JOHN PRINE

One time, I went to school, and they asked us all to find out where our roots were. It's goin' around the class, and the kids were going, 'I'm Swedish-German' or 'I'm English-Irish.' They got to me and I said, 'Pure Kentuckian.'

It's usually drawing on personal experience. I don't think I could dig deep enough trying to get into somebody else's life. Like 'Far From Me' - I wrote it about this waitress that I was dating when I was fifteen or so, and she broke up with me.

I did three club tours before I started playing concert halls, and the clubs were half full the first time around.

I always feel like every song is the last song.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

I thought I was grounded. I thought from my kinda blue-collar outlook on life that I would call myself a grounded person. I was not. I was like a balloon flying around in the air. And as soon as our first child was born, boom - my feet came right down to the ground.

I think if you write from your own gut, you'll come up with something interesting, whereas if you sit around guessing what people want, you end up with the kind of same schlock that everybody else has got.

To tell you the truth, the nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame totally surprised me. I had no idea that was coming. I know a lot of people like to say it's enough just to be nominated. But I've been nominated for so many things, I'd like to get this one. I think it's a long shot, considering I never had a No. 1 rock n' roll record.

Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.

Because of my song 'Sam Stone,' a lot of people thought I was interested in writing protest songs. Writing protest songs always struck me as patting yourself on the back.

My music has been called so many different things over the years. I figure as long as it's selling, call it what you want.

I still enjoy the heck out of getting up there to play shows every night.

Johnny Cash was like Abraham Lincoln to me.

I had a year-round Christmas tree with nothing but colored vinyl 45s hanging on it, like, old Elvis records and stuff.

When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.

'Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

I think it shows when you have to work too hard on a song.

I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.

When I was a boy, my family used to watch a lot of Laurel and Hardy.

I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.

I always had an affinity for older people. I had a job delivering newspapers, and one place I had to go was an old people's home. Some people would introduce you to their neighbors as if you were a nephew or grandson. They didn't get many visitors, so they acted like you were coming to see them. And that stuck with me for a long time.

I didn't hear anybody talking about the plight of a soldier coming back home and what he'd gone through. That was why I wrote about that stuff. If somebody else had done it, I probably wouldn't have touched the subject.

I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n' roll lifestyle.

People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.