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Copyright © 2016 by Paul Zollo
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 Credits
The bulk of the interviews collected here were originally conducted for
various magazine stories and in those stories were often edited down from
the original conversation. Those conversations have been restored in full
here. The following interviews were originally conducted for Song-Talk
magazine, the journal of the National Academy of Songwriters: Gene Clark,
John Stewart, John Sebastian, Paul Williams, Bryan Ferry, Daryl Hall,
Michael Smith, Difford and Tilbrook, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Interviews
originally conducted for Performing Songwriter magazine are Randy
Newman, Aimee Mann, Rickie Lee Jones, Joan Armatrading, Brian Wilson,
and Bernie Taupin. Interviews originally conducted for American
Songwriter magazine are James Taylor, Richard Sherman, Leiber and
Stoller, Dave Stewart, Loretta Lynn, Sheldon Harnick, John Prine, Elvis
Costello, Rickie Lee Jones, Randy Newman, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde,
Alice Cooper, Jorge Calderon, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon, Ringo Starr,
Richard Thompson, Matisyahu, and Stephen Stills. The interviews with Jeff
Barry and Joe Henry were conducted live on the web series Songwriters on
Songwriting Live at the Songwriting School of Los Angeles. The interview
with Sia was conducted for the program of the 2015 Grammy Awards. The
interviews with Herbie Hancock, Rob Zombie, Donald Fagen, and Joe
Jackson were conducted for this book. The interview with Marjorie Guthrie
has never previously been published.
The following photos were taken by Paul Zollo: Aimee Mann, Alice
Cooper, Brian Wilson, Darryl Hall, Dave Stewart, Herbie Hancock, James
Taylor, Jeff Barry, Leiber & Stoller, Joe Henry, John Prine, Jorge Calderon,
Kris Kristofferson, Matisyahu, Michael Smith, Patti Smith, Paul Simon,
Paul Williams, Randy Newman, Richard Thompson, Richard Sherman,
Rickie Lee Jones, Ringo Starr, Rob Zombie, Sia, and Stephen Stills. They
are used by permission of Paul Zollo Photography, Los Angeles.
 The following photos were taken by the great Henry Diltz: Donald
Fagen, Gene Clark, John Sebastian, John Stewart, Joan Armatrading, and
Peter, Paul & Mary. They are used by permission of Henry Diltz
Photography, Los Angeles.
Photo of Woody and Marjorie Guthrie is used by permission of the
Woody Guthrie Archives
Photo of Norman Whitfield is used by permission of the Whitfield
archives
Photo of Sheldon Harnick is by Margery Harnick
Photo of Difford & Tilbrook is used by permission of Squeeze Official
archives
Photo of Chrissie Hynde is by Dean Chalkley
Photo of Bernie Taupin is by Michelle Warren Photography
Photo of Bryan Ferry is used by permission of Bryan Ferry Archives
Photo of Joe Jackson is by Jacob Blickenstaff
Photo of Elvis Costello is by James O’Mara
Photo of Kenny Gamble is used by permission of Gamble-Huff Music
Photo of Loretta Lynn is used by permission of Loretta Lynn Archives
Paul Anka photo courtesy of Paul Anka
Photo of Maurice White used by permission of Earth, Wind & Fire
Archives

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“All songwriters are links in a chain.”
—Pete Seeger

“The writing of a song is a triumph of the human spirit.”

—Van Dyke Parks

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Dedicated to my father, Burt Zollo,
to my son, Joshua Zollo,
and to all songwriters everywhere.

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 Table of Contents
Introduction

Marjorie Guthrie On Woody Guthrie

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller A Bridge Built on the Blues
Richard Sherman Writing Songs for Disney
Jeff Barry River Deep Mountain High
Paul Anka From “Diana” to “My Way”
Kenny Gamble Inventing the Philly Sound
Norman Whitfield Through the Grapevine
Loretta Lynn Songs from Butcher Holler
Sheldon Harnick Of Fiddlers on the Roof
Peter, Paul and Mary The Power of Song
Herbie Hancock On a Journey of Jazz
John Stewart Daydream Believing
John Sebastian A Loving Spoonful
Gene Clark Still The Byrds
Stephen Stills The One You’re With
Paul Simon Love and Hard Times
Ringo Starr The Beatles and Beyond
Brian Wilson Beyond The Beach Boys
Kris Kristofferson Another Word for Freedom
Bernie Taupin Writing with Elton
Paul Williams Only Just Begun
Maurice White Inside Earth, Wind & Fire
Bryan Ferry Of Roxy Music
Elvis Costello A Man Out of Time
Joe Jackson Night and Day
Rickie Lee Jones Flying with the Cowboys
Daryl Hall Of Sacred Songs
Patti Smith Still Dancing Barefoot
Chrissie Hynde On the Chain Gang
John Prine Mailman of Miracles
Michael Smith Tulips Beneath the Snow
Dave Stewart Eurythmics and Beyond
Joan Armatrading Walking Under Ladders
Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook Being Squeeze
Aimee Mann On Memory Lane
James Taylor The Secret o’ Songwriting
Randy Newman The World Isn’t Fair
Alice Cooper Inventing Alice
Donald Fagen Being Steely Dan
Jorge Calderon On Writing with Zevon
Don McLean American Pie and Beyond
Richard Thompson Inside the Beeswing
Rob Zombie Doing the Impossible
Joe Henry With Blood from Stars
Sia On a Chandelier
Matisyahu Darkness into Light

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 Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Ben Schafer and Da Capo Press, who not only have
kept the first volume of this journey alive, Songwriters on Songwriting, but
they also turned it into a textbook for colleges that teach songwriting.
Without them, this second volume would never have been conceived or
executed, and my gratitude for this privilege is boundless. Thank you for
your patience, faith, and support always.
Also great thanks extended forever to my father, Burt Zollo, for
teaching me about the beauty of words, of books, and of song. And heartfelt
forever thanks to Pete Seeger for your wisdom and ongoing inspiration. To
Else Blangsted for your love, good advice, humor, and talking to your boys
in heaven for me over these years. To Van Dyke Parks for your
introductions to greatness and ongoing brilliance. To my son, Joshua Zollo,
for being my beamish boy forever, I love you, and to my wife, Leslie, for
your faith in me. Thanks to my mom, Lois Zollo, for being the best mom
ever. To my sister Peggy Miller and brother Peter Zollo for your love. To
my many dear friends for your love and energy through these long days and
for understanding me and caring about that understanding, especially Tomas
Ulrich, Michael Hughes, Earl Grey, Jeff Gold and Holly Gold, Sandy Ross
and Lee Hirsch, Amy Linton, Paula McMath, Jilly Freeman, Michelle
Williams, Tom Bowden, Michael Wisniewski, Susan Downs, Henry Diltz,
Neil Rosengarden, Andy Kurtzman and Anne Kurtzman, Lisa Dubell,
Smokey Miles, Andy Kenyon, Lisa Johnson, Sarah Kramer, Dan
Kirkpatrick, Scott Docherty, Deborah Presley Brando, Katie Presley,
Edoardo Tancredi, and Billy Salisbury. To Kathy West for your great
transcribing, without which this volume would never be complete. To my
agent, Anthony Mattero, for believing in me. To my brother in song Darryl
Purpose for writing so many beautiful songs with me and for your
generosity. To American Songwriter magazine for employing me for so
long and for honoring the art of songwriting every day. To Rob Seals and
the Songwriting School of Los Angeles for building a temple to song and
for giving me a beautiful place within it, a home for our web series
Songwriters on Songwriting Live, with so much love and joy. To Steve
Goodman for my first songwriting lesson. To Paul Simon and Bob Dylan
for teaching me how to write songs. To Artie Garfunkel for your beautiful
harmony, in song and in life. To Rickie Lee Jones for your timeless spirit.
To Zippy for everything.
And to the memory of two gentle dear friends and beautiful songwriters,
D. Whitney Quinn and P. F. Sloan, for your lives in song. I wish I had more
time with both of you.
And to all songwriters everywhere for writing songs. Don’t ever stop.

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 Introduction
“It really is a living spirit being born.”
—Rickie Lee Jones

“It’s living art, captured for all time.”

