The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.

I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.

That was one thing that we learned, that the Klan was making an active recruitment pitch to the armed forces - not just in Colorado Springs, but in other parts of the country as well. With trained military personnel who share that ideology, you know you have a valuable soldier at your disposal.

Peace is not wimpy. It's about sitting down and negotiating with people you hate. Ultimately, all occupation ends, and you have to deal with the enemy.

I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.

I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.