This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.
Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.
More people are asking me to come and sing for them, so obviously I am getting more work. But apart from singing, I have been parallely programming and producing music tracks and assisting music directors. That is my bread and butter, which is how I survived in Mumbai. Now I can't leave it.
I liberate minds with my music. That's more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.
I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.
My dad's job was to manage apartment complexes, so when people would move out or when people would die or whatever, people left things in their apartments, he would always bring me home people's collection of music that they left behind. I was excited because I didn't really have money to go to the CD store all the time.
I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by.
One thing that did get me into a lot of different types of music was when I was very young, the local record store went out of business and they were selling off all the vinyl. I remember going in - I was probably 16 or 17 and I'd just gotten a record player as a present. It was like hitting the jackpot: all these records for $3 apiece.
Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.
If I was in a zombie apocalypse, I wouldn't be playing music, because that would attract zombies.
I don't think I'd ever apologise for music I make, no.
I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid.
I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.
When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.
My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.
No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.
I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.
In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It's called 'Scalia/Ginsburg.' The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.
I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.
