Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

Songs should follow the state of mind of the actor on screen. It can be grammatically perfect, you know, with all those embellishments that the ustads are good at, only if you're singing for a film on, say, the life of Tansen.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Folk musicians, blues musicians did write a lot of songs about the "Titanic". That's what I feel I'm best at, being a folk musician or a blue musician, so in my mind it's there to be done. If you're a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the "Titanic", because that's the bar you have to pass.

I'm coming out of the folk music tradition and that's the vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I've experienced. Those are the dynamics of it. I couldn't have written songs for the Brill Building if I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now.

It's the thing to do, to tell all the teeny-boppers, "I dig The Beatles" and you sing a song like "Yesterday" or "Michelle". Hey, God knows, it's such a cop-out, man, both of those songs. If you go into the Library of Congress, you'll find stuff a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like "Michelle" or "Yesterday" written in Tin Pan Alley.