—P. F. Sloan

My first memory is of a song. A song spinning in infinity. A bright red 45

single of a song about farm animals, replete with their individual sounds.
Pretty delightful stuff. Over and over—I couldn’t get enough of it.
Skip ahead a few years to another single spinning, another eternal 45.
I’m in a little room at the very far end of a vast old apartment on Aldine
Avenue in Chicago, the home of my Aunt Shirley and Uncle Miles. Dusty
sunlight streamed in from the window above almost horizontally, the sun
making its early winter descent. I was on the floor with a little electric
record player, an ancient small boxy machine that played no LPs, only 45s.
In its middle was a black cylinder on which records neatly slid. One side,
one song. It was pure and right, and it was the center of my universe, 1966.
I was seven. Up on the bookshelf over the bed was the book
Frankenstein, tucked in between other nonthreatening titles. But my
proximity to it was mildly terrifying. Trying not to look in that direction, I
directed my attention instead to what mattered most. The song.
Music trumped everything, even being all alone in a giant apartment
with volumes about monsters just overhead. I had one record and one only,
but it was enough: Simon & Garfunkel, “Homeward Bound.” (On the B-
side was “Leaves That Are Green.”)
It enthralled me. It was both human and electric, chords shifting from
major to minor, simple drums spelling out the folk-rock groove, all crested
by two voices in harmony, singing words that to me were the essence of
beauty. It was a bit beyond my grasp, this tale of playing music abroad and
yearning for home—not only had I never been out of the country at this
point, I had never even been away from my happy home in the kingdom of
Illinois.
But the idea of the narrator being both a “poet and a one-man band”
made perfect sense, as I knew—even then—that this same man writing the
song was also making the music. And that promise, of a musician
performing the thing he creates himself, and the boundless bounty of
expression that spelled, shone to me like a bright star.
The song spoke to me, and spoke to some place deep in me, and
expansive. Even the rhymes thrilled me. I always loved the beautiful
completion rhymes bring to an idea, and the whole song started with,
“Sitting in a railway station / Got a ticket for my destination.” That made
me happy. It still does. A couplet for the ages.
It was a true wonder to behold. This entire world, seamlessly fusing so
many disparate components: melody, harmony, groove, finger-picked
guitar, drums, rhymed verse, romance, and more! All of those delicious
ingredients wed together into an organic whole, this swift passage of time.
A universe in under 3 minutes (2:42 to be exact). And one I could freely
enter and lose myself within. It was a genuine and timeless joy, and at my
fingertips.
It was the most moving experience of my life to that point. Not only
was I all alone to absorb this transformative musical elixir; I could control
my intake, playing it over and over, injecting it directly into my heart and
mind, as I still do to this day with songs.
I even toyed with vari-speed. The B-side of this single, “Leaves That
Are Green,” started with a honky-tonk piano, the sound of which, when
sped up faster to 78 rpm instead of 45, sounded delightfully manic. But it
was a controlled and musical mania, and it belonged to me. It was my secret
passion, and I loved it. There was no inclination whatsoever to share this
with any of the other humans. It was self-discovery in solitude, the dynamic
that aligns perfectly with songwriting: this intimate and individual
connection with the musical muse.
It launched my journey as a songwriter, setting me on the path I’ve been
on ever since. There was no profession that to me seemed more thrilling or
important, with the notable exception of astronaut, but not so much to walk
on the moon—which seemed cold and lonely to me—but for the
weightlessness. The idea of flying appealed to me, as it does to most
earthbound creatures. But I decided I could fly farther and for a full lifetime
by writing songs.
I wrote my first one the summer that man landed on the moon, 1969. I
was ten. Prior to then I’d been writing abstract, free-verse poems—mostly
nonsensical—just playing with words, really. Then I wrote my own lyrics
for Simon’s “The Sound of Silence.” Mine was called “The Look of
Absence.” (Which I told him about years later. He smiled and said, “Hey,
that sounds like one of mine.” Indeed. Evidently, the idea of masking my
influences had yet to occur to me.) Yet it was a great education for me:
although my lyrics made little sense, I was learning the first stages of
songwriting: merging words and music. Making them fit. All the rhymes
were in the right place, the phrasing was right, and even syllabic stress—
something some modern songwriters neglect—was perfect.
And it’s there that songs live, in this delicate yet dynamic union of
disparate elements. Music—abstract and emotional—and language—
intellectual and specific. It’s the “crucial balance,” as Simon put it, at the
heart of songwriting, the marriage of words and music. It is the one constant
through all these interviews, all the styles, years, generations. All united in
the same mission, ultimately: combining words and music.
My first true song, words and music, was written on my beloved
acoustic Silvertone guitar and called “Time Changes the Scene.” Even then,
at ten, my main theme was how quickly time passes. I was feeling nostalgic
for the good old days, I guess, back when I was seven.
But even then I recognized with awe the unique power of song and the
way ideas expressed in song, underscored and actualized by music, were
received in a way far more powerful than mere words.
I also received with awe this understanding that while being carried
down the river of life, with time and everyday chaos infiltrating every
moment, one could create something immaculately conceived and ordered.
Something that would exist outside of time and be durable so as to never
“fall apart on the street like a cheap watch,” to quote Van Dyke Parks.
That was the goal. Not to create good songs. But great ones. As Patti
Smith explains in her interview in this volume, the whole difference
between poetry and songwriting to her was that a songwriter writes a song
not for an elite group of song enthusiasts but for the world. The entire
world! That’s a big target audience. And designed to work not just for now
or next season but for the ages. To write a song people want to hear and to
play and to sing across generations. It’s a lofty goal, to put it lightly, and it
says a lot about songwriters—all songwriters—that one would even attempt
something so bold. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah—Yiddish for crazy
courage. That is where songwriters live, after all, on the edge of courage
and crazy. It’s creative chutzpah, the audacity of making art.
I started writing songs, as do almost all songwriters, not unlike
somebody who has never driven before getting behind the wheel. I really
had no clue about any of it—the words or the music—so I did it blindly,
with love and faith guiding. Though my inaugural song began in G, it ended
in E—a whole other key. Ending a melody where it begins—the return to
tonic, as it’s known—is a fundamental concept, common to most of the
music we hear, regardless of genre or generation. But this is how all
songwriters learn to write songs. This is the journey of discovery, and
though all of our journeys are distinct, they are connected.
I learned by studying and learning to play—as I still do to this day—
songs I loved. To get inside their architecture, to learn the components that
add up to that effect.
Because there’s a whole lot to learn when learning to write songs. It’s
why almost all the great songwriters interviewed here and in the first
volume admitted to years spent writing bad songs before they wrote good
ones. (With the exceptional exceptions of Laura Nyro, Janis Ian, and John
Prine, all of whom, remarkably, began with masterpieces.) It’s because
writing a song, any song, is not unlike painting a cubist painting. Songs
encompass many elements at once, and it’s in the seamless fusion of those
elements that greatness is achieved. But in each of these pursuits—the
creation of music and lyrics—is a whole world to discover. Music is a
universe unto itself, with melody, rhythm, and harmony. Lyrics, as well,
encompass a complex realm of considerations, combining language both
poetic and colloquial, weaving together metaphor, symbology, storytelling,
and more in rhymed verses. Add to those aspects the mastery of song
structure itself—the precise architecture of verse, chorus, bridge and other
song forms—into which the words and the music take their place.
 And despite the impact of songwriters such as Dylan and Lennon and
McCartney, who forever expanded the potential of the popular song, the
song form itself was never exploded and replaced. Dylan, The Beatles,
Simon, and the rest showed great respect for the song—and within its
narrow confines created miracles. And it is in that accomplishment—
creating something eternal and unlimited within a restricted form—that the
full and true phenomenon of the song is realized. That, as Krishnamurti
said, “limitations create possibility.” That within this tiny room, this narrow
space, this fast passage of time, a songwriter can create something
boundless.
Once I started writing songs, I never stopped. To this day nothing is as
compelling, exciting, or fulfilling.
I played my dad my songs always. He was a writer himself, the author
of three books, and was a tough critic. But a consistent one. His chief word
was “trite.” Meaning he’d heard it before. Meaning everyone had heard it
before. It had been done. So my mission became to write anything he didn’t
find trite. To discover new content in songs and new ways of transmitting it.
Ultimately I did get there.
I also played one of my songs for my junior high music teacher, Camille
Bertagnolli, a sparkling piano-playing teacher with an infectious passion for
music and teaching. She led the Glee Club, as it was known, a choir of boys
and girls singing songs in simple harmony.
I wasn’t really sure, however, if she’d have any interest in hearing a
song I wrote. After all, the songs she taught our class were famous ones by
legendary songwriters such as the Gershwins or modern standards like “Fire
and Rain,” written by James Taylor. All songs that astonished me for their
beauty.
But she did want to hear my song. She asked me to play it then and
there in her big musical office, and she listened intently, as if it mattered.
Because it did matter, as she taught me. She let me know in no uncertain
terms that writing songs mattered. Her words changed my life. I was
already committed to this thing. But because of her, I became reverent in
my devotion. “For the rest of your life,” she said, “you will always be rich.
Because you have music in you.”
The song I played her was called “Picnic Island.” She loved it. Though
the words added up to some sort of sense, the music was well conceived, a
mostly major-key verse set against a minor-key chorus. Not only did she
praise its structure, she immediately did what I always do now: she figured
out what the chords were. She even informed me that a chord I was playing
in a funny position and didn’t recognize was simply C major. (She was
right.) That night she notated the song, wrote out the music and lyrics, so
she could teach it to the class.
This was an honor for which I was unprepared. The whole class—all
those voices—were going to all sing my song? And at the same time? It
seemed like an impossible dream. But the very next day of class she passed
out the dittoed pages with my song in purple ink and my name on it as the
writer—right where names like James Taylor and Gershwin had been—and
announced, “This is very special. One of our own students, Paul Zollo, has
written a song, and we are going to learn it.”
It was the first time in my life I had felt tears of joy. I didn’t shed any, as
I recall, but I was so moved by the emotion of hearing my song elevated to
this great place that I welled up with a feeling I’d never known before that.
It was an honor and a thrill unparalleled in my life up to then. I remember
the sound of hearing my song sung by our entire choir. It was stunning. This
little creation, born on my humble guitar strings, now sung—with spirit—
by the whole bunch. Sure, she changed the groove somewhat so it had more
of a musical theater bounce than I intended. But I could live with that. The
song was in the world now, and what happened was out of my control. I felt
what can best be termed as parental pride.
As if she hadn’t done enough to transform my life forever, Mrs.
Bertagnolli included this song in our holiday concert. My song. Both my
parents—even my father, who was never around during the workday—was
there. He even taped it on a cassette, a tape I still have and cherish. It was
momentous. I knew then that there could not possibly be anything in life
more fulfilling than being a songwriter. And I’ve never really wavered from
that idea.
I also had a great guitar teacher named Judd Sager who was seventeen
when we started, which to eleven-year-old me seemed very grown up. He
had long and hip hair and a mustache, could play guitar and sing
beautifully, and was one of the coolest people I had ever met up to that
point, like if some cool fusion of George Harrison and David Crosby
walked into my home. At first he taught both my brother Peter and myself,
but my brother had other talents, and music became my province alone.
Like Mrs. Bertagnolli, Judd was excited that I wrote my own songs and
was using guitar—almost from the moment I started playing—as a
songwriting tool. Knowing well that a songwriter’s vocabulary consists of
the chords he knows that support melodies—and being inspired and excited
by brilliant chordal usage by our mutual heroes that the time, such as
Lennon and McCartney especially and George Harrison and Paul Simon—
he taught me new chords every week.
These were golden for me, each one. I was so hungry and happy to get
new information on this, already clearly my life mission, each was received
like a gift, knowing each added new synapses in my musical brain that
would forever expand my understanding of music. But he did more than
teach me new chords; he insisted I write a new song every week using these
chords. Which was a brilliant exercise that enriched me both as a guitarist
and songwriter. When a chord was in my own song, I found, I learned how
to play it! Even the hard ones, like F major, which, as every guitarist knows,
is the first really tough chord to play. So my guitar chops quickly expanded.
But so did my harmonic vocabulary, the tool bag from which I compose my
songs.
I grew up in the beautiful Chicago suburb of Wilmette, just north of the
city. At that time Chicago was home to a great and thriving folk music
scene with wonderful clubs like the Earl of Old Town that featured local
legends Steve Goodman, Bob Gibson, John Prine (see page 434), Michael
Smith (see page 462), and others. It also had the great Midnight Special
radio show on our classical station, WFMT, which, on Saturday nights only,
swapped Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest for our heroes Pete and Woody
and those heroes coming in their wake. That show, which remains the
Chicago equivalent of Carnegie Hall for singer-songwriters, is still on the
air.
It was the weekly open mic nights at Steve Goodman’s own club,
Somebody Else’s Troubles on Lincoln Avenue, or the Spot by Northwestern
University that I learned how to perform. (It was also at the Spot where I
learned to handle hecklers, who were frequent there, drunk on beer and
youth, wanting to tangle. I loved it, as I do to this day.)
 I took advantage of the generous spirit of many of these artists by
asking them to listen to my songs. Armed only with my guitar and that
aforementioned chutzpah, I would make my way backstage after shows
with hopeful determination. They were a sweet and gentle bunch, and not
once did they turn me down.
Steve Goodman was unique among great songwriters in that he could
write a brilliant song, such as “City of New Orleans,” which became a hit
for Arlo Guthrie, but would also sing and record classics by other great
songwriters. It was Steve who introduced John Prine to the world, as he did
Michael Smith. Songs by both Prine and Smith represented to me the
greatest a songwriter could achieve, the distant star toward which I aspired.
Steve gave me my first songwriting lesson. And to this day the most
important one. It was after one of his greatly spirited shows. In a dressing
room with lights and mirrors surrounding, I asked if he’d listen to my new
song. He smiled, said sure, and handed me his big black acoustic guitar.
I was fourteen then. My song was “Troubled Winter,” which had a
plaintive, pretty melody highly influenced, admittedly, by the chords of
“Sisters of Mercy” by Leonard Cohen. It had a true tonal center too, starting
and ending in D major.
He listened carefully, gentle smile in his eyes. When I was done, he
waited a beat and said, “Yeah, you know that was good. That was good. But
I could have written that entire song in two lines.”
Brutal criticism! And not what I had expected, having previously
received almost unanimous praise for my efforts. But, I recognized, now I
was in the major leagues. I wanted to play with the pros, after all, and this
was a healthy and warranted dose of reality. It was a little painful initially,
but ultimately greatly appreciated. Because I knew he was right: the song
did amount to perhaps two lines of actual content, and no more. And rather
than be crushed by this criticism, I took it as a challenge. I decided to write
songs that made sense. To write something like a Steve Goodman song. Or
a John Prine or Michael Smith song. A true story song. With lyrics poetic
and musical but that told a story someone could understand. That was the
goal anyway. I didn’t always reach it. But I aimed high.
My next song was called “Shades of Color” and was inspired by a
newspaper story I saw in the Chicago Sun-Times about convicts who
painted. This was the story of one such artist, who used art to escape.
 This songwriting journey is one every songwriter takes and plays out
against the soundtrack of the time one is in. Mine was a time of
momentous, meaningful songwriting. In only a handful of years The
Beatles progressed from “She Loves You” to “Strawberry Fields” and
beyond. I was hyperaware of this evolution, which was intoxicating and
electric to me. Nothing seemed more vital or meaningful. Dylan, Simon,
The Beatles, and the others—they expanded the popular song. Without
sacrificing anything that made songs great, they showed, as Robbie
Robertson said, that anything goes. That a song could contain any topic, and
the only limit was the songwriter’s imagination. It was a brave new world.
Then came other geniuses like Randy Newman and Tom Waits into my life,
who showed me other parts of town I’d never even considered and where I
soon wanted to live. Also there was James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Laura
Nyro, Carole King, Stephen Stills—all doing glorious work but in different
ways, and each valid and beautiful.
And as modern standards emerged, enlivened and expanded by this
evolution, the world was changed.
I never took any of it lightly. Each new miracle song that arrived in my
world was momentous to the extent of changing everything. I remember
countless examples, but the most stunning was 1970. I was still in my first
year of writing songs. After my dad picked me up from weekly Sunday
School at Temple Sholom in the city, we went out for lunch in what was
then called Old Town, a hip part of town along Wells Street with great cafés
and cool poster and record shops. It was the counterculture realized, the
world I was experiencing through song though rarely seeing firsthand,
living as I did in a mostly wealthy, white suburb.
After lunch we went to one of these shops. The weather was cold, gray,
and biting outside in typical Chicago fashion, making these interiors ever
more glowing.
It was there I heard it as soon as we walked in: “Bridge Over Troubled
Water.” The new single by Simon & Garfunkel. Released prior to the album
of the same name.
I nearly swooned. I knew who was singing it. I knew it was our friend
Artie. That golden voice so friendly and dear to me, even then, like a
brother singing to me. But this was something new, something different. It
was something so sweeping, so majestic and triumphant—and yet so
warmly amiable, a song of true friendship—that it was utterly enthralling.
My dad sweetly purchased the 45 for me, probably knowing there was no
way he could pry me out of this store if he didn’t.
I brought it home, went directly to my room to play it, and essentially
lived inside that song for months. On the flip side was “Keep the Customer
Satisfied,” which I also loved. But “Bridge”—I couldn’t get enough of it.
How anyone could write something so beautiful? It was something I really
couldn’t fathom. But I sure thought about it. How exactly did Paul Simon
sit down with only a guitar and a pad of paper—same tools that I have—
and come away with “Bridge Over Troubled Water”? He looked like a
normal human, after all. Like a member of my own family, in fact, which is
how I always thought of him, to this day. But no one I ever knew could do
that.
It’s that hunger for understanding, that passion for these musical
concoctions, that led me to these questions and these volumes. At that time
these heroes of mine were often interviewed in the press but rarely queried
about songwriting and hardly ever about music itself. Yet internally I was
compiling my own personal lexicon of questions I’d like to ask Paul Simon
—or James Taylor, Carole King, Laura Nyro, Randy Newman—or any of
those songwriters I revered. How did they do it? Does it seem as miraculous
to you as it does to us, your listeners? And how about this song, and this
one? How did you write those? And does the process seem as magical to
you as it does to me?
I knew then of the connection between all songwriters and proudly
included myself in this club. As the late great Pete Seeger said in the first
interview in the first volume, “All songwriters are links in a chain.” It’s that
wisdom that guides this journey and repeats like a refrain through all these
pages: the understanding that all songwriters—regardless of genre or
generation—are united by this singular pursuit of combining words and
music to make songs. No songwriter learns how to write songs—or even
acquires the inclination to do so—in a vacuum. Inspired and enervated by
the songs of others, songwriters begin by using these templates of songs
known and loved and then expanding from there. We imitate and we
emulate that which we love until we discover, ideally, our own voice and
our own song. Even Dylan started by imitating Woody Guthrie. (And he
wasn’t even the best Woody imitator, according to Woody’s wife, Marjorie,
in our opening chapter.)
I also wanted to ask about a phenomenon I experienced from the start
and knew wasn’t particular only to me. Which was when lines for songs,
both musical and lyrical, would simply arrive, like a gift. A line that does
everything and more that you need. Where did that come from? They
always seemed to come from beyond, as if I was tapping into some timeless
and mystic source. And it still feels like that.
Because in that experience exists the essence of songwriting. It is a
conscious act to reach beyond the conscious mind, to discover and invent
things outside of our usual reach. That is both the challenge and beauty of
the thing. Every single songwriter I spoke to had some experience of it,
although they perceived it individually. The especially intellectual ones,
with no faith in anything spiritual, attribute these experiences to the artist
connecting with his own unconscious. Sure, it feels as if it comes from
beyond, they say. Because it is beyond your conscious mind, from your own
subconscious.
The others—the spiritual ones—scoff at the others’ inability to grasp the
truth—and understand songwriters tap into a source that is beyond them but
connects all. Rickie Lee Jones, who embodies the faith and openness of the
spiritual ones, laughed and said, “Where else would it come from?”
Soon after “Bridge” came another song that, to me, also resounded like
a miracle: “Let It Be,” the single by The Beatles, written by Paul
McCartney. Again, exalted consciousness. It seemed nothing could be more
beautiful. Obsession—I listened to it nonstop. It was all I needed.
Other remarkable songs emerged, songs that stretched and redefined
what songs can do. “Mr. Tambourine Man,” written by Dylan but performed
by The Byrds. “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by
Stephen Stills. “American Pie” by Don McLean. “Hello in There” by John
Prine. “Louisiana” and “Sail Away” by Randy Newman. Everything by
Laura Nyro. And so many more.
These songs, if I listen to them today, still send me. They bring me back
to when I first heard them—but forward too. Their power is undiminished
by passing time. And therein lies the beauty and magic and power of the
song: it is a forever renewable source. It is a vessel of grace and spirit,
impervious to the wear and tear of the physical world.
 This exalted song consciousness doesn’t belong only to the distant past.
To this day I am forever excited and even surprised by the extent to which
great songs can still send me. So many times in recent days I have found
myself walking down Hollywood Boulevard and confronting a song so
utterly compelling, I need to stop and take it in. Whether it’s something
fairly new, such as “Chandelier” by Sia, a recent favorite, or something
classic, I will be transported. There’s one store that only plays Michael
Jackson, and whether I go by and hear “Billie Jean” or “Man in the Mirror,”
I have to stop. Stop and feel the magic. Every time.
So when I got the lucky job in Hollywood, 1987, of becoming editor of
SongTalk, which was the journal of the National Academy of Songwriters,
my mission became to interview legendary songwriters—and ask them only
about songwriting. Of course, it’s a big subject and encompasses a lot of
corollary issues. But the main focus was always on music and the creative
process, which invariably led to good places. Music, after all, is the realm in
which these people live and in which their genius flourishes. Yet rarely can
they discuss the actual technicalities of music itself with the press, as most
writers are not musicians.
But if I asked Brian Wilson, for example, about colors associated with
musical keys in his mind, he opened up (insisting darkly, however, that
every minor key is black). Or if I mentioned to Paul Simon, for example,
the cunning of the subtle key change in the last verse of “Still Crazy After
All These Years,” his eyes lit up, and we connected in a whole new way. Or
when I spoke to Dylan about the essential nature of the key of A minor in
“One More Cup of Coffee,” our conversation instantly deepened. (“Try it in
B minor,” he said. Why? “Because it might be a hit for you.”)
This was the pattern always. As soon as I would let on that I was a
fellow musician, the conversation would shift. Musicians simply speak
differently to fellow musicians, and songwriters to fellow songwriters, than
to civilians. It is a whole other language. Yet it’s an abstract and vaporous
thing to discuss, a genuine mystery even to those who have written music
for decades. But it’s where we live.
Because as songwriters know well—and was exemplified in Volume I—
there are no easy answers about songwriting. Not one of these legendary
songwriters divulged a secret or a trick that would make songwriting easy.
Because it is not easy. When I first realized that Simon, for example, while
writing songs for Graceland and subsequent albums, had jettisoned his old
tried-and-true method of writing a song with voice and guitar and was,
instead, writing songs to musical tracks, I thought it was an especially hard
way to write songs.
He agreed. “Yes, it is hard,” he said. “But all of songwriting is hard.
There are no easy ways.”
And, of course, he’s right. There is no formula or no repeatable method
for the writing of a great song. Because as Lennon said and all songwriters
understand, any one of us could sit down and write a song right now. Given
a title—even a key, a tempo—we can sit down and write a song. But a great
one? A timeless one? That is the goal. And how you get to those ones—the
songs that seem beyond, even beyond the songwriter who wrote them—that
remains a mystery.
But part of being a songwriter is the passion to embrace this mystery.
As Leonard Cohen said in Volume I, “Songwriting is much like the life of a
Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.” That level of devotion
resonates with songwriters because it’s accurate. It’s a daily pursuit of
something unseen, even unknown, and you fling yourself directly into this
unknown, sustained by nothing but faith and courage. And love. The love of
songs, of music, sustains us. The religiosity in Mr. Cohen’s words rang true
in my heart and mind, as I know it did for songwriters everywhere, because
we recognize that songwriting is a high calling and perhaps the purest and
holiest thing we do.
“The world doesn’t need any new songs,” Dylan told me with a sly
smile. But to this he added the qualification: “Unless someone comes along
with a pure heart.”
A pure heart. That is the essence of great songwriting, the well from
which Woody Guthrie drew, as did those who came in his wake. They came
for the pure love of song. Even when writing on a commercial assignment
—as did Leiber and Stoller when writing songs for the movie Jailhouse
Rock starring Elvis, or Jeff Barry and the Brill Building writers, or Norman
Whitfield and the Motown gang—they connected with the pure heart of
music, the love of song.
For songs—and songwriting itself—is a source of joy. We don’t work
music; we play it. Being playful and connecting with joy is the essence of
the thing, even for those who find the process torturous. It’s only tough up
to that point when you get something that works. Then it becomes joyful.
As Laura Nyro said, for her songwriting was a “serious playground.”
When writing songs, she said she felt that “you are really with your essence.
. . . There can be delight there. There can be self-discovery. You can dance
there.” Jimmy Webb said, “I am like a kid with a jigsaw puzzle. A
glittering, magical jigsaw puzzle.”
It’s a journey of joy I’ve been on for a long time. The year I wrote my
first one is also the year The Beatles broke up. It was one of those
occurrences so significant, as was the death of John Lennon, that it seemed
the world wouldn’t go on. But it did, and it always does. As Stephen Stills
wrote, “We have no choice but to carry on.” And it’s the songwriters who
make life endurable in these times, who give us hope to carry on even when
it seems all hope is lost.
To this day music still matters as much as ever, if not more. Songs still
matter. Though I am well known as an author of this and other volumes, my
greatest joy is the writing of a new song. I quote Van Dyke Parks’s
statement that the writing of a song is a triumph of the human spirit all the
time because it is so true.
And concurrent with writing these books and other writing about music
(and Hollywood history: Hollywood Remembered is another compendium
of my love and obsessions), I have continued on the golden path of writing
songs, and it’s been a rich and wonderful journey.
Songwriting is an ancient endeavor, dating back to the dawn of man.
The first book about a songwriter was the bible, with the psalms composed
by King David. Psalms that spoke to man more directly and fully than mere
words ever could. There is no epoch of history or any culture that existed
without music. Many historians maintain song preceded spoken language.
Songs, for successive eons, have been integral to every human occasion,
from momentous events such as weddings and funerals to mundane ones
like elevator trips and supermarket shopping. Songs fan the flames of war,
celebrate victories, and envision peace and a world beyond war. Songs are
written and sung in rage and protest, in an effort to change the world. Songs
are also there to celebrate the beauty of the world and the greatness of
existence. The need for song—for this attempt to make sense of the world
with words and music—is deeply rooted in humans and as primal and
necessary as the need for love.
Now headlong into this twenty-first century, with miracle technology
forever at our fingertips changing our world profoundly, still nothing has
surpassed the power of a song. New technologies have forever changed the
way we acquire, collect, and listen to songs. But never have songs and the
need for songs in our lives been supplanted. Despite what Dylan said, the
world absolutely needs new songs.
The truth remains that whether a song is heard by millions or by only
one, it matters. It is truly a triumph of the human spirit. Here is a deep and
joyful journey into the heart of the mysteries from which these triumphs
emerge. It’s there, in that timeless place where words and music meet, that
Bob Dylan’s words resonate forever: “Thank God for songwriters.”

