I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.
You can linger too long in your dreams...
There will be miracles After the last war is won Science and poetry rule in the new world to come Prophets and angels Gave us the power to see What an amazing future there will be.
If you’re a very unfulfilled person you might have a tendency to turn to crime.
I’m a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don’t like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.
The biggest regret? This may be one of those years I have no regrets.
I tell the audience every night, “I hope you didn’t pay more than face value on that ticket, because we ain’t worth more than that, and you ain’t gonna get any more than that.”
I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I’ve been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, “River Of Dreams” in ’93.
I’m not the kind of guy who wants to be on a pedestal.
Even when I stop performing or stop making records I won’t stop being creative. Songwriting is a good outlet.
I’m writing new music all the time. I’m just not writing pop stuff. It’s not my goal.
I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I’m confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I’m proud of all of them for one reason or another.
I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there’s a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.
I’m kind of putting my toe back in the water and seeing how it feels. We’re going to be doing stuff we haven’t done for years and years and years. So I’m looking forward to seeing how this stuff flies.
Move to California – my first impression of the Wild West.
I always wrote the music first, and the music gave me the mood and the lyrics were pretty much put in to give you a map, where that mood came from and where it’s going. But my first love was really the music itself, and I guess I’ve gone back to that.
I look at some of the songs I wrote years ago and I can’t believe I wrote such crap.
Some of the stuff I’m writing is almost like hymns, some of my first singing and choral experiences were in church, the Church of Christ in Hicksville.
I’ve written a bunch of stuff that no one’s ever heard, and I don’t know if they ever will. I’m just doing it for my own edification.
I always wanted to try to be a teacher even before I was in the music business. I liked history, and good teachers made an impact on me.
It didn’t matter that I felt like a fool ’cause I forgot when she walked through the door.