Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?

Marilyn Monroe never sold a platinum album. And more people know my music than what I look like.

I never gave up on country music because I knew what I was doing was not that bad.

I'm quite private. And I never wanted to be the biggest star in the world really. So in that sense I've got a good balance of doing great shows of making an appearance every now and then and writing music and I don't really have to do much else.

Oh I will always be honest with my music. The records are black boxes for me. Like if you want to know who I am my views my perspective things I love things I hate my convictions my anthems. I've never let people's opinions affect the way I write.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

In a weird kind of way music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.