I can’t listen to so much music at the same time. I think you really have to have a diet. You’re just processing too much, there’s no place to put it. If you go a long time without hearing music, then you hear music that nobody else hears.
I’m just trying to make a buck like everyone else.
My first big gig was an opening show for Frank Zappa, and I think that was difficult.
I was always laughing in church.
It’s rather mystifying when you think about writing songs – where they come from, and how they’re born.
The piano has been drinking, not me.
Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.
Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you’re mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.
I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.
It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.
Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.
Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.
Arithmetic arithmetock Turn the hands back on the clock How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat? The only strings that hold me here Are tangled up around the pier.
I’m so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.
The Universe is making music all the time.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
I’ve been riding on the crest of a slump lately.
Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.
But then I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
The trick is to have a career and have a family. It’s like having two dogs that hate each other and you have to take them for a walk every night.