“Politics and art are not antitheses. Art and politics are both forces of nature. I’m an artist. I’m not a pop singer. It may not be part of the pop mainstream anymore, but I come from the moment in the ‘60s. I was an Elvis fan, Beatles fan, and then gravitated more toward acoustic music, because my dad wouldn’t let me have an electric guitar in the house. So, I listened to those Dylan records, and the Vietnam war was still going on. Politics was always going to be part of what I did. I thought we got past that mind-set a long time ago.
“The best way to write a political song – to write any song is to make it about what we have in common and not what drives us apart. I had a song on my first record about living on the road, separated from my son, ‘Little Rock ‘n’ Roller.’ The first conversation I ever had with Johnny Cash, he told me how much he loved that song. It was a really big deal to me, but two weeks later a truck driver came up to me and told me the same thing. What all three of us had in common is that we loved and missed our kids.”
