Are you surprised about the fuss over "John Walker's Blues"?

I'm only surprised that it started more than a month before the record came out. Anyone who listens to the song knows that I'm not telling you to send your kids off to the Taliban. Taking it out of context, listening to snippets of it and then railing about Jesus and patriotism is just sort of silly.

Didn't you once say you'd leave Tennessee if there was ever an execution there?

I caught some shit from several people about that because I didn't leave [after Robert Glen Coe was executed there in 2000 -- the state's first execution since 1960]. What happened was I met [live-in girlfriend] Sara and I can't leave.

But we're starting to get somewhere with that movement. There's a moratorium in Illinois and a moratorium in Maryland as of about several weeks ago. People are starting to realize that [the death penalty] is expensive and that it doesn't do what it's advertised to do.

The death penalty will die of natural causes just like it did in the '60s. If we didn't do shit, the death penalty would go away eventually. But right now, all the abolition movement is trying to do is hasten that demise so that fewer people die.

It's not just the people dying, it's also what it does to us every time we kill someone. It affects all of us. Certainly it affects the people whose job it is to go get the people out of their cells no matter how hard they fight, how loud they scream, and kill them. That affects those people for the rest of their lives. I've witnessed an execution. This is not an abstract for me. It's a really ugly thing. It scarred me for life. I'm still recovering from it. I have dreams about it.

Are you glad that you witnessed it?

No. I don't know how I could have avoided it. I don't recommend it to anyone. I had two revelations. One was that I needed to tell other abolitionists who are asked if they want to do this to really think about it, that it's not what they think. It's more damaging than they could possibly imagine. The other thing that surprised me was the amount of empathy I had for the people who had to participate in the execution. No matter what lip service they give or what rhetoric they attach to it -- they're finding now that people who work in death row units where they do executions, especially Texas where they do a lot of them, that most of them eventually burn out and change their minds about the death penalty.

How did you start writing letters to death row prisoners?

I wrote [the song] "Billy Austin" [about a death row inmate] and then inmates and people from the movement started writing me. I've always opposed the death penalty. I just grew up that way. It's never, ever made sense to me.

One of the biggest influences on me as a child was that my dad was involved in a letter-writing campaign. And he probably supported the death penalty or at least thought it was justified in some instances. But there was a guy in San Antonio who was charged with killing a kid whose family had a lot of money. The rich kid was riding around in a car with a gun. This was the early '60s when everybody wanted to be Sharks and Jets. The other kid got hold of the gun and killed the rich kid, whose family hired a powerful lawyer to prosecute the case, and my father didn't think that was fair so he wrote a letter to the governor. It was the first action I ever witnessed against the death penalty. My father was an air-traffic controller and kind of a regular guy.

Then a few years later I saw "In Cold Blood." The way Perry Smith's execution is portrayed in that film -- I read above my level as a kid so I immediately went out and got the book -- the indignity and inhumanity of it was really apparent to me even when I was 10.

The thing that disgusted me is that there's a scene where they're getting ready to execute Smith and they've got him in a harness. He's worried that he's going to soil himself; he's heard that happens. So he wants to go to the bathroom, and they say, "No, we don't have time." Finally the priest intervenes -- "For God's sake" -- and they hurry and get him out of the harness and then strap him back up again. It was just obvious to me that it was hurting everyone. And it was a pretty realistic portrayal from what I understand from all of my own research. Truman Capote is really an interesting cat. I mean, it's just a really, really great book. It made a big impression on me.

You've been working on your own novel, right?

I haven't worked on it in a while because I've been working on this play and that goes into rehearsals Sept. 1. The novel will be the nonmusical project for probably the next couple of years. During the tour, I'll work on it, but probably not every day. But when the tour is over, I'll probably sit down and finish it.

You recently spent a year writing daily haiku, too, didn't you?

I'm struggling with that right now. I didn't write those to publish 'em. But Tony Fitzpatrick, the artist who does all my album covers, he and I are talking about putting together a book of that haiku. There would be some connecting prose pieces because it's kind of a journal. It's 366 days, because I fucked up and did it during a leap year, and 366 haiku. They're in a little notebook and I just wrote the date and where I was so it's kind of interesting in that respect.

I haven't written any haiku since. I haven't written any poetry since, but I've been wanting to write some longer poems again. When I started the haiku thing, all the other poetry went on the back burner, but I'm growing interested again. Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me so I want to write more of it.

Recent Stories