This beast went to the well and drank, and the noise was in the beast’s belly like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds, but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the beast’s belly.
I don’t think any songwriter who comes up through playing clubs can really claim to have independently developed their art. All along the way so much information is coming, the writer inside the performer unconsciously reacts to all of that. By the time they get to be thirty, the writer is gone.
When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it’s just the opposite.
The worst moment was when I was performing and I was about to sing, but I choked. I had a tickle in my throat and I started coughing, and I couldn’t get the words out. It lasted for like thirty seconds, but I got over it, and luckily the crowd didn’t seem to care.
The slogan was ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’. Sixty years later the slogan became, ‘Don’t trust anyone over ninety’.
My father was and is a great journalist. Thirty years ago, I was studying broadcasting in college, and the problem was I wasn’t nearly as good as my father. I wasn’t as quick or as smart as my old man, and I realized it would be a long time before I was ever going to be, and I decided to do something else.
‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is a great piece of filmmaking and does a valuable public service by raising difficult questions most Hollywood movies shy away from, but as of this writing, it seems that one of its central themes – that torture was instrumental to tracking down bin Laden – is not supported by the facts.
For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that’s really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.
‘Argo,’ ‘Lincoln,’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ three films honored with Best Picture Oscar nominations, lionize their Washington-anchored protagonists as crafty, competent, and virtually incorruptible.
