I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn’t interested.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn’t saying anything.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

Fade Into Light

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

Quite frankly, I’ve always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

It’s been done in all the right spirit. The people who put this thing together did it for all the right reasons.

I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.

So I think after taking a hiatus for some years and coming back, I’m finding my voice and my place again in the world of music around me.

Lowdown.

I think the women – Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu – are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

I was a guitar player first off.

There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.

And if it’s not there – if that little melody is not in my head, or if I just don’t really feel like picking up the guitar – I just don’t do it.

I would say that I’m finding my voice in more ways than one.

There’s a whole lot of songs that men just can’t do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It’s not a style that’s difficult to pick up. It’s purely emotive and dead easy to get a start...

I’m easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn’t...

From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one...

I’m not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn’t place myself on that footing. I wouldn’t even enter that arena.

I’m still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.