There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.
I wrote a song a good long while ago, 'I Ain't Livin' Long Like This,' that has been around and been recorded by a lot of people, but it was basically childhood memory.
The goal with a show is to push forward the passion in a visual and sonic way. It all comes out in a trance-like way, fast and pulsating. Then people can go home and think about the lyrics later.
What I can feel the most and what I can remember the most are the melodies I want to write to.
When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.
I feel there is a song for every occasion, and India is a land full of music.
I'm sure that the meaning of the songs that I've written will change for me over the years, the same way that I can't even say what inspired some of the songs that I've been singing for a long time anymore.
We became the songs we wrote.
As a kid, on the cotton fields, I had this tune in my head. I hummed it and sang it. It was the same melody as 'When A Man Loves A Woman.' I could never, ever forget it.
Just like any songwriter, the songs come out of where I am in my life and what I'm doing and who I'm hanging out with and the kind of sounds I'm imagining. I always loved the idea of it evolving in the same way that life changes.
Sometimes a song indicates that it wants to be about a certain thing. And then if you write it, you find that it is about something that you've done.
Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.
I would describe my songs as just a collection of my thoughts, with melodies that probably occurred to me in the grocery store or cycling home, sung as best I can over a bunch of chords.
