There are good reasons for being in jail - for protesting.
Tracy Chapman
At this point in my life I'd like to live as if only love mattered.
We have more media than ever and more technology in our lives. It's supposed to help us communicate, but it has the opposite effect of isolating us.
I'm still thinking and hoping there's an opportunity for people to have better lives and that significant change can occur.
So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.
I dressed up as a veterinarian for a Halloween costume party. I had the lab coat. I got a couple of stuffed animals for patients and put bandages on them.
I had a ukulele when I was much younger. I have no idea what happened to it but I think that was part of it, just being inspired and wanting to try to play an instrument that, to me, sounded beautiful.
We all must live our lives always feeling, always thinking the moment has arrived.
I found myself in the middle of a race riot when I was about 14 years old, and I found someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to run or they'd shoot me.
I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.
I never travelled when I was younger.
It all comes together. It's - that's the way it's always worked for me with songwriting.
Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.
Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'
I don't try to project any image at all, other than the person that I am.
People's real hopes and dreams can be distorted and misdirected and packaged until you're not sure what you really want or what you even really need.
Some things remain fragments, just the lyrics and melodies or a line or two or a verse.
We do need to think about how we have security - everyone has a right to that - but we also need to think about how we maintain civil rights and personal freedom.
There's a time and place for everything, and my focus is music. So that's what I prefer to spend most of my time doing, and not talk about making music.
I may be revered or defamed and decried; But I tried to live my life right.
I was raised in a Baptist tradition, but then I went to an Episcopalian high school, and they were very accepting of people of all faiths.
I end up writing about all kinds of things. I never make an attempt to write about anything in particular. I don't have a little list of topics to write about.
I started playing and writing songs when I was eight.
With other people, you're always swapping music. Somebody is always listening to something you've never heard. It's a great way to hear all sorts of new things.
As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot.
I'm a hopeful cynic.
I always considered trying to make a living playing music. But it was always really clear to me, at the various stages in my life, that it really wasn't a possibility unless some phenomenal thing happened.
Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.
What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak.
I think religion played a huge part in Bush's re-election.
When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.
Growing up in Cleveland, I learned about singing from my mother, who had once sung professionally and who admired Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.
Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.
I don't know - I'm not sure about anything as far as religion and spirituality go.
That's one of the things I like about San Francisco. It's not like anywhere else in the world.
I'm not sure about anything as far as religion and spirituality go.
Love's a recurring theme through my work.
I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.
One of the reasons I chose Tufts is that they have one of the best veterinary schools in the country. Since I was six years old, I wanted to be a veterinarian.
As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.
It's fun playing small venues.
Everyone is looking for connections between the songs. I don't usually approach a record as a concept. There's no overriding theme I'm trying to represent. It's all about the individual songs.
After it's finished, sometimes I can trace a path that goes back to the possible source of inspiration.
I learn all these things about the record talking about it after it's finished.
I often write either really early in the morning, or really late at night.
I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too!
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.
When you feel like you've had a good show, you go backstage and you talk to yourself about it, and if you have a bad show you talk to yourself about it.
