Playing The Drums Hurts My Back.

To Want What I Have, To Take What I'm Given With Grace. For This I Pray.

O' Beautiful For Spacious Skies But Now Those Skies Are Threatening They're Beating Plowshares Into Swords For This Tired Old Man That We Elected King Armchair Warriors Often Fail And We've Been Poisoned By These Fairy Tales The Lawyers Clean Up All Details Since Daddy Had To Lie But I Know A Place Where We Can Go And Wash Away This Sin We'll Sit And Watch The Clouds Roll By And The Tall Grass Wave In The Wind Just Lay Your Head Back On The Ground And Let Your Hair Spill All Around Me Offer Up Your Best Defence But This Is The End This Is The End Of The Innocence

Lennon's Was One Of The First Voices I Emulated When I Began To Sing. When We Held Tryouts In My Pal's Dad's Living Room For The Singer In Our Band, I Sang A Beatles Song That Lennon Sang. There Is Something About The Timbre Of His Voice, Something That It Conveys, That Still Gets To Me. The Quality And The Poetry Of His Lyrics. The Wry Sense Of Humor. And The Boyishness, In The Beginning. There Are A Great Many Things That Touch Me About Him... Lennon Was, To Put It In His Own Words, A 'working-class Hero.'

In The Old Days, Words Like Sin And Satan Had A Moral Certitude. Today, They're Replaced With Self-help Jargon, Words Like Dysfunction And Antisocial Behavior, Discouraging Any Responsibility For One's Actions.

We Live A Protracted Adolescence. At Some Point You Must Leave The Party.