Those minutes that I'm on stage are the best! Being there and looking at the crowd and seeing their faces, hearing them sing the positive words from the songs.

I think it's something to do with the structural quality of the songs. We weren't actually trying to make stuff that was cool, or of the moment, although a lot of it was. We were trying to make stuff that was good enough to stick around and lo and behold, it has.

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.

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.

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.

I have written a song that says: If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words, "They're gone," and they'll come back.