Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.

I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load.

What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top.

I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.

People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.

I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.

It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.

A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics.

I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.

Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.

I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.

The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?

Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35.

There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry.

There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike.

If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn't know that. I didn't know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It's inhumane.

I think music is the highest form of healing.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.