I wish my memory weren't so bad. They tell me it's from all the football and boxing and the concussions that I got.

There's a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we've moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn't play me. They were more conservative than I was.

I never was one to go into an office and write. For one thing, I had a job. I was cleaning the ashtrays and setting up the studios at Columbia for a couple of years and working every other week down in the Gulf of Mexico flying helicopters. I didn't really get to just write songs for about five years.

Human rights is something that wasn't hard to be inspired to write about because there have been so many violations of those rights.

What I've found recently is the heart, the soul, whatever you want to call it, it doesn't differentiate: If you really live the experience making a movie, it's the same as living it in real life, as crazy as it sounds.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

To all the kids out there: Follow your dream. Believe in your dream. Because dreams do come true.

I could hardly believe that she really existed, that she wasn't a dream. There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten.