How I Became a Modern Lover

I went into this when I was sixteen and one of the reasons I started was that I knew I had no standard voice. I just wanted top show in a way that anyone could do it. Anyone. It didn't matter how pretty your voice was. All you had to have was feeling. People said it took courage to do what I did when I was performing alone and only knew two chords on the guitar, but it was just something I wanted to do so badly, no one could have stopped me.

-- Jonathan Richman, in Yakety Yak by Scott Cohen