OceanofPDF.com
Marjorie Guthrie
 On Woody Guthrie
New York, New York 1981

It’s New York City, 1981, and we’re more than twenty floors up above 57th
Street and the everyday mayhem of Manhattan. But here there is calm. And
joy. And music. It’s the office she shares with Harold Leventhal, famed
manager of legendary folk stars like Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie (her son),
Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, and others.
“You want to see something wonderful?” she asked with an impish glint
in her eyes. “Look at this one.” In her hands was a timeworn cherry-red
spiral notebook. Inside were epic poems, song lyrics, romantic entreaties,
expansive erotica, musings, jokes, sketches, drawings—all inscribed there
by her late husband, Woody. Woody Guthrie.
For years they lived on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, where they
raised their three kids, Nora, Arlo, and Joady, and would take the train
between there and Manhattan, where they worked. During those commutes
Woody would get busy and devote all his exultant energy to filling entire
notebooks thusly, dedicated to his beloved.
Now here I was, Woody’s notebooks and songs at my fingertips. I had
somehow crossed the mystic river, and I was on the side where Woody was.
Anything was possible. I could go to the source.
Woody’s old pal Pete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain.”
And who did Pete learn to write songs from? Woody. Who so inspired and
enervated a young Bob Dylan that he had to leave his Midwest home,
change his name, and head east to start his life? Woody.
So it seemed an appropriate place to begin this volume, as Pete’s
interview was the first in the previous volume, with an interview I did with
Marjorie Guthrie back in 1981 about her late husband, Woody.
One of my very first jobs out of college was to work for Marjorie at
CCHD—the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease—in New York
City, 1981. She’d created this organization to fight this disease that robbed
not only Woody’s life but also the last decade of his life. They needed
someone to do publicity and other chores. I signed on, not so much out of
any great desire to battle this disease but, admittedly, to be with Marjorie
and her treasure trove of Woody’s world—his abundant archives,
overflowing not only with the thousands of songs he wrote but also with
those beautiful notebooks of poetry and prose and erotica and cartoons.
Also the tools of his genius were preserved so lovingly, his pens, pencils,
crayons, and notebooks. This proximity to the stuff of legend—to the
cornucopia of expansive song wisdom and wonder that all poured out of
this one miraculous little man—and the very crayons of this famous kid at
heart was all I needed to sustain me.
She was born Marjorie Greenblatt on October 6, 1917, in Atlantic City
and lived until March of 1983. She danced with the Martha Graham troupe
starting in 1935 under the name Marjorie Mazia. She first met Woody in
1940, as described in the following, and was with him on and off until the
end of his life on October 3, 1967. She was a brilliant and beautiful woman
who put up with Woody while he was alive, though it was never easy. He
wasn’t a man who stayed still for long. But long before he was gone they
both knew the legacy—the body of work—mattered. And though I was
there before legions of great songwriters wrote new melodies to his
unfinished songs, the lyrics that lived in the exalted archives, the
recognition of his lasting legacy underscored all other endeavors. Like
Dylan who came to be with Woody before he was gone forever, I wanted to
get near this source too, and Marjorie was used to all sorts of folk-inspired
pilgrims being drawn to all things Woody. So she kindly allowed me to
interview her about Woody on more than one occasion, a dialogue I am
happy to include here.
 After all, Pete Seeger was our hero growing up. He was in our world.
But he always spoke and sang of Woody. And perhaps he cleaned up the
dark aspects of Woody’s outlook more than necessary—Woody was no
saint, after all—but what was undeniable was Pete’s respect for Woody as a
songwriter. As the songwriter.
“Woody is just Woody,” John Steinbeck wrote. “He is a voice with a
guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that
people . . . there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet
about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those
who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against
oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.”
Woody’s work was remarkable—some two thousand amazing songs—
songs of love, outrage, beauty, faith, humor, death, sex, and pretty much
every other human experience under the sun. Some became famous, such as
“This Land Is Your Land,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “Roll
On Columbia, Roll On” “Deportees,” “Union Maid,” and “Do Re Mi,” but
most of his songs have hardly been heard once, if ever. And there was also
so much else that he created: volumes of poetry, love letters, journals of
erotica, books, drawings, doodles, paintings, and stories.
When he was married to Marjorie, he was so thoroughly in love with
her that he’d write her entire inspired daily notebooks of love poetry and
cosmic musings while on the subway, hurtling through the subterranean
tunnels toward their Coney Island home. Marjorie kept all of these—and
every letter he ever wrote and every song he composed along with every
crayon, pencil, and pen he used to conjure his magic—in her New York
archives, where she’d share it with his admirers, a legion of artists,
musicians, and vagabonds that increased every year and continues to
expand.
Born in the heart of the Dust Bowl—Okemah, Oklahoma—in 1912, his
childhood was spent in the oil boomtown of Pampa, Texas. In the
depression-ravaged thirties he hitched and rode the rails along with
thousands of others to reach the world of their dreams, the Promised Land
—California.
Of all those wanderers, thousands more than there were jobs, Woody
was one of the fortunate few able to make money by singing, playing guitar,
and painting signs. He managed to get a fifteen-minute daily radio show
that paid him a dollar per show. And when he wasn’t broadcasting he could
be found singing at saloons, parking lots, rallies, and union meetings—
anywhere people would listen. Their struggles were the impetus for his
talent—he always knew his mission was to translate their hearts and minds
into song. Using what his pal Pete Seeger called the “folk process”—
writing new words to old songs—he gave these people a voice.
Radio gave many people their first taste of Woody’s songs. One listener,
Ed Robbin, commentator for the Communist newspaper People’s World,
was surprised to discover that the man he had pegged as a hillbilly was
actually quite politically savvy. He invited Woody to perform at rallies, first
warning him that they were left wing. “Left wing or chicken wing, it’s all
the same to me,” Woody said. And with that he connected with a new
audience, one that was charmed and inspired by his unique fusion of
country simplicity, Okie humor, and political sophistication. His popularity
spread quickly across the country and even preceded him to New York City,
where he eventually fell in with new friends such as Josh White, Leadbelly,
and the actor Will Geer.
Opportunity kept knocking. In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of
John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, Victor Records hired Woody
to write a song about it. Though he didn’t read the book, Woody saw and
loved the film and understood its subject matter better than most. With his
guitar and a jug of wine, he got behind a typewriter in Pete Seeger’s
apartment and proceeded to work into the night. The next morning Pete
found him slumped over the typewriter with twenty-six verses of “The
Ballad of Tom Joad” still in the typewriter.
“I learned a lot about songwriting from Woody,” Pete said. “I learned
something that was awful important. And that was: don’t be so all-fired
concerned about being original. You hear an old song you like but you want
to change it a little, there’s no crime in that.”
By today’s standards Woody’s records sound rough. Mostly guitar and a
ragged, often off-tune voice recording on the spot by Moses Asch for his
Folkways label. But each of these recordings contains the essence of pure
and brilliant songwriting, the dynamic and delicate marriage of music with
words.
Woody well understood the inherent power of this combination—words
to express the timely and timeless needs of the people and music to
underscore that expression while engaging the soul and lifting the spirit. He
knew few forces were as effective in uniting people as a good song, and as
he constantly traversed America by walking, hitching, or riding the rails, he
would constantly connect with new people and translate their lives and
dreams into songs.
Woody wrote his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” as a
response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Woody felt Berlin got it
wrong—that America was already blessed by God—and wrote “God
Blessed America for Me.” He kept fiddling with it for a full decade and
eventually realized that if he substituted the line “This land was made for
you and me” for his title line, he had a song not just about himself but about
all of America. Not only was he a great thinker, he was a crafty songwriter.
He died in 1967 at the age of fifty-five. But his songs have lived on,
performed and championed by a big range of singers, including not only
Arlo, Dylan, and Seeger but also Ani DiFranco, Bruce Springsteen, Ry
Cooder, and even U2, who cut Woody’s song “Jesus Christ.” Though
Woody’s been gone now for so many decades, his songs and the spirit of
human hope instilled in them have been resounding with more force than
they have for years. “The worst thing that can happen is to cut yourself
loose from the people,” he wrote. “And the best thing is to vaccinate
yourself right into the big streams and blood of the people.”
I conducted this interview on a sunny autumn day in Manhattan, in the
57th Street office. She sat at her big desk, always calm and joyful many
floors above the tumult of a New York City business day, with the archives
of Woody’s songs and writings always within easy reach.

It’s been suggested that, for both Martha Graham and Woody Guthrie,
you were the organizer behind the genius.
Marjorie Guthrie: This is true. Some people felt that Martha Graham
was difficult to work with, but when you know you are in the company of a
great artist, you minimize their negative aspects and are grateful for the
opportunity to see how a true artist works. Let me say that she was a very
good rehearsal for Woody Guthrie.

When did you first meet Woody?

 On one of the Martha Graham tours, in St. Louis. My sister called me
from Columbia, Missouri, and wanted me to visit her. So I got Martha
Graham to let me leave the company for a day, and I took the bus over to
Columbia, and when I got there my sister said, “Oh Marge, I have to play
something for you.”
And it is so vivid to this day: I sat on the arm of a chair and she played
Woody’s “Ballad of Tom Joad”—first time I had heard his voice. And I was
so moved, when it got to the end I started to cry. I am an emotional person,
and I love being emotional, and when he got to the end I was just in tears.
I said to my sister, “How does anyone put into words what I’m thinking
about myself?” Funny, I related it to myself: growing up, going through the
Depression, seeing what happened to our family, coming to New York.
Then Sophie Maslow, who was with Martha Graham, had choreographed
two of Woody’s songs from that same album, “I Ain’t Got No Home” and
“Dusty Old Dust,” and she said to me, “Guess what? Instead of using the
record, I’m going to use Woody Guthrie, if he’ll do it, because he is in
town. And I’m going to ask him to appear on stage with us and sing those
two.” And I practically fainted and said, “Woody Guthrie is in town?
Sophie, I’m coming with you!”
I went with her and we came to what was then the Almanac Singer’s
Center on 6th Avenue, a big loft with great big wide posts. First of all, they
didn’t want to let us in. Finally, they did, and I saw Woody from the back
first.
He was looking out the window at 6th Avenue, and he was nothing at all
in stature like the way I pictured him. When I had heard his voice I thought
of this tall, Lincoln-esque figure with a cowboy hat. But then he turned
around and he had this wonderful face. I loved his face immediately.
I don’t remember anything he said. I just kept looking at that face. And
then remembering that voice and the quality of those songs. I fell in love
with him right then and there. And he said to me later that when Sophie and
I came up he was talking to her but looking at me. And I was looking at
him.
In a few days he started to rehearse with us. He was to be both a
narrator and a singer in a production called Folksay. And here I loved this
guy, and everyone was picking on him. Why? Because he sings the song
differently each time. Here we have twelve people on the stage, and he puts
in an extra verse, he takes out a verse. What do you do? Everyone was
angry with him. I was just dying for him.
What I did was to take cardboard sheets and type up all the words of the
songs and put them in measures and say, “Woody, why can’t you sing it just
like the record?” He would say, “The day we made that record, Lee Hays
had asthma, someone had just given us $300, and we were on our way to
California. I don’t have asthma, I don’t have $300, and I’m not going to
California, so I can’t play it the same way.” But I worked with him, using
these little cards, and before you knew it we were living together.

What was he writing during this period?

That was the year he was writing Bound for Glory. He would be writing
—by hand—and I would come home in the evening and he would read me
what he had written. Then we would take turns, reading and typing. It was
then that I first learned about his mother and all of her problems and that
she had Huntington’s Disease.

Was he a disciplined writer?

Oh yes. Take a look at any of his notebooks. He loved to write. He had
great respect for his work. He signed every piece of paper and dated almost
everything and wrote a little background about each song, like why he had
written it. He did have a highly organized mind.

So he had an understanding of his own historical significance?

Absolutely. We used to tease about it. He would say, “We can be poor
now, but maybe someday this stuff will be worth something.” But you see,
even knowing that didn’t stop him from doing things the way he wanted to.
And that was something else that I loved about him. You see, in the thirties
and the forties dancers were the poorest people on the cultural ladder, and I
didn’t have much. But that didn’t matter to me because the dancing was so
important.
Woody had that same feeling. It wasn’t important whether everyone
loved him or every song made money. It was important that he was doing
what he wanted to do and what he was compelled to do. He couldn’t have
done anything else anyway.
Did he have moments of self-doubt?
Very few, I have to tell you. He had confidence in what he was doing,
that there were important songs, not whether they were commercial
successes or not. That he didn’t know about. But what he knew was that in
his songs were the voices of people he had known, and he felt better suited
to represent these people than anyone.

Could he take criticism of his work?

He would argue with me. Very rarely would he change something. In
the song “Jesus Christ,” I felt that one verse was wrong, that it
misinterpreted Christ. He argued with me about it and won the argument.
But he let me argue.

Did you have a sense of how famous he would become?

I never thought of him being famous commercially. I always had the
feeling that when you speak for the downtrodden you might be famous
among the downtrodden, but nobody else hears about you. And again, I
don’t care. I wanted him to do what he was doing, and I felt that what he
was saying was important. But the first hint of his real importance didn’t
come from me or him. It came from Alan Lomax. It was Alan who said to
me one day, “Don’t throw anything away. Save everything.” And I looked
at him as if to say, “Why?” And he said, “Woody is going to be very
important.”
I knew that what Woody wrote was good because it moved me. But it
would move other people too, and maybe cause them to want to be
“wherever little children are hungry and cry” [from “Tom Joad”]. When
Alan said that to me, it was the beginning of my appreciation that other
people loved what Woody was saying.
He already had a little recognition when he came to New York. I was
not yet involved with him; he was here with [his first wife] Mary. He had a
radio show, the Back Where I Come From show, and he was commercially
successful. But he left this show and he let me know why: “They wouldn’t
let me say what I wanted to say or sing what I wanted to sing, so who needs
them?”
He gradually started receiving recognition, especially after the
publication of Bound for Glory. Did that change him at all?
It didn’t change him, but he was very pleased. He wrote “My first copy”
in the first edition of it. He was very proud of himself, especially when
people began reading it and enjoying it.

Besides writing songs, he was always writing letters and poems and
doing drawings. Which was most important to him?
The songs were most important. They came first. He had a wonderfully
organized system, something most people don’t realize. Every morning he
read the paper first thing. Then he would tear out of the paper things that he
wanted to write songs about and then make a list of songs that he was going
to write. Then he would write a few songs, read some of the books that he
had gotten from the library, usually two or three at a time. He would read
standing up because he got tired of sitting. Then he might sit down again
and do some writing.
Yes, there were times when he did do some drinking, and when he did it
had a very bad effect because of the Huntington’s disease. HD puts you off
balance, and drinking puts you more off balance, so Woody was sometimes
very off balance.

His writing has a dizzying, almost drunken power to it. Do you think
the HD affected his style?
No. I don’t agree at all with the suggestion that Woody wrote the way he
did because he had HD. It does sound logical, but even with Martha
Graham I saw the same kind of intensity and determination and creativity
that Woody had. And look at Whitman and Jack London. They didn’t have
HD, and yet they had similar writing styles.
Also, he was encouraged by Joy Home, who edited Bound for Glory.
She said to him, “Woody, don’t worry about what I’m going to cut out.
Whatever comes to your mind, just do it.” And he enjoyed that freedom to
just let it go.

I read that she’d suggest a few changes and he’d return with a hundred
new pages.
 That’s right. And she would say, “Woody, why didn’t you bring them in
yesterday?” And he would say, “Well, because I hadn’t written them yet.”

Did he talk the same way that he wrote?

Nothing like that. Nothing like his writing. We were opposites: I am as
verbal as anyone can be, and he was just the opposite.
If he were sitting with us right now and you were interviewing him, he
would probably answer in a very slow, halting voice, kind of like [very
slowly], “Yeah . . . welllll . . . way back . . .” Nothing like the flowing
quality of his writing. He simply loved to write. He loved pencils, paper,
typewriters. You know, I have to show you something. [Brings a box of
pens and colored pencils.] This is all Woody’s. He loved this stuff.

Did he have dry spells ever, times he wasn’t inspired to write?

