I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.
I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.
I was a piano player before I was a poet.
Every show that sells out is like a hero's welcome for me.
I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.
I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.
You can have a poem like "B-Movie" and sum up thirty conversations that people have had on the subject, but I wrote it down, and other people didn't.
I don't think people in power have the potential to do anything like that to me. I feel as though as long as our music is available, folks are going to hear it.
