I wish the media would do more significant interviews of this sort with artists, writers, and politicians. It’s a bit of a swan song for both interviewer and interviewee, and it actually provides genuine insight into the man, who is more interesting than one would have imagined from his public posturings:
Performers are very insecure people. Gavin Friday, his line to me years and years ago was “Insecurity is your best security for a performer.” A performer needs to know what is going on in the room and feel the room, and you don’t feel the room if you are normal, if you’re whole. If you have any great sense of self, you wouldn’t be that vulnerable to either the opinions of others or the love and the applause and the approval of others.
The whole event enriched the album, though – talk about an experience.
But isn’t that great? I thought Experience would be more contemplative, and it has got that side, but the heart of the album is the spunk and the punk and the drive of it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of the funniest lines, I think. “Dinosaur wonders why he still walks the Earth.” I mean, I started that line about myself.
Being a dinosaur?
Yeah, of course, but then I started to think about it in terms of what is going on around the world. And I thought, “Gosh, democracy, the thing that I have grown up with all my life . . . that’s what’s really facing an extinction event.”
In an interview that you and I did in 2005, you said this: “Our definition of art is breaking open the breastbone, for sure. Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were an easier way, but people want blood, and I am one of them.”Life and death and art . . . all of them bloody businesses.
How did your faith get you through all of this?The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things” – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? ‘Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, “How does that happen? It is amazing.”
Now, it doesn’t cure him of all, of what he thinks of women or gay people or whatever else, but within his context he has an amazingly transcendent view of love. And I do believe that the darkness is where we learn to see. That is when we see ourselves clearer – when there is no light.
You asked me about my faith. I had a sense of suffocation. I am a singer, and everything I do comes from air. Stamina, it comes from air. And in this process, I felt I was suffocating. That was the most frightening thing that could happen to me because I am in pain. Ask Ali. She said I wouldn’t notice if I had a knife sticking out of my back. I would be like, “Huh, what is that?” But this time last year, I felt very alone and very frightened and not able to speak and not able to even explain my fear because I was kind of . . .
When you felt like you were suffocating?Yeah. But, you know, people have had so much worse to deal with, so that is another reason not to talk about it. You demean all the people who, you know, never made it through that or couldn’t get health care!
Do you feel like you lucked out?
Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest man on Earth. I didn’t think that I had a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be inconvenient ’cause I have a few albums to make and kids to see grow up and this beautiful woman and my friends and all of that. But I was not that guy. And then suddenly you are that guy. And you think, “I don’t want to leave here. There’s so much more to do.” And I’m blessed. Grace and some really clever people got me through, and my faith is strong.
I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, “Why did this happen to me?” But there’s honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, don’t you think David looks like Elvis?
Never forget that you can always learn from those who are intelligent and successful, even when you disagree with them. In fact, you can often learn more important things from those with whom you disagree, simply because their perspective is so fundamentally different than your own.