Very few. He was always churning them out, as you can see by the
archives, which hold about two thousand of his songs. And he was just as
creative a father as he was a musician. He could spend a whole day on the
beach, starting with just our three kids around. By the end of the day he
would have these tremendous sand castles and about thirty kids who helped
him build them. And they were beautiful, really beautiful.

Was it because he was so much of a kid at heart himself that made him
so great with kids?
Yes, for sure. He had a great sense of playfulness, of fun. And both of us
have great respect for young people because you are tomorrow, you are it.
Anything we had is going to die and go away before you know it, but you
have years ahead of you.

It is true that Woody and your mother wrote a song together?

My mother, who was a Yiddish poetess, wrote the words to a song and
he corrected her. They didn’t write it together. It was called “I Gave My
Sons to the Country,” and he was opposed to it. “Why do you want to give
your sons to the country?” he asked. “Shouldn’t that be the question?” But
my mother was really a much better writer in Yiddish, and Woody never
really knew this.
I was astounded when you showed me all the letters he wrote you and
the full notebooks of love letters and poetry and erotica he would fill up
for you.
Every night when I would come home [commuting from Manhattan to
Coney Island], I would look forward to two or three letters from Woody,
especially when he was in the Army. I was a woman alone, and it was
wonderful to have these. But you know, I am a prude, and I used to die from
embarrassment all by myself. Nobody would be in the room, but I would be
reading those sexy letters and I would be dying.
And then he would say to me, “Why don’t you write back in turn?” And
I would say, “I can’t write those kind of letters!”

I know Woody was a great fan of Chaplin. He always seemed

Chaplinesque himself—
You’re right, he was very Chaplinesque. You know, he used to play the
harmonica and dance at school when he was a kid. And don’t you think
Arlo did the same thing when he was a kid? Certain people have that elfin
quality. Arlo had it as a child; Woody had it all his life. Kind of half-
singing, half-dancing, I’m the little guy on the block, but I’m no dumbbell.

In 1969 Arthur Penn made a movie out of Arlo’s great song “Alice’s
Restaurant,” starring Arlo.
Yes. I loved that film, because there was a lot of truth in it.

There’s a scene in the film where Pete Seeger and Arlo come to
Woody’s hospital room and sing “Car Car.” I’ve read that Woody loved
hearing the song “Hobo’s Lullaby” the most.
They sang all those songs and more. They sang a lot of songs. The only
thing that wasn’t accurate was showing Woody in a private room. How I
wish he had a private room and his own nurse!

I know that in addition to Pete and Arlo, a lot of other musicians came
to Woody’s bedside during that last decade when he was at Greystone
in New Jersey. Most famously, Bob Dylan made the trek to meet his
hero. What were your impressions of Dylan from then?
 He impressed me with his quality and intensity. I knew that he was
determined. I didn’t like his diction when he sang, and I couldn’t
understand the words. But I loved many of his songs, and I felt that he was
a creative artist who was going through, even now, the ups and downs that
an artist must go through. Everything that you do isn’t always top-notch.

At first did he seem like just another Woody imitator?

Well, I had already spent a couple of good years with [Ramblin’] Jack
Elliott, who Woody said was more like Woody than he was! But I had no
resentment whatsoever of people imitating Woody, because if you are
around a great artist, their influence is bound to get to you. It’s like osmosis.
Later in your life maybe you can find your own style. After all, I learned to
love dance from someone who learned to love dance from someone who
learned to love dance and so on. You must carry on the tradition of
whatever you are doing and do so with integrity. I think Bob did that.

Woody’s life ended too early, and during his last years he wasn’t able to
work. Had he more years, what do you think he would have done with
them?
I can’t answer that easily. Woody would have changed with the times
like everybody else to a certain extent. And Woody loved all kinds of
music, something that not everybody knows. Moses Asch, who was a kind
of mentor to Woody, gave him many free classical albums, and often I
would come home and find him listening to Prokofiev. He knew Romeo and
Juliet backward and forward.
He liked all different kinds of music, depending on what time of day it
was or what he was doing right then. Nothing can better express the essence
of the moment. Music is the soul of man. Woody used to borrow music
from everywhere and change it around a little for his own songs. But it was
the honesty and the quality of the songs that mattered.

OceanofPDF.com
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
 A Bridge Built on the Blues
Los Angeles, California 2006

Though they were among the chief architects of rock and roll, having
written “Hound Dog” and other songs recorded by Elvis, they never thought
rock and roll would last. Like Elvis’s manager Colonel Parker and others,
they thought rock was a fad that would quickly fade. Though they wrote
successive rock classics in addition to “Hound Dog,” such as “Stand By
Me,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Kansas City,” they were prouder of songs
such as “Is That All There Is?,” which they wrote for Peggy Lee. Though
they are forever implicit in the creation of rock and roll, its lasting cultural
impact took them as much by surprise as anyone.
It was one of many reasons why talking to Leiber and Stoller was a
remarkably revelatory experience. Two Jewish boys from LA united by a
love of the blues, they earned world fame and fortune for writing in a black
genre, and became purveyors of this genre they didn’t truly embrace or
respect, rock and roll. Today they are American icons, yet have rarely
spoken to the press in the fifty-six years of their celebrated collaboration,
and have never really participated in their history as it’s been written.
Their feelings about their now-mythic songs are bittersweet, and quite
often more bitter than sweet. And almost every one of the published stories
that purport to get their history right are wrong, including those surrounding
the writing and recording of their most famous songs, such as “Hound Dog”
and “Jailhouse Rock,” both recorded by Elvis, or “Kansas City,” recorded
by The Beatles, among many others, or “Stand By Me,” recorded by Ben E.
King originally and later John Lennon. (The Beatles also recorded two
other songs by Leiber and Stoller on their first demo, “Searchin’” and
“Three Cool Cats.”)
Their career stands as a turning of a page, a transition from the age of
Tin Pan Alley, the era of writing the standards that now form the proverbial
Great American Songbook, the epoch in which not one but two people
toiled to churn out songs—a lyricist and a melodist—into the age of rock
and roll. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who shared a suite of offices in the
9000 building of Sunset Boulevard, a building where some august veterans
of the Tin Pan Alley such as Sammy Cahn once had their offices, have met
here on this autumn day in Hollywood to give a rare interview about the
career that created many of America’s most famous songs.
Though they came together just as the legendary writers of old, they
were the architects of a new sound, a new craze, a new era of wild rhythm-
and-bluesy tunes. It was rock and roll. It was a bridge from the blues—in
which both Leiber and Stoller were well versed—to popular music, a bridge
they built themselves.
This suite of offices was appointed with large, brightly colored folk-art
paintings of the blues heroes who painted their youth with blues tales of
urban centers like Chicago, far from their sunny Angeleno homes. Muddy
Waters, Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon—these fathers of the blues hang over
their heads in chromatic glory, sharing the wall space with only one
messenger of rock and roll—a young man who, in black and white, remains
as electrically vital as these blues beacons—Elvis Presley. Their lives and
his are forever entwined, and though his image is monochromatic here, his
presence in their life is full of technicolor radiance and unfaded glory. Their
memories of the King—which are frank, forthright, and unqualified—
related here for the first time in unexpurgated detail, remain as alive as
Elvis himself is said to be.
It is true, though, that, as reported, Stoller didn’t like the idea of writing
songs with Leiber when they met in 1950. It’s not true, though, as has often
been quoted, that he said he didn’t like songs. What he said he didn’t like
were popular songs. He preferred jazz. But when he realized that the young
Jerome Leiber had written not pop songs but blues, a bridge was built
between them that still stands to this day. It’s a bridge built on the blues.
Because their most famous songs came fast and easy to them, “hot off
the griddle” as Leiber put it, they don’t tend to value them to the extent they
value their songs like “Is That All There Is?,” an existential theatrical ballad
made famous by Peggy Lee. To this day Leiber, the lyricist, and Stoller, the
melodist, yearn to be known as more than writers of simple rock and roll.
When I lingered on the writing of “Jailhouse Rock,” for example, Leiber
looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “Why are you spending so much
time on ‘Jailhouse Rock’? Is it that important?” Though they’ve written
some of the most lasting popular songs ever, they didn’t think any of them
would last. As soon as they were off the charts, they felt, the songs would
vanish.
Leiber and Stoller have long felt their famous rock and roll songs were
kid’s stuff, and they wanted to write songs for adults—deeper, more
musically and lyrically complex songs, of which there exists an abundance
in their mythical “vault.” But except for “Is That All There Is?,” it’s their
simple, easy songs that have connected them timelessly to popular culture.
Although countless songwriters attempted to approach the same kind of
lofty heights Jerry and Mike reached, they were attempting to write songs
like Brecht and Weill wrote and to translate into words and music the
synthesis of sorrow and humor found in the writing of Thomas Mann and
other writers. Out of the universe of albums that have been recorded
containing their songs, the one they speak of with the greatest pride is
Peggy Lee Sings Leiber & Stoller, a collection of their “adult songs” sung
by the legendary vocalist.
And although you might assume any songwriter would be forever proud
to have had a song recorded by Elvis or The Beatles, they never liked the
King’s rendition of “Hound Dog” (and have never referred to him as the
King or even Elvis; in the following interview he is “Presley”). Nor did
they like The Beatles’ record of “Kansas City” (for reasons also explained
in the following). They only wrote “Jailhouse Rock” because the movie’s
producer refused to let them out of their hotel room until they came up with
some songs. “Hound Dog” was written on the fly and not for Elvis but for
Big Mama Thornton (and not on a piano but on a car, as explained here).
From the first second Jerry uttered its title, he didn’t think it was
sufficiently explicit and still doesn’t feel it’s as biting as he wanted (nor
does he see much value in other legendary titles he’s created, such as
“Jailhouse Rock” or “Spanish Harlem”). Elvis’s rendition of “Hound
Dog”—perhaps the most famous record ever of one of their songs—doesn’t
even use the right lyrics; instead, it copies improbable lyrics written for the
song by Freddie Bell—who introduced the whole notion of a rabbit to the
song, a notion Leiber and Stoller regard as nonsense.
They were the first independent record producers to be officially
designated as producers—“producer” being a title they invented themselves
(they wanted “director”)—but they started producing records only in self-
defense, as they explain it, to ensure that their songs wouldn’t be wrecked.
Even with their most famous nonrock creation, “Is That All There Is?,”
they are forever dismayed by Peggy Lee’s insistence on changing one word
—an alteration, in their opinion, that dilutes the entire point of the song.
To this day, like any couple who have stayed together through many
decades, they sometimes irritate each other. Often they finish each other’s
sentences, though their memories frequently clash. “Our relationship is the
longest-running single argument in the entertainment business,” Jerry said,
only half-joking.
But the connection that led them to write words and music like one
person over the decades is still powerful, and as often as they argue, they
laugh, and it’s clear that there are few people they’d rather spend time with
than each other.
We met on a sun-bright day in Hollywood that had a shaft of darkness
piercing through it—it was the fifth anniversary of 9/11. But that tragedy
didn’t darken our time together, which was originally only slotted to be less
than an hour and extended, thankfully, to several hours. Mike, who so
seemed the embodiment of pure energy that I was prepared for him to leap
up and run several miles at full speed, sat in front of a giant blow-up of the
sheet music for their song “I Want to Be Free,” which was recorded by
Elvis. The King’s iconic profile shone like the sun over Stoller’s shoulder
throughout our talk, a presence that was both ghostly and vital, as is the
enduring presence of Elvis in their lives. Stoller sipped Snapple out of the
bottle as Leiber drank coffee from a white china cup and saucer, and the
distinct dynamics that have been at play within this duo for more than a half
century were very much alive, as the memories ripened and shape-shifted
and the sparks flew as they have since the very dawn of rock and roll.

Now, the legend goes that Jerry wanted to get together with you, Mike,
when you were both seventeen, to write songs. And you didn’t like the
idea of writing songs.
Mike Stoller: Well, that’s not really true, but, you know, when you’re
interviewed, frequently you give a very quick answer. The thing is, I
assumed that Jerome Leiber was not writing something that I would be
interested in. I had very specific tastes. I was a musical snob. I was a big
bebop fan. So I thought he would, somehow, be writing songs that I just
wouldn’t care for. That I’d consider commercial, which was a terrible word
among jazz musicians. I wasn’t a jazz musician. I played a little bit. But I
had that kind of an arrogance, if you will. And when he came over, of
course, I discovered that he was writing blues, and I loved blues. ’Cause it’s
great stuff. I was a big boogie-woogie and blues fan, as was Jerry.

Before meeting Jerry, were you hoping to make your living as a

musician?
Stoller: I was hoping to make it as a composer, yeah.

Of jazz? What kind of music?

Stoller: Just music. Of jazz, or of, quote, serious music.

Were you considering being a songwriter?

Stoller: No.

And so you, Jerry, were writing blues without music?

Jerry Leiber: Yes.

Had you worked with other songwriters before working with Mike?
Leiber: Well, I worked with one other person who I wouldn’t really
characterize as a songwriter. This was in high school. Going to Fairfax High
School. I hooked up with a drummer. Whose name was . . . Jerry Horowitz.
Is that his name?
Stoller: I can’t remember, and he can’t remember. [Laughs] I remember
what he looked like. Nice fella.
 Leiber: We worked for maybe two months, three months. One day he
didn’t show up for a writing session. And it sort of went out the window. I
needed a composer. Tunesmith. He told me he had a musician’s name
written down who was a piano player that he played a dance with in East
LA and he thought was pretty good. And he might be interested in writing
songs. And he took his number down and gave it to me.
I called—it was Mike—I called him up and I said, “My name is Jerome
Leiber, and I was given your number by a drummer. Said he played a dance
with you in East LA. And he said you might be interested in writing songs.
Can you write notes on paper?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Can you read music?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Do you think you’d like to write songs?”
He said, “No.” I thought what a tough nut to crack here. And I talked to
him for a few more minutes. And sort of wrangled an appointment with
him.
I took my school notebook, which had all my lyrics in it, and I went to
his house. Which was at—
Stoller: 226 South Columbia Avenue. Right where Belmont High
School is.
Leiber: I can’t remember the address. It’s been, what, forty years?
Stoller: Fifty-six. He’s a great lyric writer, bad mathematician.
[Laughter]
Leiber: I don’t have a very good memory either.
Stoller: That’s true.
Leiber: So he was adamant. He didn’t want to write songs. He made it
clear that he was doing me a favor by talking to me. He really wasn’t
interested. He told me he was interested in Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie,
Art Blakey.
Stoller: Bela Bartok. [Laughter]

He was good too.

Leiber: Miles Davis. And I thought he was a terrible music snob. And I
think so did he. But he did take the book out of my hands and wandered
toward the piano.
 And he set the book down on the piano, and he started playing licks.
Sort of blues-jazz. And he looked at the book and he said, “Hey—these
aren’t songs. They’re not the kind of songs I dislike. These are blues, aren’t
they?”
I said, “I think so.”
He said, “I like the blues. I’ll write with you.”
And that’s how it started.

The legend was that you said, “These aren’t songs, these are blues.”
But did you consider them songs?
Stoller: Well, they weren’t the kind of songs that I thought that he
would be writing. Most of the blues that I knew—almost all the blues—first
of all, were written by black people. And most of them by black singers,
and as a matter of fact, many, many of them were piano players, and I
bought their records for the boogie-woogie instrumentals, which might have
been considered, in those days, the B-side. You know, in the old 78 records?
But I always played both sides. And the other side, frequently, which might
have been the A-side, had the same person playing a blues and singing. So I
did become somewhat familiar with the poetry of the blues and certainly the
structure of the blues, and Jerry’s work was in that mode. It had the blues
poetry in it.
Leiber: Almost all of our audiences thought we were black. And when
we took some of our music to a performer to show it to him for approval or
to teach him how to sing it, they were absolutely amazed. I remember we
went to a little hotel down on Central Avenue. We were taking some songs
to Wynonie Harris, who at that time was pretty hot. And we knocked on his
door, and he opened his door and he looked at us in shock. At first he really
didn’t believe that we were songwriters. That’s how it went for years,
actually. It wasn’t just the first five minutes. That’s how it was for years.
And some people today still think of us as black songwriters. In fact, LeRoi
Jones wrote an article about us. He said we were two of the best black
songwriters in the business. And he meant it.
Stoller: But when Smokey Joe’s Café went into rehearsal for the
Broadway production, three of the guys met us for the first time and were
shocked. And this was ten, twelve years ago. They thought that we were
black.
Those first lyrics you wrote, did you intend them to be blues?
Leiber: Well, they were blues. The form, the structure. There were
repeat lines—
Stoller: Yeah. I looked at it, I said, “There’s a line, a line of ditto marks,
a rhyming line.” I said, “These are twelve-bar blues.” I didn’t know that you
were writing blues.
Leiber: He turned to me and said, “These are blues. These are the blues
. . . I like the blues.”

I understand one of the first songs you wrote together was “Kansas
City.”
Stoller: It was the first big hit. Actually “Hound Dog” and “Kansas
City” were both written the same year, 1952, when we were nineteen. Yeah,
I remember very well both of those songs, the writing of them.

Was “Kansas City” first?

