We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.
Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
In this age when people expect to get their music for free, we have to work out how we can protect the rights of creative artists so they are compensated fairly and that the record business itself remains sound and healthy.
I've been trying to do this music stuff and work it out for so long... I was like, 'Let's do it for ourselves.' All these songs, we've travelled the world - no record label, nothing. We just did this for us, but the love is very appreciated.
My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.
When I came back to California in the early '60s I was hanging out with Jimmy Bowen, Phil Spector, and I wanted to be a record producer and work with other artists.
I used to work in a record store. I'm kind of a record nerd.
I really just like making music. People call that 'work.' Like, 'Oh, you're going to the studio to work?' No, that's even what I do in my off day. I love recording.
I hope someone thinks I sing good. I'm always working hard to sing better. I sound the way I sound, but I can always be better. I work hard at singing and being a better recording artist.
Due to my work as a musician, songwriter, recording artist and author, hundreds of people stream in and out of my basement studio to help me with my creative projects.
Yes, I would say I had quite a rough time from 1992 to 1996. After the highs of the Eighties, work became slow from around 1987 to around 1997. I was running a small recording studio in Shepherd's Bush but wasn't making a great deal from it.
When I look back at those pictures of my mother performing - and listen to her recordings - it makes me sad to think that all of that joy she found in her work came to an end. I wish she hadn't had to make that sacrifice, even if it was for the benefit of my father and siblings and me.
The Recovery Act is working, but it's going to continue to work. It's not over. A lot's going to happen this summer. And even after the summer, there's more to come with the act.
Recovery is something that you have to work on every single day and it's something that it doesn't get a day off.
We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that.
But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.
Themes recur again and again in my work.
One is constantly trying to figure out what came together in one's childhood. Lots of people spend significant portions of their lives in therapy - especially in the States - trying to work out who they are. I'm certain there is a little of that in the business of writing. That would explain why certain images and themes recur.
Love's a recurring theme through my work.
I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
