But when you know that you’ve got a real friend somewhere, suddenly all the others are so much easier to bear.
I look around for the friends I used to turn to pull me through. Looking into their eyes, I see them running, too.
The high ideals and promises you once dressed the future in are dancing in the embers with the wind.
Very often it’s really inconvenient – who you fall in love with. You can’t really control it.
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business – writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
People know more about baseball players contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our childrens lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, Do you want to bring a child into this world? Thats pretty dire.
So what I do, more than play any instrument – I mean, I love to play – but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it’s like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.
It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.
My forays into trying to date girls my own age from the school I went to were all pretty tortured.
When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.
Got seven women on my mind. Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she’s a friend of mine.
I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.
These days I seem to think about the things I forgot to do for you and all the times I had a chance to.
I’ve written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing – an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse – and that led to writing my own songs.
And my dad wanted me to play the trumpet because that’s what he liked. His idol was Louis Armstrong. My dad thought my teeth came together in a way that was perfect for playing the trumpet.
The biggest influence? I’ve had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that’s not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don’t know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don’t have any pressure on me.
I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I’m not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.
I’m going to be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.
I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.