Were you against the war in Iraq from the get-go?

In the States, there’s more pressure to be ‘patriotic,’ Everywhere else in the world it was extremely obvious -  what America is waking up to - that it's a sham war where the President lied to push his agenda through. Ten of millions of people went to the streets to protest the war.

You’ve got such an expansive catalog. How much can you play of what you’ve written?

Cole Porter wrote a couple thousand songs and we remember 200 and maybe hear 40. I’ve written 400-500 and I’m happy with 100, possibly 200 of them.

I try and factor in all eras, starting in the '60s, for the poor old farts, into the zeroes, up to songs that haven’t been recorded yet. I really try to go across the board. Pacing is very important. You think of a sequence that isn’t going to lull people into a soporific state: Up tempo, mid-tempo, slow tempo. There’s a kind of art. You learn of engagement with the audience; you save certain songs for a point of the show, other songs, you want song number two or three in the set to start emotionally engaging the audience. I always have a plan and I try to get through it, though every audience is different.

Sometimes, you can sense it. Other times, the audience lets you know what they want to hear. I did a show in London a couple of weeks ago, and from the second song, people started shouting and it became a request night. I suppose you have a plan and your plan is sabotaged. Some songs you feel precious about and you feel that they’ve upset your applecart. But on the whole, it’s rewarding knowing people have taken the effort to buy the record and request the song.

There’s a lot of contradictions about being a shy guy on stage. Something propels them against their best judgment in terms of being a performer. There’s the theatrical aspect, the acting aspect. You can be somebody else up there. You can act and say things you wouldn’t say, be somebody else. Self-deprecation kind of cuts through bullshit and I love to cut through that. It’s no big effort to be self-deprecating.

I think you have ask yourself that question: Do I have anything to say? Have I said this before? Sometimes it is time to stop and take stock of what you should do, but I think when you ask yourself those questions, you say "This is what I do and I can’t help it." You’re really driven.

The kernals of each is inside the other. It may be a cop-out answer to say I ‘m really interested in songs, the structure, what I can do with it, how I play guitar and sing with it. But if you write a song, you don’t want to keep it to yourself. Playing live is the unfolding of the song.

All the time. Some songs fall by the wayside, some seen like a really good idea at the time, and then six years or ten years later, not. The other thing you can do for a song with a short shelf-life is rewrite it. The thing about being a singer and songwriter is that you can keep revisiting your own past on a nightly basis. You wrote something at 18 and it’s naïve and clumsy? You find yourself re-interpreting these naive ideas and find other virtues in that song, a spark of goodness. And you forgive yourself the bad stuff. If you’re a painter, if you sell (the painting) you might never see it again in your life - it goes off to a National Gallery somewhere.

In a sense, it’s not for me to say. If I have to, I’d say you’re just expressing what you’re going through. Mostly I write stories about other people. It’s just that the angle you’re viewing a life from is your personal filter,

Thompson's show starts at 7:30. Tickets are $23 (including the ticket fee!). If it rains, the concert moves across the street to Durgin Hall.

40 French St., Lowell, 978-970-5200  www.lowellsummerseries.com