Me, I'm in love with this country called America. I'm a huge fan--I'm a huge fan of America. I'm like one of those annoying fans, you know the ones that read the CD notes and follow you into bathrooms and ask you all kinds of annoying questions about...
Yesterday, here in Philadelphia, at the Liberty Bell, I met a lot of Americans who do have the will. From arch--Are you here? There's the three million of them over there--From arch religious conservatives to young secular radicals, I just felt an in...
Well, more than we think. We can't fix every problem--corruption, natural calamities are part of the picture here--but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say, sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for l...
Because at that moment I became the worst scourge on God's green earth, a rock star with a cause. Krikee. Except it isn't the cause. Seven thousand Africans dying every day of preventable, treatable disease like AIDS? That's not a cause--that's an em...
Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and its effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider...
Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, its foibles; its phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths. Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children...
Actually I saw something in--in the paper last week about Kermit the Frog giving a commencement address somewhere. One of the studens was complaining, I worked my ass off for four years to be addressed by a sock? You have worked your ass off for this...
So that for better or worse that was my education. I came away with a clear sense of the difference music could make in my own life, in other people's lives if I did my job right. --Which, if you're a singer in a rock band, means avoiding the obvious...
But no, I never went to college. I've slept in some strange places, but the library wasn't one of them. I studied rock and roll and I grew up in Dublin in the 70s; music was an alarm bell for me. It woke me up to the world. I was 17 when I first saw...
And sometimes I wouldn't read the copy, and I'd be--because I wanted to be spontaneous--and I'd come across a list of words I didn't know and I'd mispronounce. And one day I was reading copy and I called Canada Cah-Nah-Dah. And I did just that. I cra...