Folk music is not for a select group of people who feel that maybe he taught them about this music and that it belongs to them. It doesn't belong only to them. It belongs to everyone who's interested in the blueprints of good songwriting.
I'm allowing myself every opportunity, every tool that every other artist should allow themselves to use. If anybody expects me to not use certain language or certain words, like I have some kind of penalty restriction, it's completely unrealistic.
The songs I write should only be gauged by what other writers or peers are doing today. If the barometer for all songwriters was to match his body of work, then anyone you might mention alive or dead is a failure. But I've learned to not be too hung up on what's fair or not fair.
I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively-and there were a lot of choices-writing songs was king.
Artists are not going to put somebody new in the president's chair. It's all worth the effort; it all needs to be done. But I don't look at songwriting as having the ability to necessarily do that today.
Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.
To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.
My songs have always had hope and perseverance in them - I never write songs that have no escape hatch, no positivity.
