The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

I think of the Replacements only when they're brought up to me. For two years, I'm at home, they don't really cross my mind. I still hear them on the radio. I'm not ashamed of anything we did.

Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.

Stick with your heart and you'll be fine.

I sat through Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones like three times at the Skyway when it came out.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

I don't think there's anything that will make me stop doing it. There may be a time when it's not available to anyone. You may have to come listen at my basement window... but I can't stop.

I didn't wake up one morning and not be in the Replacements. We're all that forever, and I've just grown older. I mean, I haven't lost anything. I've gained a few things.

So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.

I've had more people in my life take their lives than... I think it's out of proportion with most people. I think a lot of them gravitate towards me because of the music.

The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.

A rock'n'roll band needs to be able to get under people's skin. You should be able to clear the room at the drop of a hat.

You know, he likes me because I'm his son. I have to go long and far to find someone who knows me just as me, rather than me the songwriter or whatever.

Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.

It's my first record since my son is old enough to understand and I can't even show it to him. Yes, it's affected me, probably in the opposite of how anyone would have thought.

Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

I think it should be evident by now, but I'm as lost as anyone.

I forever felt that I've fallen right between the crack of way too young for the first generation of classic rock 'n' roll and too old to be brand-new. It's hard.

It's fun, but the fun is where it always was. I mean, it's still fun to strap on my Les Paul in the basement and turn up the Marshall amp. I'm still 15. I still enjoy that as much as I ever did.

Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.

Reading music is like listening to flowers. I don't understand the concept.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a lot of great rock movies.

I'm beyond caring what anyone expects of me anymore.

The truth is overrated.

I'm not dissatisfied with my place in it rock 'n' roll.

Any musician who can stop may be a musician, but they're no artist. If it's in your blood, it can't stop flowing.

Actually, I've done it the other way so many times where you rehearse the band and you do the whole thing with lights, the show and the crew - everything. Then you see what happens and you're already committed to dates. I'm just sort of putting out feelers this way.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?

If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, ya know.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot.

Peace Train is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions of human beings.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Listen kid, take my advice, never hate a song that has sold half a million copies.

There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn't been broken, but I don't know of anyone whose heart hasn't been broken.

A song has to become as much a part of you as a tailored suit.