I don’t want to get too dark or whatever, because I don’t like to think about this kind of shit at all, but I remember this article came out a while ago where like, the CIA or the FBI or something—I forget exactly who it was, but it was one of those agencies—someone who used to work there leaked this list of all the songs they used to play to torture people. They’d like, blast these songs into the cells of people they were holding on an aircraft carrier or whatever in the middle of the ocean, and they’d just play the same song on full volume 24/7 for a month or a year, hoping that they’d break the guys down. And thank God none of my songs were on that list, but I knew a bunch of people’s that were. My boy Scaggs, for instance, had a track on that list, and it really fucked him up for a while. Scaggs just like, couldn’t even listen to that song anymore. He completely stopped playing it at his concerts—I think he even had his lawyer, like, try and sue whatever agency it was that was using it because he was so shaken up by the whole thing—and he even had to go into therapy for a while just to sort through how he was feeling about everything. And this is Scaggs we’re talking about, you know? Like, this is a hard dude. This is a dude, who’s like, been in the game since forever, and like, he’s seen a BUNCH of shit. But the fact that his song was being used that way, it was just like: How could someone do that, you know? How could someone think that was possible?

But you learn after a while that you just can’t control that shit. You can’t control how your shit’s gonna be used. You just leave your shit behind, and whatever people wanna do with it, that’s their business. That’s completely outside of your control.

At the place where I get my haircut, they just have the radio going all day, like full blast, and sometimes, I’ll be sitting in the chair and like, two, three, four of my songs will come on over the course of my haircut, and Francisco, the guy who cuts my hair, will like, sing along to every one of them just like he sings along to all the other songs on the radio. He knows the words to EVERY song—like, every song on the top 40—and it’s not even totally clear to me if he knows that those are MY songs he’s singing, you know? I’m not even totally sure he knows that he’s singing at all. For him, like, the music isn’t even something he’s listening to. It’s more like air, you know? It’s like air conditioner. It’s the basic structure of his environment.

So you can’t expect people to experience your music or like, think about your music the way you do, because people have all different kinds of reasons for listening, and at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of fucking sounds. No one can control that.