Stoller: I’m not absolutely sure. I do know when “Hound Dog” was
recorded—it was recorded in August 1952; it came out in 1953. “Kansas
City” might have been after that, but it came out in December or
thereabouts of ’52. There might not have been as long a wait. ’Cause I
remember—
Leiber: “Hound Dog” waiting—
Stoller: We were waiting and waiting and waiting for “Hound Dog” to
come. We knew, if one can know, it was a smash—
Leiber: In the blues.
Stoller: In the blues field. We went down to Pico. We went and waited
and waited and said, “When will the goddamn thing come out?”
Leiber: I remember it came out when I was in Boston. Visiting my
sister. I think it took eight or nine months to come out. Then it came out,
and it was out for twenty hours. And it broke. Like the atom bomb. In
Boston. And I found out that it broke every place else within five minutes.
It was one of the biggest hits ever.

You wrote that song after you went and heard Big Mama Thornton
sing?
 Stoller: In between seeing her sing and coming back to a rehearsal at
Johnny Otis’s house.

You pounded out the rhythm on your old car—

Stoller: Yeah, on my old car. [Laughs]
Leiber: A green Plymouth.
Stoller: It was actually gray. It was a gray 1937. . . . It was greenish
gray, you’re right.

And that main line, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” just came to
you?
Leiber: Yeah, it did. And I felt it was a dummy lyric. I was not happy. I
wanted something that was a lot more insinuating. I wanted something that
was sexy and insinuating. And I told Mike I didn’t like it. We were driving,
and he said, “I like it, man.”
I said, “I like the song idea, but I don’t like that word. That word is kind
of replacing another kind of a word.”
He said, “What are you looking for?”
I said, “Do you remember Furry Lewis’s record ‘Dirty Mother’?”
He said, “Yeah?”
I said, “Well, I’d like to write something like that.”
Mike said, “You’ll ruin it. If you write something like that, they won’t
play it.”
I said, “I don’t care if they don’t play it. I want this word in the song.”
He said, “Jer, leave it alone. I think you’re making a mistake.”
Stoller: Well, I liked “Hound Dog.” I liked the sound of it.

Big Mama Thornton’s version is in E flat. Did you write it in that key?
Stoller: Didn’t write it in a key. I probably played it in C ’cause it was
easier.

When you say you didn’t write it in a key, did you write it away from
the piano?
Leiber: The two of us walked in his house and walked into this sort of a
den, where this upright piano was. And I was singing. I started singing it in
the car on the way over. “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, quit snoopin’
round my door.” And I didn’t have all the lyrics. And we walked into
Mike’s house, into the den, and he walked over—and I will never forget it,
the moment is indelibly etched on my memory—he walked over to the
piano, and he had a cigarette in his mouth, and the smoke was curling up
into his eye, and he kept it there and he was playing, and he was grooving
with the rhythm, and he was grooving, grooving, and we locked into one
place. Lyrical content, syllabically, locked in to the rhythm of the piano.
And we knew we had it.
We wrote it in about twelve minutes. And I will never forget it. He had
the smoke from this cigarette curling up into his left eye, and I was
watching him.
And he was singing, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” and I said,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah—that’s it.”
Stoller: And we drove back to the rehearsal. Because we had been
invited. We had worked with Johnny Otis on a couple of sessions with Little
Esther and Little Willie doing duets with Little Esther and so on. And
[Johnny Otis] called me and said, “Are you familiar with Willie Mae
Thornton?”
I said, “No, I’m not.”
He said, “Well, I need some songs.” The procedure, before that, was
that we’d get a call from Ralph Bass, who was the head of Federal Records,
a division of King. He would call and say, “We’re cutting Little Esther
tomorrow. Two to five at Radio Recorders. Bring some songs.” And we
would write two or three songs. And sometimes during the session, during
which we’d try to get some of our ideas done. Even though we were just
newcomers in that field, we’d go out in the hall and write another one.
So Johnny called and said, “Come over and listen to her and write some
songs,” and that’s the way that happened. We went over and heard her and
said, “Whoa!” We ran over to my house in my car, wrote the song, came
back.
Leiber: I just remembered—we came back, and I had this sheet of
paper. And we walked in. And I think I said, “We got it.” And Big Mama
walked over and she grabbed the sheet out of my hand and she said, “Let
me see this.” I looked at her and I looked at the sheet. And I saw that the
sheet was upside down. And she was just staring at it, looking at it, as if she
could read it, right?
 She said, “What does it say?”
I said, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, quit snoopin’ round my
door.”
She said, “Oh, that’s pretty.”
She took the sheet back and she started singing [slowly and
melodically], “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog . . .” She’s singing a
ballad. She’s crooning a ballad.
And I said, “Mama, it don’t go like that.”
She grabbed the sheet and she said to me, “Don’t you tell me how to
sing.” And she started to sing it again. And Johnny Otis had witnessed this
little contretemps, and he came over, and he was getting a little bit salty.
And he said, “Mama, don’t you want a hit?” And she said yes. And he said,
“These guys can get you a hit.”
Stoller: He said, “These guys write hits.” Which was—
Leiber: Not true. [Laughter] He said, “These guys can write you a hit.”
She accepted that, and he said something like, “Now be good.” Like he was
punishing a child.
Then he turned to me and he said, “Why don’t you perform it for her?
Why don’t you demonstrate the song?” And I was a little nervous, because
there was about a twelve-piece band sitting on a platform—it was a pretty
big band—and I was always used to performing a song wherever, whatever,
with Mike. He played the piano, I sang the song—no big deal.
I got up to sing the song, and half a dozen of the men—the rhythm
section more than anybody else, guitar and drums, bass, whatever—sort of
accompanied me. Mike was not playing the piano when I turned around.
And he was standing by the piano, smoking. And Johnny Otis said, “What
about your buddy?”
I said, “He’ll play in a moment. He’s just getting ready.” And I said,
“Mike, play piano.” He was very self-conscious in those days and didn’t
like to perform. He was gonna sit it out. And I almost pleaded with him to
play the piano.
The groove she was singing was not right. I said, “Mama, it don’t go
like that.”
She said, “I know how it goes. It goes like this . . .” I didn’t know how
to deal with this. I said, “Mike, play the piano.” And the groove fell right in,
’cause he had the groove.
 So Jerry, although you are the lyricist, you sort of had the music for
that.
Leiber: Just a road map. Mike wrote the melody.

And you wrote the melody apart from the piano—you just sang it?
Stoller: More or less. Based partially on what he was singing and how I
felt it should do. But it wasn’t written out on a lead sheet and handed to
Mama. We didn’t have time to sit down and write out anything.
Leiber: I think I had the music for the very first line. [Sings] “You ain’t
nothin’ but a hound dog . . .” And Mike picked that up and went with it and
developed the rest of it. And then she got it. She understood.

It’s amazing to learn you didn’t like the name “Hound Dog,” given that
it’s such a classic now—
Leiber: The line was not what I wanted. Sometimes you make mistakes.
Stoller: Thank goodness. [Laughs]

That the two of you met each other at the time you did and that you
ended up writing so many great and important songs together, do you
attribute that just to good luck, or was it something bigger—was it
Providence?
Leiber: Now I look at it different. Forty or fifty years ago I thought it
was Providence. Or just dumb luck that happens to people kind of
mystically or magically. But then about eight years ago my cousin told me
that my father was a songwriter—he used to write religious songs in
synagogue. And then I thought that Mike’s aunt was a great musician.
Stoller: That’s something else. It’s a genetic strain. But I think what
Paul is asking is something else. Which has to do with—from my point of
view—great luck—
Leiber: That’s because you’re a gambler.
Stoller: Well, that’s true. But in those days I think that two white
teenagers that loved and knew enough about black music to begin to write it
and meeting each other—
Leiber: Fortuitous.
Stoller: Absolutely. Because you could have come over, and I could
have been not interested in writing with you. I could have wanted to write
“Floatin’ down a river on a Sunday afternoon.” Or you might have written
that kind of a lyric, and I’d say, “What is this? I’m not interested. Bye.”

The original “Hound Dog,” by Mama Thornton, was in E flat, but Elvis
sang it in C.
Leiber: That’s because he got the song from Freddie Bell and the
Bellboys. He did not learn the song from Mama’s record.
Stoller: He knew her record, but it was a woman’s song, and he never
sang it until he heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who had distorted the
song so that they could sing it—
Leiber: Lyrics and music.
Stoller: Yeah, both. And that’s how he learned it. Though I’m almost
positive that Big Mama’s record was in D or E. I know they were playing it
in D or E. It depended on the piano in the studio, which might have been
out of tune. I’m sure it was D or E. It was Pete Lewis playing that guitar
solo. And he had retuned his guitar to what was, ostensibly, a Southern
tuning. It was not standard E-A-D-G-B-E. It was tuned differently. So I am
also positive—I would think E. And “Kansas City” was probably written in
C. Because at that time I used to write a lot of things in C because it was
easy to whip them off that way. And that was done by Little Willie
Littlefield. That was the first record. He was a boogie-woogie blues pianist.
And it’s possible that it was in E flat. It may be. We taught the song to Little
Willie at Maxwell Davis’s home.
Leiber: He chipped his tooth on the microphone.

Many articles written about you say that Elvis knew Big Mama’s
version of “Hound Dog”—
Stoller: He did. But that’s not where he learned it.
Leiber: He didn’t do her version.
Stoller: Her version is a woman’s song. It’s a woman’s lyric and she did
it in that way. He heard a white group called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.
We learned this later. They were hired as a lounge act in Vegas, and when
he walked through Vegas, he heard them doing it.
Leiber: It was what you heard from him. Ostensibly it was like an
English skiffle shuffle band.
So Elvis got his lyrics from Freddie Bell?
Leiber and Stoller: Yeah.

And it was Freddie Bell who rewrote the lyrics?

Stoller: Yeah. Or somebody did.
Leiber: I wrote, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, quit snoopin’
round my door, you can wag your tail, but I ain’t gonna feed you no more.
You told me you was high class, but I can see through that, you told me you
was high class, but I can see through that, and Daddy, I know—”
Stoller: “—you ain’t no real cool cat, you ain’t nothin’ but a hound
dog.” Freddie Bell’s is, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the
time—”
Leiber and Stoller: “—you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no
friend of mine.”
Leiber: Nonsense! He liked the lick. He liked the sound.
Stoller: She was singing to a man. And he was singing to a dog.
[Laughter]
Leiber: She was singing to a gigolo, to be very precise. Somebody that
was sponging off of her. That’s what it was about.

So were you unhappy with the lyric as Elvis did it?

Leiber and Stoller: Yeah.
Leiber: I didn’t like the record either. Mama’s record was it. Pete Lewis
playing that guitar solo, with her screaming her heart out. That was it. And
Presley, he did records that we really loved. One of the best records we’ve
ever had of a ballad of ours was “Love Me” [recorded by Elvis]. One of the
very best. And he did a great job on a lot of songs.
Stoller: “Jailhouse Rock.” I mean, that’s great.
Leiber: But his biggest song of ours, I think, I feel—Mike does, I think
so too, I can speak for you—was just not up to snuff. It wasn’t up to his
standards either, I don’t think.
Stoller: Well, I think “Jailhouse Rock”—
Leiber: Is it.
Stoller: —is, at this point, one of the biggest songs. Bigger than “Hound
Dog.” Though “Hound Dog” is his signature.
Bigger in what sense?
Leiber and Stoller: Sold more.
Leiber: It’s more famous too.
Stoller: It’s hard to say whether “Jailhouse Rock” is more famous than
“Hound Dog.”
Leiber: Not than “Hound Dog,” no. “Hound Dog” is one of the greatest
performed songs of all time.

Some people consider it your greatest song. People have said if you
wrote nothing other than “Hound Dog,” that would have been enough.
Leiber: That is, in a sense, true. The point is, though, the record that is
celebrated is not the record that should be celebrated. It should be Big
Mama Thornton’s record. That’s the way it was conceived, and that’s the
way it was written, and that’s more or less—and very much more—Mike’s
bag, because the rhythm pattern that Mike played that day on Columbia
Avenue is the rhythm pattern that was used for Big Mama Thornton.

Did you produce Big Mama’s record of it?

Leiber: Just about.
Stoller: I’ll tell you what happened. Johnny was running the session,
but Johnny had played the run-through at his house. He was the drummer. It
was his garage. When we went to Radio Recorders to record it, he went to
the booth, because he had to make the record, and he was ostensibly making
the records. There was no named producer. That word hadn’t come into the
lexicon in recorded music yet. So he was making the record, and Jerry said
to him, “It ain’t happening.” His drummer was “Kansas City” Bell. Layard
Bell.
Leiber: Bell. You’re right. Again! [Laughs]
Stoller: And Jerry said, “It’s not happening. And you’ve got to get out
there on the drums.”
Johnny said, “Well, who will run the session?”
And Jerry said, “We will.”
Leiber: It was the beginning of it. Of producing.
Stoller: And he went, “Okay,” and he went out there and played the
drums. We did two takes. The first one was fabulous and the second one
was magnificent. [Laughs] And that was it.
And needless to say, everything was cut live. No overdubs—
Stoller: No. Mono.

So the first time both of you heard Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” neither of you
liked it? You didn’t like the words or the sound?
Leiber: No. Mike was more tolerant than I was. We really didn’t like it.
Stoller: It was nervous sounding. It didn’t have that insinuation that Big
Mama’s record had.
Leiber: You know what’s strange about it? It’s something that really is
sort of an imitation that never really turned out well. It became one of the
biggest smashes of all time. And lots of songs and records that we made
that were really great never made it at all.
Stoller: It’s a matter of aesthetics. It’s where you live. And what really
gets to you. That’s really the most important thing. And once in a while you
do something that you feel is just right, and everybody else thinks so too.
Then you’ve really accomplished something.

Aside from the groove and the lyrics, did you think Elvis, on “Hound
Dog,” had a good voice?
Leiber and Stoller: Yeah.

And you knew nothing about him when you first heard it?
Leiber: No. But when we heard him, I think we thought he was an
animal. He had a voice, a range, that was unreal.
Stoller: Animal in the most positive light.
Leiber: He would go out there. He was like one big champion in the
recording studio. We’d tell him we need one more. It was take fifty-eight.
And he’d do it. And he’d do it with the same kind of zest and energy as take
one.
Stoller: He loved to perform.
Leiber: That’s when he was really himself. He was very self-conscious.
Very, almost always, openly, embarrassed about being anywhere socially or
being anywhere where it had to do with his mixing with anybody. He
carried his entourage, the Memphis Mafia with him, and they were his
family, and they knew him. If he wanted a peanut butter sandwich with
tomatoes on a bagel, they all understood.
 Stoller: [Laughs]

No bagels?
Stoller: No, I don’t think he ever ordered a bagel in his life—
Leiber: No, I know.
Stoller: I know. Orange pop and peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
Leiber: But when he was behind the microphone, that’s where he lived.

I know that when you worked with him, he would do lots and lots of
takes. Did you feel at the time he needed to do that many takes?
Leiber: He was so good, we kept going—
Stoller: He loved to perform!
Leiber: —he’d improve. Yeah, you don’t know when he was gonna stop
improving. And when you felt he did, and you got take twenty-five or
thirty, and it was good, we’d often go for take thirty-one. Because we felt it
might be greater. And often it would be. So we’d always go for one or two
more after he did a great take.

When he was singing in the studio, would he be moving in the way we

now know Elvis to famously move?
Leiber: No. No way. You mean shake his hips? No.
Stoller: No. But he was constantly singing. Between songs he would
sing a hymn. He would go to the piano and play a few chords and sing a
hymn.
Leiber: “Nearer My God to Thee.” Stuff like that. White Baptist hymns.
Stoller: He had The Jordanaires with him. And they’d come in behind
him. That’s what he wanted to do all the time.

Would he ever play guitar while doing vocals? Leiber: No.

Stoller: Once in a while he’d pick up an electric bass guitar—it was in
those days, it wasn’t real electric bass—and fool around with it. But usually
he just sang.

Would you give him ideas of how you wanted a song to sound?
Stoller: We’d demonstrate it as best we could. The feeling. And that’s
what we did.
After he did “Hound Dog,” did you like the idea of doing more with
him?
Stoller: Well, we submitted songs. His music publisher asked if we had
any other songs that would be good for Elvis. And Jerry thought of this
song “Love Me” that we had recorded with this black duet, Willie and Ruth,
and then had been picked up and recorded by a dozen other people,
including Billy Eckstine. None of them were hits. And Jerry remembered
the song, and it was submitted, and he did a fantastic job on it.

So you were happy with that one.

Leiber: Oh yeah.
Stoller: Very. And then they asked us to write songs for the movie. We
did “Loving You” and then “Jailhouse Rock.” Then we were informed that
he wanted us to be in the studio. Because he knew the records that we were
making.
Leiber: He was a fan of ours. In fact, he was a fan of ours before he
started making records for Sun Records and Sam Phillips. He knew what
we did.

Do you remember how “Kansas City” came about?

