Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
When a baby comes you can smell two things: the smell of flesh, which smells like chicken soup, and the smell of lilies, the flower of another garden, the spiritual garden.
My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.
My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.
I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.
I have come to the conclusion - and I don't know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I'm here now - that a lot of people tell me they don't get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.
The best part of touring, still, is touching people's hearts and igniting my band and igniting the people into what you call a spiritual revelation is sound and emotion.
When you fly to New York, sometimes they put you on hold and you just go round and around in a holding pattern. Sometimes in a concert, I feel other spirits in a holding pattern that they want to land through my heart and through my fingers.
There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.
I know I'm not the kind of person who's gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock 'n' roll artists. They just play their hits and that's it. That doesn't appeal to me.
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
