I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular – I can choose that.

It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

It’s meant to reaffirm the validity of that music – clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music – which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old – is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular – I can choose that.

In addition, I’m finishing a track for the movie ‘Waking Up In Reno’, but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It’s like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I’ve seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

‘m really proud of it. To me, it’s a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character’s massive survival guilt.

At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, ‘Let’s see if we’re able to live among the living, walk among the living.’

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me – he’d gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.

Control success before it controls you.

Fortunately any of the songs we’ve recorded can be extremely fulfilling to perform depending on the variety of circumstances that surround any given show.

Only beginning to present itself over the horizon.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

In the past 3-4 years I’ve developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I’m able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.