I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

I'm not a jazz singer.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I was a guitar player first off.

I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

I love all kinds of music.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians' hearts are.

I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.

Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn't otherwise get to hear music on quite this level.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

I would say that I'm finding my voice in more ways than one.

There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

There's a whole lot of songs that men just can't do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.

I'm really conflicted about my role as a front-person. I hate the attention.

I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.

The study of an idea is, of necessity, the story of many things.

Confidentiality is a delicate bargain of trust.

I become quite obsessive when I get into something.

I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region.

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

As a race, the Negroes are not lazy.

As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.

I was in relays for track where you just bonded with all these different kinds of personalities who were coming together for this one common goal of beating a rival team.

I really love listening to Hozier. He's great.

I definitely don't need therapy in life because I have gone through every little corner of my life.

I don't follow what everybody else does.

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

I have a controversial opinion about evil, because I don't believe evil exists. I believe that actions are dark and destructive but I don't believe evil is a thing. I believe it's a by-product of man's fear and desperation.

I was probably cool around the end of 2002.

I've worked hard, but this business can be tough, and I just consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the career that I have, and to still be having so much fun playing drums and making music.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.