When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.

I was always keen to do a solo album. I just wanted it to be the right time and the right place so that I could actually work properly on the songs that I wanted to do before I got too old.

I think everything happens in time. There's a time for everything. There's a time to be in a group, and there's a time to be solo.

My life is not a political campaign. I just write about what is on my mind. I just play whatever I feel like playing. Whatever is in my soul at the time is what I want to do. I have, thank god, enough people who are still interested in what I am doing so that I can go out and keep doing it.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

You can't just play the way The Grateful Dead plays without working at it. It's not something that is easy or just happened to us. There was a long, slow process that brought that into being.