"A song is a prismatic thing, nonlinear. Writing songs, you are looking for rhymes that feel right—things that come to you even as you are singing. They come to you quick-like. Sometimes even in a scatological way. You don't have time to distill meanings or ideological fallout. You want to make sure that the feeling is there, but you can create feeling out of tone, texture, and phrasing, not only words. You want to make sure that there's camaraderie between the lyric and the rhythm. That just has to be, or you wouldn't have much of a song. All that profound meaning stuff—that comes later. And truthfully, that's for other people to experience. Believe me, the songwriter isn't thinking of any of those things.
Back then all sorts of elements were mixing together—jazz, folk music, filmmakers, photographers, Robert Frank, Jack Smith, Monk and Coltrane, the Clancy Brothers, dancers, dance groups, off-Broadway theater, Julian Beck and Judith Molina, the beat poets, civil rights, Vietnam, the Cold War. Battle lines had been drawn between the old and the new, and there was a lot going on. Everything was pretty interconnected. This was before corporate-sponsored culture. The walls Andy was busting down were from a different planet than the walls I was busting down, but it was in the same solar system. He was a maverick, like myself, I guess, so there would be some kind of affinity.
Film is a great art form, but it's not comparable to a live musical performance. There really is no reason to equate the two mediums. They're vastly different. There's nothing tactile about film. You can't smell it or touch it. It's an illusion. A magic trick. A film is abstract. A great painting or musical performance is visceral.
Yeah, sure, but everything in life, directly or indirectly, has a great degree of mystery. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me." Persons, places, things … time itself is a mystery. You know, like, who can explain it? It's really difficult to define anything. What's slow can speed up. Love can turn into hate. Peace can turn into war. Pride can turn into humility. Anger to grief. There's plenty of mystery in nature and contemporary life. For some people, it's too harsh to deal with. But I don't see it that way."
Taken from an interview with John Elderfield