Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don't know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that's what inspires my interest.
My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
One of the main reasons I'm vegan is because I'm ethically lazy. My friends who eat meat or who eat eggs have to sometimes wrestle with the ethical consequences of their actions. By being vegan, I take the easy way out.
Factory-farm lobbyists are so powerful and so well funded and they do everything in their power to hide the truth about farming. They keep the farms and slaughterhouses in places that most people never visit; they execute huge marketing campaigns in an effort to make animal production look like a happy, nice, benign institution.
I wasn't raised Catholic; I just really like the image of a neutral and benign Mary floating around somewhere, being nice to people.
Basically we should stop doing those things that are destructive to the environment, other creatures, and ourselves and figure out new ways of existing.
There are a lot of people in the animal rights movement who can be very passionate and aggressive, and I applaud people's passion, but when people are judgmental and aggressive, all you end up doing is getting other people to turn away in irritation. To change people's minds, you have to respect the people you're talking to.
I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
It just seems like musicians want to sell a few records and put out a perfume line, and I think it's so sad that there are so many musicians who don't want to change the world.
I realized that I don't like touring. I'll never complain about it because no one wants to hear about a relatively successful musician complain about the hardships of staying in a hotel.
So man's insanity is heaven's sense, and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
For me the two biggest issues are climate change and animal welfare/animal agriculture. And oddly enough animal agriculture is such a contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations, 25% of climate change comes from animal agriculture, so every car, bus, boat, truck, airplane combined has less CO2 and methane emissions than animal agriculture.
Sometimes people will think, I need to have pre-sanctioned spiritual joy. Getting joy from my contemplative meditation practice or getting joy from reading Thich Nhat Hahn books. Those things can be joyful but I think it’s the small, simple joys of playing with dogs or having sex with someone you love or going for a walk outside, stuff that we tend to ignore.
In a way I almost feel like the election of Donald Trump has inspired Democrats and progressives and punk rockers in a way that hasn't been seen since Vietnam.
That is not all I need. I need dogs. A house filled with dogs and a smart, funny, kind, loving girlfriend or wife.
I'm not Catholic but the Virgin Mary fascinates me because she's like a folk hero.
Luckily almost no one buys music anymore, so selling music doesn't really affect any of my professional decisions.
If you look at the history of demagoguery and fascism, it always happens when there are two things. It requires a gentle populace to allow it to happen, whether through laziness, ignorance or ineptitude, but it also requires a very angry, dissatisfied section of the populace who want egregiously simple answers to very complicated problems.
Let peace and beauty reign.
I won't complain about touring, because I really do believe that a public-figure musician complaining about being a public-figure musician is just absurd. Like, 'Boo hoo hoo! I have to stand on stage and people pay attention to me!'
What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.
I feel like once the song is done, you put it out there and if people want to do bizarre remixes, if people want to make strange videos, great. You know, like chaos theory applied to the music business.
I know, in my heart of hearts, I don't do things for money.
Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.
Better a loving single-parent family than a 'conventional' family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.
