Dec 5, 2025
The style of music may change, but the role of the songwriter is always to encapsulate an idea in either intellectual or emotional terms or both. Essentially what a songwriter is doing is packaging. They’re taking the things that people are talking about and the...
Dec 5, 2025
I heard somebody talking recently about the first time they heard the Velvet Underground, and they said, “It’s folk music.” And I went, “Oh my god, it is folk music.” But it’s folk music about heroin. Nobody calls it folk, it just turned into its own thing. It’s...
Dec 5, 2025
To create art, there has to be an emotional connection. Making it vulnerable is part of that connection on the part of the artist. If it’s just business, then fine; you can sell a lot of records by making something that’s commercial. But if there’s no emotional...
Dec 5, 2025
I’m careful not to do things for the sake of doing them. It has to come from the song. It has to come from a real natural spot. I don’t want to sit around with a cigar and go, ‘You know what we’re gonna have on this record?’ If you sit down and write out on a piece of...
Dec 5, 2025
A lot of times I’d write stream-of-consciousness imagery and then go back to clarify it—but by the time I went to clarify, it would start making sense to me. It’s like a Beck song. You’re never really sure what he’s talking about, but if you listen to it enough times...
Dec 5, 2025
Tell the truth and love songwriting for the right reasons. If you love it more than anything else, then you should do it. If you never get rich or famous, it doesn’t matter. If you’re in it for the love, that’s what matters. All of us, the guys who I was close to as...
Dec 5, 2025
I feel really lucky, because I get offered record deals now. The funny thing is, right after I did “Just the Two of Us” with Grover [Washington Jr.], I tried to get a record deal and I couldn’t get one (laughs). So now that I don’t care, I get offers! I have a funny...
Dec 4, 2025
I think learning to sing in the arena of country music was behind [my vocal restraint]. It was Gram Parsons who got me into country music, and harmonizing with him, which required even more restraint. Basically, you’re just learning to trust the melody and the lyric....
Dec 4, 2025
I never liked the commercial world. It was a bunch of hypocrisy. I don’t drink or smoke. I don’t like nightclubs and never went to them. Around 1953, I got a letter from some students at Oberlin College asking if I could come there and sing. They said they couldn’t...
Dec 4, 2025
When I was 19, I wrote a musical called Dancing Girl, and I wanted to play it for [singer] Tony Martin, who starred in a lot of MGM pictures. He was appearing at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, so I got the money together and flew up there with my script. I’m not sure...
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