Bad Mood Rising

— that you were essentially apolitical. The quote was "I don't think my views are of any interest."

Well, apparently they were.

So did something change?

Yeah. It's been so noisy. And the Bush people are going away, and it just felt as if . . . well, not that I had to write about it. It's not like a comment was expected from me, like I'm Will Rogers or something. But I just wanted to say something. I rarely have an idea when I sit down to write. But this time I did.

The song "Harps and Angels" also sounds more like your voice than a narrator's: "Hasn't anybody seen me lately. . . ." "You boys know I'm not a religious man. . . ." Had you been sick when you wrote it?

No, nothing like that. I've just always been interested in heaven. I love depictions of it — not the particularly serious ones, but those old movies with angels and things like that. A movie like The Green Pastures, which you'll never see on television, because it's kind of offensive, I guess. But a great picture, just beautiful. Or even the Jack Benny movie The Horn Blows at Midnight, where Benny is the third trumpeter in the heavenly orchestra. I've always liked that kind of stuff. And sometimes you do think, "Jeez, it'd be great if there were an afterlife." Especially if you're sixtysomething, like I am, and you meet someone who's religious, and you think about how they have that faith. I mean, it doesn't make you want to run out and hold up a banner for atheism. What's the point? "Follow me! Don't believe in an afterlife!" In my song, the guy has a vision of all this fantastic stuff, and he says, "It's good to know there really is an afterlife. And I hope to see all of you there. Now let's go get a drink."

[From Issue 1060 — September 4, 2008]

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