After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth, it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling.

This is music I've known since I first started to play the guitar. Ray's music was one of my inspirations: He was a super soul-music man, but he was also a jazz musician, too. I see him as the height of honest expression.

Music took a bunch of average-Joe Christians who could play electric guitar and sing and threw them into the limelight. But we were not a bunch of Billy Grahams.

Guitarists should be able to pick up the guitar and play music on it for an hour, without a rhythm section or anything.