Leiber: Yes. There was a blues with a big band that I loved. And it was
one of the only blues with a big band that I really cottoned to. There was
one song that I really loved, and it was “Sorry, But I Can’t Take You.”
“We’re goin’ to Chicago, sorry, but I can’t take you.” I was influenced by
that song, and I wanted to have something like that.
So I sang “Kansas City” to Mike like I sang “You ain’t nothin’ but a
hound dog.” And Mike said, “Yeah, I like that, but I don’t want just a blues
shout. I want to write a melody to that. I want to write kind of a jazz-blues-
oriented melody for Basie, or someone like that.”
Stoller: What I said was that I wanted to play a blues—
Leiber: With a melody—
Stoller: With a tune, so that if it’s played instrumentally, people will
recognize it as that song.
Leiber: I said, “I want it to be a blues shout. I don’t want it to have a
predictable melody, some jazz melody. I want it to be a blues. I want it to be
really raw. I don’t want it to be phony.”
 He said, “Well, who’s writing the music—you or me?”
I said, “Well, I guess you are.” So he wrote the music, and it became the
big standard that it became.

That’s fascinating. With both “Hound Dog” and “Kansas City” you
had disagreements about the way they should be—
Stoller: We’ve had a disagreement about everything since 1950.
[Laughs]
Leiber: Our relationship is the longest-running single argument in the
entertainment business.

You are both the same age—so it’s kind of a sibling rivalry—
Stoller: Absolutely.

So many of the famous entertainment duos, from Martin and Lewis to

Simon & Garfunkel, are famous for their fights.
Leiber: I think out of those confrontations come very good work.

You came up with the idea of “Kansas City” ’cause you liked the use of
Chicago in the other song, so you came up with another Midwest city?
Was Kansas City the first city you considered?
Leiber: Yeah. I loved the sound of it syllabically. Kan-sas Ci-ty.
Chicago was good, but I liked Kansas City better. Because Chicago is
halting consonantly wise. And Kansas City just rolls out.
Stoller: And Kansas City was the center—
Leiber: Of jazz, yeah.
Stoller: Blues and jazz-blues.
Leiber: Jay McShann. Charlie Parker. It was kind of an homage from us
to Kansas City.
Stoller: Count Basie put together one of his first bands in Kansas City
and had the Kansas City Seven, which had Lester Young. So it was that
amalgam of blues and jazz. And Joe Turner—
Leiber: It was a breeding ground for great musicians.
Stoller: It was a lot of history of that kind of music.
With a song like “Kansas City,” would you finish the whole lyric before
giving it to Mike?
Leiber: Rarely. It was later on in our career that I got accustomed to
writing the lyrics on my own. But even then there would be a line or two
that he would help with.
Stoller: To my memory, it was always like that. Same thing with the
music. I would write the music, and Jerry would make suggestions. He’d
say, “It doesn’t fit what I’m trying to say”—
Leiber: “Would you change that note?” He’d say, “No”—
Stoller: No! [Much laughter] But eventually things smoothed out. I’d
say, “If I have to change it there, I’d have to change it there . . . well, that
could work . . .”

You once said that “Kansas City” came together like spontaneous
combustion—
Stoller: Even including the argument, I would venture to guess that the
whole thing, within forty-five minutes to an hour, was complete. Including
the argument.
Leiber: The songs that were tooled and worked on for weeks did not
happen that way. “Is That All There Is?” did not happen that way, was not
spontaneous combustion. “Hound Dog” was. “Kansas City” was. “Stand By
Me” was. “Down Home Girl” was. A lot of things were. A lot of the early
blues things would be finished in ten minutes, twelve minutes. At the most
a half hour. But other things—the Peggy Lee songs—took a lot more craft
and a lot more working. And I would spend a lot of time on my own trying
to get it right. Because I didn’t want to waste his time with me struggling
with a line that could take me a day or two or longer. Jokey songs for The
Coasters, like “Charlie Brown” and “Yakety Yak,” also came quickly, but
not as quickly as the blues. They were technically more refined in terms of
form. There’s a lot more rhyming. There’s a lot more acknowledgment of
structure.

Did you write the melody of “Kansas City” at the piano?

Stoller: Yes, I did.
It has been recorded so many times—by Joe Williams, Little Richard,
James Brown, Peggy Lee, Little Milton. Even The Beatles recorded it.
Stoller: I didn’t like The Beatles’ record of it because they neglected to
sing my melody, the way it was written.
Leiber: We don’t like the greatest records, the greatest names.
Stoller: But Joe Williams and Count Basie, you know—
Leiber: —were killer.

The original version by Little Willie Littlefield, released in 1952, is in D

flat—
Stoller: Do you have perfect pitch?

No.
Leiber: I do, but I’m a baseball player. [Laughs]
Stoller: Well, you never can tell because sometimes we would record
things in one key and then you’d pitch them up or down.
Leiber: Presley never did that at all. Presley would sing the song in the
key that the demo was in. Even if he had to strain his larynx and everything
else.
Stoller: Because he learned them—
Leiber: In that key.

To write the songs for the film Jailhouse Rock, I understand you went
to New York—
Stoller: Well, we didn’t go to New York for that purpose. We went to
New York because we had started making records for Atlantic Records.
And we also had some notions about writing for theater.
Leiber: Actually we went to New York because Nesuhi Ertegün had
discovered us in LA, and he liked the stuff we were doing, and he realized
that we were making records at that point for our own label with Lester Sill.
And were making records like “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” and other songs.
And they used to get very good reviews in the trade papers, but they never
really sold very much.
Stoller: Not outside of LA. ’Cause we didn’t have any promotion.
Leiber: Nesuhi approached us and said, “You know, you’re making
great records. But you’re not gonna sell them ’cause you don’t know how to
merchandise records.” He asked questions about who we had doing
promotion, who we had taking records to the radio stations. We didn’t have
anybody doing anything. We thought all you needed was to make a record
and send it to twenty-five or thirty disc jockeys and that was it. Well, of
course, that wasn’t it. And he talked to us about going to Atlantic. And I
thought of an idea that might work for us. And something I wanted to do
very much. And I talked to him about it, and he wasn’t sure we could do
that, but he thought if we made records for Atlantic, they would put them
out and distribute them.
Mike and I finally talked it over and decided to ask the guys at Atlantic
to consider us producers since we were in the studio making the records.
And in many cases Mike was making the arrangement. In many cases I was
directing the rhythm section. They fought like tigers to keep us from getting
credit on the label. It had never been given to anybody else.
Stoller: Actually they came up with the title “producer.” We didn’t
invent that title.
Leiber: How did we get it? I was fighting with Jerry Wexler.
Stoller: Yes, we were.
Leiber: Or was it just about money?
Stoller: No! It was about some kind of credit. For making the record.
Leiber: Oh, I know, I know.
Stoller: Finally, when they agreed, they came up with the name
“Produced by.” Because I would have thought “Directed by” would have
been more appropriate.
Leiber: That’s what I was gonna say right now. That we came up with
“Directed by,” and they didn’t buy it for whatever reason. I think it sounded
too consummate—
Stoller: That may have been so. All I remember is saying we wanted
credit, and they finally gave in, ’cause they said, “Man, how many times do
you want your name on the record? You wrote the song. We tell Waxie
Maxie in Washington, the distributor, we told him you made the record.”
[Laughs]

So you were the first official designated record producers.

Stoller: As far as I know.
Leiber: With credit.
 Stoller: Independent record producers.
Leiber: There was Buck Ram, who was making records for The
Platters. He was making records at the same time. I just remembered that. I
haven’t remembered that in forty years.
Stoller: But he didn’t have a producer credit.
Leiber: There was no credit. There was no credit at all.

Was there any name for the person doing that job?
Stoller: The A&R man.
Leiber: But he never got label credit.
Stoller: That’s true.
Leiber: The A&R man—
Stoller: —was a hired—
Leiber: —producer, actually.
Stoller: In effect, a producer. But in some cases they selected the song.
Then they called the take numbers. They hired an arranger, and frequently
that was it. They hired an arranger, and they selected a song for the artist.
What we were doing, because we were writing and we wanted to protect the
intention that we had when we wrote the song, was outline—not only
teaching how to sing, which Jerry frequently did by demonstrating over and
over certain phrases, and I would write an arrangement, and frequently I
would play the piano on those early sessions. I played on all of those
Coasters records—
Leiber: Nobody could ever play like Mike could. And there were
wizard piano players. But they never got the feel.
Stoller: I was not a wizard piano player. I’m still not. Apparently I had
the feel for the songs that we were writing. Especially at that time.

I never understood why the name “producer” for records was chosen,
as a record producer, of course, is much different than a movie
producer.
Stoller: It should have been “director.”
Leiber: That’s why I came up with “director.” I was looking for a word
they might accept. And then they refused to use the word “director.” I put a
lot of pressure on Jerry Wexler. And to some degree we both intimidated
him. We got to a point where we more or less stood our ground, and we
indicated that if we couldn’t get a credit and a royalty—we wanted a two-
cent royalty—they didn’t want to give us either, but then they gave in, and
we got the royalty—
Stoller: They gave us a royalty?
Leiber: It wasn’t two cents?
Stoller: It was two cents, but then after that we wanted three. And we
went up to three.
Leiber: Mike is right. And they gave us producers credit. And we went
from there.
Stoller: And we made their first million-selling single, which was
“Searchin’” and “Young Blood” [performed by The Coasters].
Leiber: “Searchin’” was designed to be the B-side, and it became a big
hit. “Young Blood” was a big hit too, but nothing compared to “Searchin’.”

And you would completely produce the sessions—

Stoller: Between the two of us—
Leiber: Between the two of us we did everything.
Stoller: Including the mastering. In fact, even before there was
multitrack, we were doing overdubs. When we had to. And cutting an S off
a word because it wasn’t supposed to be there. Because in those days you
couldn’t reach into one track and adjust it. There was only everything.
Leiber: We used to do it with [engineer and producer] Tommy Dowd,
who was a wizard, at Atlantic.
Stoller: Well, first we did it here, with [engineer] Bunny Robine. At
Master Recorders.
Leiber: On Fairfax. Right across the street from my high school.
Stoller: But with Tommy, we had a major advantage, because Tommy
had—
Leiber: —a four-track machine.
Stoller: Eight.

You had eight-track?

Leiber: Not the first one.
Stoller: Yeah. Guarantee it. Three people had an eight-track machine.
Tommy Dowd, Les Paul, and the US Navy.
 Leiber: I remember that Tommy had, by himself, a four-track machine
for six or eight months, and then he graduated to an eight-track machine.
Stoller: Well, when I worked with him, that I recall, he had a small
studio—234 West 56th Street, top of an old brownstone building. My
memory of it was that working there with The Coasters was with an eight-
track machine. But we didn’t do any of that stuff where you start with the
bass and drums and then add a guitar. We did everybody at the same time,
but we had the ability to make little adjustments. And we had the ability to
have the group, or the lead singer, sing four or five bars or do a whole
performance again. We’d pick the best stuff.

But you wouldn’t overdub the lead vocal. You would do it live.
Stoller: Oh absolutely, it would have to be.

It’s surprising to me you had eight-track so early on. The Beatles, at

Abbey Road, didn’t get eight-track till 1968.
Stoller: We didn’t except if we worked with Tommy Dowd in New
York. He had an eight-track machine early. I’m talking about, I think, 1958.
And there was an eight-track. Like I said, there were only three at the time.
Tommy was a genius.

You said that you overdubbed prior to having a multitrack?

Stoller: Yes. Going from a mono to another mono. The original tape,
with whatever was on it, and adding a new element.

And it sounded okay?

Stoller: Well, it wasn’t fabulous. But we got what we wanted!

So many of the stories written about you are inaccurate, according to

what you’ve told me. Another is that when you were asked to write the
songs for Jailhouse Rock you were in a fancy hotel in New York, and
you spent the nights partying and clubbing rather than write the songs
—
Leiber: It wasn’t a fancy hotel. We were in a small hotel, and Mike was
a real jazzophile, jazznik, and he schlepped me all over New York to small
clubs to watch jazz players, the greatest jazz players, and Mike was excited
about the whole scene, and couldn’t care less—
Stoller: But we were given a script by Gene Auerbach, who said, “We
need songs for the new movie.” I forget what the movie was called then.
Somebody told me this, that the original title was Ghost of a Chance. We
kind of tossed it in the corner with some other magazines, and we were
having a great time in New York.
Leiber: And then they came looking for us.
Stoller: Yeah, Gene came. [Laughs] And he locked us in, more or less.
[Laughs]
Leiber: He came over to lecture us on fidelity in delivering work, and
we hadn’t done anything. And he came over, and he stalked around the
room, and he talked about the necessity of being on time, etcetera. And
finally he shoved the sofa against the door. And he stretched out on the sofa
and said, “Boys, I’m gonna stay here until you give me the score.”
We wrote four songs, and one was “Jailhouse Rock.”
Stoller: The others were “Treat Me Nice” and “(You’re So Square)
Baby I Don’t Care” and “I Want to Be Free.”
Leiber: We wrote those songs in about three hours, all four of them.
Stoller: And then we wanted to get out.
Leiber: He finally took the songs and said, “Great!” and left. And we
split.
Stoller: [To Leiber] Let me ask you a question: Did we make demos of
those songs?
Leiber: I think you played them live and taught Presley directly, ’cause
I don’t remember a demo.
Stoller: That’s what I thought! I played them and you sang. ’Cause I
don’t remember—
Leiber: Yeah, I remember. And I’ll tell you where the piano was. It was
in the right-hand corner.
Stoller: I remember you and I teaching Presley the songs.
Leiber: Some session was over. I think it was the Jailhouse Rock
sessions, and one of the guys in the entourage of mechanics and doers and
coproducers and associates came over to me and said, “Jerry, we’d like you
to show up tomorrow at seven in the morning. We’d like you to play the
piano player in the film.” And I said, “But I’m not a piano player. Mike is
the piano player.” “That doesn’t matter. You look like a piano player.”
Stoller: You look like one. [Laughs]
Leiber: What nonsense. So I go home that night, and at ten o’clock that
night, my face was swollen out to here—I have an impacted wisdom tooth.
So I call Mike up, and I said, “Mike, you’re gonna have to go at seven in
the morning. They wanted me to be the piano player.” He said, “Jerry, I
can’t do it. I have a beard.” I said, “So shave it!” He said, “No.” He’s
always like that.
Stoller: I’ve got to protect myself.
Leiber: He was, “How do you want your ‘No’—fast or slow?” But then
he said, “All right, I’ll do it.”
Stoller: I didn’t say that to you about the beard. You said, “They won’t
know the difference.”
Leiber: I said, “Yes they will! Shave your beard off!”
Stoller: No, no. My memory is this. Your memory could be right, but
mine could be righter. I went over, and they put me in a Hawaiian shirt, and
they said, “You start Monday morning, seven in the morning every day.”
And they said, “Shave the beard off—it’s a scene stealer.”

And you did?

Stoller: I did.
Leiber: The dialogue is a little different from how I wrote it.
Stoller: Yes, but the result was the same. And that was my debut!
Leiber: He became a star, and I became a no-name schlepper.

I had assumed Jailhouse Rock was the original title of the film, and you
wrote your song to the title. But you invented that title.
Stoller: There was a scene. We didn’t read the script that carefully, but
we thumbed through, and Jerry saw that there was an amateur show in a
prison. So he wrote “Jailhouse Rock.” The only title song we wrote to their
title was “King Creole.”

Good to set the record straight. It’s been written that you wrote the
songs for the movie Jailhouse Rock—
Stoller: We wrote songs for the movie that became Jailhouse Rock.
It was also written you were staying in a “ritzy hotel.”
Leiber: Ritzy?
Stoller: No, it wasn’t.
Leiber: The Gorham Hotel.
Stoller: The Gorham Hotel.
Leiber: Did they mean fancy, expensive?

Yes. Fancy like the Ritz.

Stoller: No.
Leiber: The Plaza was ritzy. The Waldorf was ritzy. They don’t pay
expenses when you do movies.

When you wrote “Jailhouse Rock,” did you have a sense that it was a
great song?
Leiber: No, we never felt that. See, you can write a great song and you
can end up with a lousy record. Because record production is sometimes not
up to speed. As Mike once said, “We don’t write songs. We write records.”
Stoller: [Laughs] He’s giving me the credit for saying that.

Yet you produced many of the records yourself, so you ensured the
songs would become good records.
Leiber: We started producing in self-defense because a lot of our songs
got wrecked. And we started moving closer and closer to having hands-on
producing situations. We were the first independent producers.

In what ways were your songs wrecked? Was it the wrong feel?
Leiber: Yeah. You give an A&R man a song, and he’ll misinterpret it.
It’ll be like a Texas shuffle, and he’ll do a Benny Goodman swing
arrangement of it, instead of Tiny Bradshaw or James Brown, or the right
stuff.

So with “Jailhouse Rock” you both wrote words and music

simultaneously?
Leiber: Yeah. Most of the blues were written that way. Once I had a
couple of lines, it created a groove. And once the groove was in, he could
groove with it and extend it, if he wanted to, and that’s the way a lot of the
blues were written. The cabaret songs were not written that way.
Stoller: On some ballads sometimes it would start with a melody. A
beginning of a melody. Then the words would come in. In the early days we
worked a lot—
Leiber: Simultaneously.

