It must be nice for today's hitters when you don't have to worry about being thrown at. It's a whole different deal. When I played, getting knocked down was an accepted part of the game.

I like happy endings.

I found out early in life that I could hit a baseball farther than most players, and that's what I tried to do.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

As I got older, I got more Victorian and morbid. I got into things that circled around death, like skulls or morgue photographs or handwritten diaries. They can be almost haunted with all this history, and you project onto it and then it gets onto you.

I'll always remember when I bumped into Good Morning America's Robin Roberts on a flight to my mother's funeral in 1994, and how kind she was during that difficult time.

I grew up in a very celebratory town. We celebrate everything, from life to death and everything in between. So a lot of dramatics come into my aesthetic. And I'm an actor, so that adds more to the dramatic - I don't mean over-the-top. The main thing is never to be boring.

You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you learn from your parents' divorce or from the travels that you took.