Dec 5, 2025
“You don’t want to be held back because of a lack of technique. Technique is practice. But technique is not where it’s at. Where it’s really at is what you do with what you got. The key to it is to say something with your instrument, so it’s like a conversation....
Dec 5, 2025
Punk pretended that it was wiping everything away and starting fresh, like a Year Zero of music. That was bullshit. Punk was based on the Stooges and the New York Dolls. It just had a short memory. It didn’t invent it all again. It wasn’t atonalism. It wasn’t that...
Dec 5, 2025
Right after The Stranger came out we were playing in the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh, Penn., opening for the Doobie Brothers. We played ‘Just the Way You Are,’ and the audience started cheering wildly. We looked at each other like, ‘What the hell was that all about?’,...
Dec 5, 2025
“The easiest thing to write is a difficult song. Just play a bunch of chords and hit a bunch of melodies. OK, congratulations, you’re a songwriter. Now, can you write a song that people can name in four notes? If you can do that, you, my friend, have done the...
Dec 5, 2025
Co-writing can happen in so many different ways. In the case of “You Belong to Me,” the Doobie Brothers were doing the song for their album and using Ted Templeman as a producer, as they always did. There was a melody that Michael McDonald had written, and Teddy...
Dec 5, 2025
No, I didn’t push a piano in a river. It was an ocean (laughs). The Atlantic. I pushed this old piano out the back door of this theater in Florida and right down down the sidewalk and off into the water. Son, that was one bad piano. It floated pretty good, though....
Dec 5, 2025
I was on the fence about having my song used in the Chevrolet ad, because I had always said no to any commercial things. At the same time Chevrolet was talking to me about using “Our Country,” Tom Petty had just put out a new record [“Saving Grace”]. It was a really...
Dec 5, 2025
Quincy Jones and I finished our recording session about 5 o’clock the afternoon of March 30, 1963, and Quincy had to be at Carnegie Hall that night to host a party for Charles Aznavour, who was on the Mercury label. So Quincy was outside Carnegie Hall, and Phil...
Dec 5, 2025
Preventing our songs from becoming novelty songs were something Walter and I discussed, relative to Steely Dan albums. Essentially the question is, “How funny do you want to be?” We try not to let the songs become too much of a pastiche or parody. We don’t want to...
Dec 5, 2025
The weird thing is that the songs that take the longest are sometimes the quickest ones to write, because you can spend months thinking about an idea and then when you sit down to write it, it’ll take an hour or two. “The Queen and the Soldier,” even though it took...
Dec 5, 2025
Usually anyone is put into a pigeonhole according to the first thing they do that sticks. Whether it’s a dentist or a plumber or a painter, you get pigeonholed for particular things. There’s a tendency to stay in the comfort zone, because that’s where you’ve already...
Dec 5, 2025
I don’t actually like rock music. I like rock ’n’ roll music. I know it’s a debate that isn’t exactly original, but the “roll” part of rock ’n’ roll is the interesting part. Any dimwit can play rock music, but the roll part of it is altogether more difficult. It’s...
Page 4 of 6« First«...23456»