When you wrote all four of those songs in a handful of hours, did you
feel there was something phenomenal about that?
Leiber: No. “Hound Dog” was twelve minutes.
Stoller: We wrote songs for Little Esther when a phone call came. As
Sammy Cahn would say, “What came first, the music or the lyrics? The
phone call.” We would write three songs in a few hours and finish one in
the car on the way to the studio.
Leiber: Tell the story about the Christmas song.
Stoller: Oh yeah. [Laughs] They were doing a Christmas album with
Elvis, and he wanted us in the studio all the time.
Leiber: Like lucky charms. He believed that. We were lucky charms.
Stoller: We were in the studio, and they said, “We need another song.”
And we went out into the utility closet at Radio Recorders, and within eight
minutes we had written “Santa Claus Is Back in Town”—

In the closet.
Stoller: Yeah. And pardon the expression, we came out of the closet—
[Laughs]
Leiber: Well, he did, not me. As you can see, I stayed in the closet.
Stoller: And we came in with the song. Colonel said, “What took you
so long, boys?”

So again, no instrument. You just wrote the melody in your head.

Stoller: Well, yeah. It’s kind of a vagueish melody.
Leiber: It’s also blues oriented. And Michael would often, in a song
like that, add sort of a touch of polish of a melody.
Stoller: Well, we sang it to them.
Many songwriters have written great songs fast, but to write four great
songs fast—
Leiber: They’re not all great.
Stoller: We’ll let you decide which ones are and which ones aren’t.

Do you think it was the pressure of having to write that enabled you to
come up with four songs so quickly?
Stoller: No.
Leiber: No.

Because the Motown writers and the Brill Building writers had that
kind of pressure, and they came up with great stuff.
Stoller: Well, the Brill Building writers—and they didn’t write in the
Brill Building, as you know [1619 Broadway], but across the street at 1650
Broadway—they had to compete with each other for cuts.

As did the Motown writers.

Stoller: I guess so. We didn’t compete with anybody. We chose our own
productions. The only time we wrote for assignment was when we wrote for
movies.

When you would teach a song, such as “Jailhouse Rock,” to Elvis,

would he do the song pretty much as you did?
Stoller: No.
Leiber: I don’t remember him copying me behind a microphone. I
remember him going behind a microphone, and what he did for the first two
or three minutes was crack bad jokes.
Stoller: He had one of his entourage, also—
Leiber: —on the microphone.
Stoller: —comedian. Talking like a phony airport—
Leiber: “Boarding on a 707, gate twelve . . .” And they all laughed.
[Laughter]
Stoller: And they ate lunch in the studio too.
Leiber: He was right about that. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
The idea made me ill.
 Stoller: That was amazing to us. We were producing records. And we
would go into the studio with the Robins or with the Coasters, and we had
to get four tunes done in three hours.
Leiber: It was the union’s rules.
Stoller: Because, what was it in those days? Four dollars and twenty-
five cents per musician, and if you went overtime, you know, that was
heavy. These guys took over the studio. RCA booked the studio from ten in
the morning till whenever—they just blocked out the whole week! So they
stayed in the studio, and nobody was worried about them.
Leiber: That was the only pressure, actually, that we put on ourselves.
Because we were just trained, we were brainwashed, not to go over three
hours. And to get four sides. And we always did. And we learned how to
move very quickly and very effectively. But that’s the only pressure. The
other pressure didn’t exist for us.
Stoller: No. First of all, we were very young, and we could work
eighteen hours a day without being concerned about anything, about being
tired—
Leiber: And smoke four packs of cigarettes.
Stoller: And drink endless cups of tea.
Leiber: Can I ask you a question? Why are you so interested in
“Jailhouse Rock”? Is it that important?

Yes, it is. It’s part of our culture. It’s one of the most iconic and classic
songs performed by Elvis, who is considered the king of rock and roll.
When you hear that record he is alive—his spirit is alive in that
performance.
Leiber: Yeah, that’s him.
Stoller: Absolutely. That’s true.
Leiber: But there’s a whole other dimension to our collaboration. We
wrote “Is That All There Is?” in three shots, as I remember it. Before it was
even recorded, it was part of another song called “Black Is Black No
Longer.”
Stoller: Well, it wasn’t part of it. What happened—this is my memory,
again, which is pretty good—Jerry presented me with spoken vignettes.
And I set them to music. They were all set to the same music. And Georgia
Brown, the British singer-actress who had been on Broadway in the show
Oliver, she came over with her—
Leiber: Manager.
Stoller: Her manager, and an arranger, Peter Matz. And we played this
for her, and she said, “It’s great, it’s great. But it’s all talking. I need
something to sing.” And we had this other refrain, “We all wore coats with
the very same lining,” and we stuck it in and she said, “That’s it. I’m gonna
do that on my television special in London on the BBC.” She left, and we
looked at each other and said, “This doesn’t make any sense.” [Laughs] We
both vowed to write a refrain—he the lyrics and me the music.
The next day I called him and said, “I’ve got a tune that I think is really
right for this.”
And he said, “Okay, but listen, I’ve written a lyric already. And I know
that the lyric is right. And you might have to jettison what you wrote.” I
came over and I insisted on playing and he insisted on reciting, and finally I
won, and I played it. The tune.
And he said, “Play it again.” And I played it, and he sang the lyric. And
it fit perfectly. We didn’t have to change anything.

Amazing.
Leiber: That is pretty amazing, yeah. That only happened once in fifty-
six years, but it happened.
Stoller: And there’s only one rhyme in the entire piece. “Let’s break out
the booze and have a ball, if that’s all . . . there is.” That’s the only rhyme in
the piece.

Does that phenomenon—of having written words and music separately

that matched perfectly—give you any sense that there is Providence at
work guiding your collaboration?
Leiber: No.
Stoller: No, no, not at all. [Laughs]

As you know, many songwriters have said they don’t feel they write
songs but that songs come through them. John Lennon said that—
Leiber: He got that from me. That you’re a vessel.
You feel that?
Leiber: Sometimes.

Had you ever written a song like “Is That All There Is?” before—a
song with spoken vignettes?
Stoller: We wrote “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” that has spoken parts. It’s
very different. That’s talking blues.
Leiber: That’s talking blues.
Stoller: And this was not exactly talking blues. And yet—
Leiber: It was Sprechstimme. It wasn’t blues at all.
Stoller: I know it’s not blues—
Leiber: The closest thing you can get to a model for it is Bertolt Brecht,
and that kind of articulation. It’s in “The Black Freighter”—
Stoller: But Sprechstimme is almost—
Leiber: Tonal—
Stoller: Tonal. This is just a recitation. It’s not even implied to be sung.
Leiber: Yeah. I tried it. I tried kind of a dummy tune, and I realized that
the tune created a synthetic kind of unreality that is so far from the tough
attitudes about living I was trying to express. So I decided to try and just
say it. But I was afraid to do that because I didn’t think it would be
acceptable.
Stoller: When I set it to music, not having really discussed it at length
with you at that point, I said, “You know, I think these should really be
spoken,” and you said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”

A lot of people have likened it to Brecht and Weill.

Stoller: We were influenced by Brecht and Weill because we liked their
work.
Leiber: I was influenced by a long short story by Thomas Mann. Called
—
Stoller: “Disillusionment.”
Leiber: “Disillusionment.” And I decided—all of these decisions came
at about the same time—both Mike and myself were getting tired of writing
for the market. And also the market was changing to a point where a lot of
stuff that we liked to write was not going down, was not happening. A lot of
the groups from England were happening, a lot of that other stuff was
happening, Kennedy got killed. And the stuff we were doing was kind of
fading from the scene. And we both wanted to write some material that was
more adult and more theatrical.
So I was reading this story by Mann, and the thread in it was this kind
of terrible, negative thing. But it had, at the same time, a parallel line that
was very Germanic and very funny. So I felt I’d like to try to translate this
material. At least the feel of it, the sense of it. And I wondered if it would
work. And I did a lot of work on the lyric, and I gave Mike the material.
And we usually always, as you know, worked together, on whatever we
were doing, simultaneously, and on this piece I just handed him a lyric—
Stoller: The original, the vignettes, you handed me on a piece of paper.
Leiber: I gave him the song, and he took it home. And he had written,
on his own, without lyrics, a refrain. And I came in the next day, and we
hassled over who would play it first.
I said, “Let me play it first, because then lyrics come first before the
music.”
He said something like, “Not in this case,” and it was another argument.
Then he played the melody. And I was in shock. [Sings refrain]
Stoller: I wanted to play it first because I thought he would love it. And
I wanted to play it so he would be inclined to adjust his lyric to it rather
than me having to tear my beautiful new tune apart to his lyrics. I wanted to
get there first for that reason. But fortunately neither of us had to adjust.

The lyric is so beautifully constructed, with the repeating refrain tying

together disparate subjects: first a fire, then the circus, then love, and
then life—
Leiber: That last one is suicide. “If that’s the way she feels about it,
why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh no, not me.” Oh, you want another secret
about that? In Peggy Lee’s version she sings, “If that’s the way she feels
about it, why doesn’t she just end it all? Oh no, not me, I’m not ready for
that final disappointment.” Which is wrong. And which changes to some
degree the meaning of the song which was intended. By one word. And
that’s a great lesson in writing anything. One word can change it quite a bit.
And that is, “If that’s the way she feels about it. Oh no, not me, I’m in no
hurry for that final disappointment.” Which is the joke. I’m not ready for
that final disappointment—is not a joke.
 But she insisted on singing “ready” because I think she felt that it
sounded more natural. And she missed the point.

Interesting you started the song with a description of a fire, which can
be both beautiful and disastrous—
Leiber: It can be very dangerous and uncontrollable.

What brought you to start there?

Leiber: I never know what brings me to think of anything. I’m not one
of those writers who gets an idea from looking at something. The words, the
ideas—I don’t know where they come from.
Stoller: We made a demo of it, and Jerry brought it to Peggy. She said,
“This is my life story.” She said, “I was in a fire like that.”
Leiber: She said, “You wrote this for me. I know it. And if you give it
to anyone else, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And she was convinced,
on some mystical level—she wasn’t joking—she thought that was true.

It is a perfect song for her.

Leiber: But we really wrote it for Lotte Lenya.
Stoller: Oh, that’s a lotta Lenya. [Laughter]
Leiber: I like that.
Stoller: You got it. [Laughs]
Leiber: Leslie Uggams recorded it first. Mike wanted to test the
arrangement out—really, that’s the truth. We both knew that she wasn’t
really appropriate. But we couldn’t get anybody—
Stoller: But we didn’t have anybody ready to record it.
Leiber: Yeah, some record. I would have done it with Mae West. In
fact, she made a record for us. She did the Elvis Presley Christmas song that
we told you about.
Stoller: “Santa Claus Is Back in Town.”
Leiber: And it’s pretty good.
Stoller: It’s funny. [Imitates her] “Christmas, oh . . . Christmas, oh . . .”
That’s the way it starts. [Laughs]
Leiber: I love the record. That’s one of my favorites. And of all the
“Kansas City” records, out of all those great stars—Little Richard, Joe
Williams, you name it—I think the best take is Little Milton. You’ve got to
hear it.
Stoller: For me it’s Joe Williams.
Leiber: Well, I mean, it’s Joe Williams for me too.

What was it about the Joe Williams record that made it the best?
Leiber: It’s really what it oughtta be.
Stoller: The intention. It was, finally, the intention of a real kind of
Kansas City blues-jazz feel.
Leiber: It was stylistically perfect. A lot of people who did it before did
it as kind of a country, semicountry version, semi–big city blues. Tiny
Bradshaw.
Stoller: Or dropped most of the tune and just shouted.

And that was what The Beatles did, in your opinion?

Stoller: Well, The Beatles copied Little Richard’s record. The Beatles’
version is good, but it isn’t what I wrote. It doesn’t have the melody that I
liked. The first record was Little Willie Littlefield in 1952. And the other
weird thing about it, if you want to talk about something mystical, was that
this one has a certain mysticism in my mind: Jerry and I were meeting at his
townhouse in New York. We both lived on the east side then. I lived on 17th
Street; he lived on 72nd in brownstones. I went up to work with him, and I
said, “Remember that old song ‘Kansas City’? That would really be a great
song for Joe Williams and Count Basie.”
And he said, “Yeah, yeah, I can see that.” He said, “I’ll pick up the
phone and call Teddy Reig at Roulette Records,” because Teddy Reig
produced all of the Basie stuff there at Roulette. So he placed a call—it was
a Friday, I think—and left a message.
And Monday the trades came out, and they had a pick. And the pick
was “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison. Plus three other cover records
mentioned. And we had not had a cover in seven years. We were just
thinking of the song, [laughs] and on Monday it came out as the big pick hit
of the week. And this is after seven years.
Leiber: And that was a big hit. It went to number one. I still can’t figure
it out.
 Stoller: He remembered the song, Little Willie’s record. Which was
originally called “K. C. Loving,” though the lyrics were the same. And I
always thought Ralph Bass screwed up the possibility of a hit by calling it
“K. C. Loving” instead of “Kansas City” because he thought it was hip.

Of all the great writers of classic rock and roll songs, such as Little
Richard and Chuck Berry, there’s not one who also has written songs
like “Is That All There Is?” Your stylistic range is amazing.
Leiber: Well, it’s obvious that we’re just geniuses. [Laughs]

I know you’re joking, but it’s true.

Stoller: He’s not joking.

So you wrote the melody for the refrain of “Is That All There Is?” as
just pure melody, with no lyric idea at all?
Stoller: That’s true. But I knew the subject matter from the vignettes.
Each one of which ends with “Is that all there is . . .” And although I didn’t
specifically, consciously write the melody as “Is that all there is”—
Leiber: He wasn’t writing to a lyric. He was just writing notes that
obviously sounded—
Stoller: That felt right to me.
Leiber: And I came in with the lyric, syllable for syllable.

And it actually matched perfectly—you didn’t have to change a single

word?
Leiber: Not at all.

That’s amazing.
Leiber: It is amazing.

On the song “Stand By Me” Ben E. King has writing credit with you.
Did he write it with you?
Stoller: Yeah.
Leiber: Yes.

There’s been countless instances of singers getting their name on a song

without really writing it, a tradition that dates back to Jolson and
certainly extends to modern times.
Stoller: There has been, but not in this instance.
Leiber: We were scheduled to have a rehearsal with Ben E. King, and
Mike and I got there early, and a couple of other guys were in this rehearsal
—
Stoller: I have a totally different memory. Go ahead.
Leiber: —were in this rehearsal hall. We had a small auditorium in a
junior high school with a piano. Ben E. came in and “Hi, hello,” you know.
And he said, “Hey man, guess what? I wrote a song.” Ben E. was not a
songwriter. A very good performer, but not a songwriter. And he went
[sings softly, to the tune of “Stand By Me”], “When the night has come and
the land is dark, and the moon is the only light we’ll see . . . I won’t cry, I
won’t cry . . .” He said, “That’s all I wrote.”
I said, “That’s pretty good. You want me to finish it for you? You want
me and Mike to do it?”
He said, “Oh yeah, man, that would be great.” So Mike and I finished it.
And Mike put that incredible bass line on it. And when I heard that bass
pattern, I said, “That’s it. That’s a hit.” And I didn’t do much predicting of
hits. But I knew that was in there. I also knew “Hound Dog” by Big Mama
Thornton was a hit. And “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison. Which I
wasn’t crazy about, but I knew it was a hit.
And we started writing “Stand By Me.” And it became what it became.

Did the two of you take it away from Ben E. and work on it on your
own?
Leiber: No, we finished it right there. Like we did most of the stuff. We
did it there. I mean, these were not assignments that you took home and
worried over for a week or two or three or a month. These were hot off the
griddle, and we always felt that way, that when they were hot they were
more effective and more attractive.

So he had a melody and lyrics.

Leiber: He had the first few lines and the beginning of a melody.

Did he have the chorus?

 Leiber: Yeah, I think he did have it. Because it was only one phrase,
one line. But he said he couldn’t get the rest of the lyrics. He’s not a
songwriter, but he came up with something pretty good. A couple of
sentences and a hunk of the refrain, or maybe all of the refrain.
Stoller: As I remember, it was in our own office. We had an office on
57th Street. And Jerry and Ben E. were fooling around with the lyric on
“Stand By Me.”
Leiber: And then you came up with the bass pattern.
Stoller: And I came in. Ben E. was singing it in the key of A. And I sat
down at the piano, and I just felt this bass pattern, and I started working on
a bass pattern, and within five minutes I had the bass pattern, which is the
bass pattern of the song and is a big part of it. And in the orchestration, it
starts with bass and guitar, and it goes into strings playing it, and it builds
up, and this pattern is from beginning to end. But Jerry was working with
Ben E. on it, and I think most of the melody of the tune is Ben E.’s. I wrote
the bottom part. Which is kind of a signature of the song.
Leiber: The bass pattern.
Stoller: [Sings bass line]. “Boom-boom, boom-boom-boom, boom,
boom-boom-boom, boom . . .”

It’s in A and has that beautiful shift of chords to the VI chord, the F
sharp minor—did you invent that or—
Stoller: It’s kind of implied. I thought it, to me, it was implied. I think
the melody may have shifted a little with the chords I was using. But it’s
basically his.

And he was just singing it a cappella?

Stoller: Yeah.

