I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.

When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house. One was me, and the other was my guitar.

For me, I was somebody who was a smart young guy who didn't do very well in school. The basic system of education, I didn't fit in; my intelligence was elsewhere.

There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.

With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.

I was kind of a MySpace kid in high school, and people thought since I had so many MySpace friends that they didn't need to be nice to me in real life. They were like, 'You get enough attention online,' or they were jealous or something. I don't really know.

To like and dislike the same things, this is what makes a solid friendship.

Whether you're a Twitter follower, a YouTube subscriber or a Facebook friend, natural social instinct is to collect people and to not kind of see them later. But unfortunately, with social media, you collect them and they're in your life, whether you really want them or not.