John Lennon, years later, made a famous record of it. Also in the key of
A. Did you like his version?
Stoller: Yeah. It was a different kind. But it still had the bass pattern. It
wasn’t like the difference between Big Mama and Elvis. It was the same
song; it just had a very different feel. But it was legitimate. It felt right. It
felt good, also.
Leiber: It was too fast.
Lennon’s was too fast?
Leiber: Yeah. It felt too fast.
Stoller: It was stiffer. It was definitely a stiffer feel.
Leiber: Ben E.’s was more syncopated.
Leiber and Stoller: [Sing rhythmic bass patterns of both in unison, in
which Lennon’s is straight-time, and Ben E.’s is more fluid and syncopated.]
Stoller: That’s really the difference.
Leiber: Unison! Did you hear that unison?
Stoller: It felt good. I like it.
Leiber: It felt white. That’s what we’re trying to say. And as Mike said,
it’s somewhat stiffer. It doesn’t really have that loop in it.

“Stand By Me” is a phenomenal song. It’s got a beautiful melody, but

it’s also visceral. It’s a rock song but it’s a ballad. It’s got everything.
Stoller: But, you know, it was a hit when it came out. But when it came
to be this wedding song and this everything song is when Rob Reiner made
this movie.
I met Rob at a party, and he insisted on singing all of the Leiber and
Stoller songs. And he insisted I go to the piano while he sang. And he called
me up months later and said, “I have this movie. It’s called The Body. And
it’s been in the can for a while, and I like it. The Body is the right title for it.
But it’s not good, because it’s based on a short story by Stephen King, and
people will think it’s a horror film. It’s really a coming-of-age movie. So I
want to call it Stand By Me.”
I said, “Great! Be my guest.”
And then I thought about it and I called him back. This was 1986. The
record came out in ’61. And I said, “Hey, who do you think we can get to
record it and put it into your film?”
And he said, “We talked about that. But I view this movie as a period
film. So I’d like to go with the original record.”
I said, “We produced the original record.” So it wasn’t that I wasn’t
flattered, but it was that I thought that, well, this’ll be an album cut, and if
we got Tina Turner [laughs] or somebody else to do it, it might become a
hit. And it did become a hit again. The same record. Nothing was done to it.
Leiber: I couldn’t make heads or tails out of that choice. I thought it
had nothing to do with that movie at all. And I still think so. I think he was
in love with the record and the song, and—
Stoller: Hey—listen—
Leiber: And he wanted it in his movie. And the movie was about a dead
body in the woods. And what does “Stand By Me” have to do with that,
with children in the movie, what—?
Stoller: Whatever it is, I am so grateful to him. Because it became—
Leiber: Yeah. A monster hit.
Stoller: I think people liked the song [when it first was released], but it
didn’t become that powerful. It became a much bigger hit twenty-five years
later. Which is really great. I mean, five years, maybe. But twenty-five
years?

Donald Fagen did a version of your song “Ruby Baby”—

Stoller: Yeah, I love that arrangement.

He took your chords and extended them.

Leiber: Yeah. And he did a terrific job. The original “Ruby Baby” was
Dion.
Stoller: No, Dion’s wasn’t first. The first was The Drifters. Nesuhi
Ertegün recorded it in 1954. But I love Dion’s record. And I love Donald
Fagen’s record. [Claps syncopated drum rhythm from the Dion record.]

I’d like to ask you about the song “Spanish Harlem.” The story goes
that Phil Spector wanted to write a song with you for a long time, and
he came over and had a chord pattern which he played you—
Leiber: No. He didn’t have anything.
What happened is that Phil had bothered me for three months, four
months, to write a song with him, and I didn’t want to do it for a couple of
reasons. And the main reason is that Mike and I had sort of a tacit
understanding that we were exclusive partners. A number of people wanted
to write with Mike and a number of people wanted to write with me, and we
just didn’t. And [Phil] wanted to write with me, and he was signed to us.
Lester Sill [their music publisher] sent Phil Spector to us. For safekeeping.
Did a bad job. Lester called me up one day and said, “Jer, I got a kid out
here who’s really talented. And he’s nuts about you guys. He worships the
ground you walk on.”
 I said, “Well, be careful. Watch out. That’s usually dangerous. Why do
you hate me so much? I never did anything to you.”
He said, “He wants to come out and work for you guys.”
I said, “Lester, that’s like fattening frogs for snakes. Why should we
take Phil Spector in and teach him everything we know so that he can go
out and compete with us? Who the hell needs that? Let him go find out for
himself.”
He said, “Jer, you owe me real big. Do me a favor. Take him on for six
months or a year. You don’t have to sign him to five years or anything like
that. And let him hang out with you, in the studio, and let him observe what
you do.”
So I said, “Okay. Will do.”
He said, “By the way, will you send me the fare for a one-way ticket?”
And I went to Mike and told him what had happened, and he said, “Do
it.” So I did it. And [Spector] was with us for three or four or five or six
months. And he wanted to come over and work on a song with us.
I was somewhat annoyed because he was supposed to come over at six
thirty, and he came over at five. Mike was supposed to come over at six
thirty to work with us. He came over while my kids were having dinner.
They were just finishing up. They went, and we were sitting there talking,
smoking, having a drink. I got a call from Mike, and he said, “I’m terribly
sorry, but I can’t make it.”
Stoller: The problem was that we had been working on some other
things, and some studio stuff, and I hadn’t had dinner with my kids in
weeks. And my wife said to me, “When are you going to see your
children?” I canceled out because I wanted to have dinner with my kids. So
I called Jerry after dinner—
Leiber: After your dinner?
Stoller: After my dinner.
Leiber: What time was that?
Stoller: Well, it might have been eight thirty.
Leiber: That late? No, it couldn’t be, not with children. It couldn’t have
been eight thirty.
Stoller: Oh, we ate later.
Leiber: Really?
 Stoller: Or maybe it was not only after dinner but after bedtime stories
and all of that. I called, and they said, “We finished writing the song.” And I
said, “Fine.”
Leiber: Both versions could use some examining. But that’s of no
consequence. As far as I was concerned, I waited and waited for Mike to
come over, and he didn’t, and then he finally called. And in that time I
wrote “Spanish Harlem” with Phil.
What actually happened was that I had this collection of LPs that were
related to Spanish themes. I had Segovia and I had Rhapsody Espanol. I had
one by Ravel. And I had this idea: “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem, a red
rose up in Spanish Harlem . . .” I told them the sentences. And he started to
play a melody that was like Jeff Barry rock and roll. [Sings the lyrics to a
rock groove] Sort of jazzy and wrong.
I said, “Let me play you some stuff that is in the right bag.” And I
played him two or three of those pieces. And he has a good ear, and he
picked up something in there. I think he even picked up a three- or four-bar
lick in one of the pieces that were in the strings. And we wrote it together.

That’s completely different than stories I’ve read, which stated

specifically that he came to you with some music, and you picked up on
the Spanish flavor in his music and were inspired to write this lyric.
All the stories about Phil Spector—almost all of them—are distorted
and wrong. Almost all of them.

Did you have that idea—about the rose in Spanish Harlem—before

working with Spector?
Leiber: Yeah. Absolutely. It was a quatrain in search of a melody.

But you never brought it to Mike—

Leiber: It wasn’t in enough shape to bring it to anybody. I mean, I don’t
come in with two lines.

Those are great opening lines. It’s visual, it sets the scene, like “Kansas
City,” there’s a sense of place—
It’s nice. It’s not special. “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem, a red rose
up in Spanish Harlem . . .” Big deal.
I’d say it is special.
Leiber: “It’s growing in the street right up through the concrete” is a
special line. But not those opening lines. They’re rather ordinary.
Stoller: I agree with Paul.

When you were writing your rock and roll songs did you ever consider
that they could become standards?
Stoller: No, we thought all the standards had already been written.
Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins. And those are still great
standards, but now they refer to them as the Great American Songbook.
And they’re putting them in a package as if they are old. Well, they are old.
But it’s separate from any new works. Just about.
Leiber: We thought our songs would just disappear after they were on
the charts. We didn’t think that they had any staying power like the old
standards. We didn’t think they were as good and specific. A lot of them
were comic and not serious love songs. For a number of years we had
trouble writing love songs. Then we fell out of love, and it was easy to write
love songs. [Laughter]
Stoller: I think we were—and probably to some degree still are—in awe
of the writers I mentioned before.

As songwriters today are in awe of you.

Leiber: If they are, I wish they would remember to tell us that more
often. [Laughter]
Stoller: I’d say most writers today don’t know who we are.

If they don’t, they certainly know your songs.

Stoller: Yes, that they do.
Leiber: I’d say that’s true.

OceanofPDF.com
Richard Sherman
 Writing Songs for Disney
Beverly Hills, California 2010

“People usually love or hate me for it,” he said with a smile about writing
“It’s a Small World,” a song that is literally in constant rotation,
accompanying the ride of the same name at Disneyland and the other
Disney parks throughout the world. It has the distinction of being the only
song in existence to receive constant, nonstop airplay all day, every day, as
it’s performed in all the parks around the world, overlapping time zones.
This phenomenon makes it the most performed—and most translated—
song in history.
A humble and humorous man, Richard Sherman is quick to point out
that a goodly portion of people are seriously annoyed by the song, as it
spins on endlessly. But others love it. (As I told him, my mom loved it. It
was always her favorite part of Disneyland—that ride—and “that charming
song.”)
It was also the source of a songwriting myth, which is clarified here,
that Richard—and his cowriter brother Robert—got paid every single time
the song was played. Untrue. They are paid performance royalties for
anytime the song is used outside of the park, in a movie, or on radio. But for
usage on the ride, they got paid one time only. “The Mouse,” as many refer
to Disney here in Hollywood, is notoriously tight.
 But the Sherman Brothers made a fortune at Disney—absolutely
cherished and coddled by Walt himself, who always admired genuine talent
and hard work—and they wrote some of the most magical movie songs ever
written. They wrote the entire song score to several Disney movies,
including Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book.
Richard Sherman was born on June 12, 1928; Robert came first, on
December 19, 1925. (He died in 2012.) Music was in their blood. Not only
was their father, Al Sherman, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter well known for
his funny wordplay; their grandpa Samuel was a composer and violinist in
the royal Austrian-Hungarian court of the Emperor Franz Joseph.
He had his first taste of the opposite coast at the age of seven when a
producer heard some of his dad’s songs and put him under contract. “So
with only that promise,” he remembered, “and some enthusiasm, Dad
packed the family up. He uprooted the family. The day we got to California
he found out this fellow, this producer, had dropped dead from a heart
attack.”
Not a propitious beginning for his dad’s California songwriting career.
But because Bob was always a sickly kid who suffered through the harsh
winters of New York, Al Sherman decided to keep his family in Los
Angeles and lived forever in locomotives between the two coasts. He found
the music business in Hollywood somewhat of a closed club to which he
was uninvited and kept returning instead to old New York to sell his songs.
Ironically, his sons were not only invited to join that elite songwriters’ club
that banned Al; they were also soon to become among its most celebrated
and successful members.
“We loved it here,” Richard said. “If you live in Southern California,
this is God’s country.” Raised in Beverly Hills, he went back east to study
music at Bard College (where Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan also went,
decades later). During World War II he was in the Reserve for seven years
and active duty for two years. “I wasn’t in combat. Mostly I counted the
days till I could be out. I had just started writing songs.” His brother Bob
did see combat, was injured in the knee, and was awarded a Purple Heart.
For reasons unbeknownst to this writer, the brothers in later years had a
falling out and put an ocean between them, with Bob in England and
Richard remaining stateside. But during our interview no indication of any
dissonance between them surfaced, and Richard had only kind things to say
about his brother. “[Bob] was a natural writer,” Richard said. “He wrote
stories and poetry. I was in music. I could pick up any instrument and play
it. Together we did what we did. We couldn’t have done it separately. I
needed him as much—if not more—as he needed me.
They belonged to an old songwriting world, the one in which
songwriters were hired by movie companies to be on staff and to come in
every day and write songs for various projects. But before getting that
dream job the Sherman Brothers began by writing pop songs and early rock
and roll such as “You’re Sixteen,” first recorded in 1960 by Johnny
Burnette and later by Ringo Starr, who had a hit with it in 1973.
From their dad they learned the value of writing unique and humorous
songs, such as “Tall Paul,” which was cut by Annette Funicello when she
was still a kid and Mouseketeer, a cast member on the Disney TV show The
Mickey Mouse Club, which started in 1955. That song connected them with
Disney, and they wrote more for Annette before being invited to join the
Disney writing staff, a dream come true, all related in the following
conversation.
We met at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills
on a radiantly clear and crisp autumn day in 2010. Many well-wishers came
to our table during our discussion as if he were mayor, and he greeted each
with warmth and gentle humor. He’s a beloved man, with good reason—
soft-spoken, whimsical, and genuinely grateful for a life writing songs.

Except for the Gershwin brothers, I can’t think of many other

songwriting teams of brothers.
Richard Sherman: Well, that’s the miracle of it. Bob and I both
recognized it. We were both very different people. I’m an extrovert; Bob’s
an introvert. I’m very talky; Bob’s monosyllabic. He’s a deep thinker. Very
solid brain. It was mutual respect.
We didn’t go together through life. We always left each other alone
socially. But in the room, when we were working, especially when we
started working on projects like films and stage shows, there was no sibling
rivalry—it was strictly work. And we both respected each other enough to
listen to each other. We would discuss everything. It was kind of a ceasefire
when it came to writing music and lyrics. We just sat in the room and
sweated out the thing. And there were no happier guys than we were when
we got an idea that socked, and we’d say, “Oh yeah, yeah, this is good.”
Whether it’s gonna be a hit or not, who knows? But you got that hook, that
little something, that special thing that makes it listenable. There’s always
something, always one little thing that makes something happen.
I remember when I went into the service we didn’t write together for
five years. He was writing with another writer, and I was writing by myself
and with another fellow. We had had dozens of songs recorded, but nothing
big where you can say, “Hey, look at that big hit.”
One day, through a series of circumstances, we started working together
again. The respect sort of happened at that point. At the beginning there a
bit of a rivalry going. But then after the five-year period, then it was really
business. We respected each other and got along as songwriters and
partners. And with a brother, you trust. So there was no problem with trust;
it’s just a matter of respect. And that’s it. We spent the next fifty years
writing songs.

There is so much musical talent in your family. Not only was your
father Al a songwriter, but your grandfather also was a songwriter,
yes?
Yeah, he was a musician and composed a little bit. But mainly his thing
was he was a great violinist. When the family migrated to this country
Grandpa Samuel was versed in the Strauss waltzes and this marvelous,
marvelous music of yesterday—of course, it wasn’t yesterday then—but he
wasn’t into ragtime or rhythm music of any kind. He was square. He didn’t
really manage too well in this country. He did have little ensembles and
things, and he played riverboats and other kinds of things. And he made a
living at it, but he was never the great success that he should have been.
’Cause in Europe he was the concertmeister of Emperor Franz Joseph’s
orchestra in Austria-Hungary.

He was a member of the royal court.

Yes. My father used to reminisce. He’d tell about how as a little boy he
used to love to listen to his daddy play, and one day Grandpa brought him
in—he was five years old—to the court and smuggled him behind the
curtain so he could listen to the music. And the empress noticed this—there
was jiggling behind the curtain—and the emperor had a guard go over
there, and they found a little boy listening, and he said, “That’s my papa
playing.”
So the emperor said, “Oh, come listen to it better” and put him on his
knee. And he sat on Emperor Franz Joseph’s knee to listen to his father play
marvelous music and polkas. He had a little ensemble, called a salon
orchestra. Back in the grand days when great music was being played in
courts.
So then Grandpa came over here thinking that the world was waiting for
them but found the miserable fact that he was not hip. It was kind of a
shattering blow. Nobody here cared that he was in the royal court. You
didn’t bring your résumé. So basically Grandpa, kind of shattered by it,
didn’t want Dad—my father—to go into it. Because Dad was a natural
pianist. Self-taught. A fabulous pianist. He was terrific. And he had a great
sense of melody. He could invent gorgeous melodies. And he was very
successful. He wrote many, many big hits in the twenties and the thirties.
But despite his daddy’s warnings and everything, he started his own
band and played music. Then he had some hits and some giant hits and
became a full-time songwriter. And Dad, God bless him, told us, “Do not go
into this crazy business. There is no security in it whatsoever. There’s no
paycheck at the end of the week. You can slave away at what you’re doing
and get all sorts of turn-downs and wind up with absolutely nothing at the
end of the week.” He didn’t want us to have the heartbreaks.

He wrote songs with many people. Was he writing the music and not
the words?
Dad was an idea man. He was a great natural composer. So 90 percent
of all those melodies are his. But he came up with wonderful word sound
songs like “What Do We Do on a Dew-Dew-Dewey Day?” and “Aha Me
Too,” and “(Tomatoes Are Cheaper) Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.” He’d
come in with a catch phrase. And then he’d go to a really sharp cookie like
Al Lewis, and they’d sit down and work on words.
But he was always looking for great word sounds and titles. And he
taught us. He was the one who sat us down and said, “You’ve got to get a
hook. To get somebody to listen. You don’t use the same old words every
time. Come up with something special and new. It doesn’t matter how good
your tune is. If you don’t have a good lyric and a good solid idea and follow
it through with some surprises, you got nothing.” And he was right. He said,
“Keep them simple, singable, and sincere.” The three S’s. And also original.
That was the big O surrounding the S, S, and S.
Bob and I, throughout our career, try to write very sincerely, very
singable, and very simple. So at least you can understand it. We are not
writing for ourselves or somebody else.

When you saw your dad being a songwriter, did that look like an
exciting life?
I never thought of it as exciting. I thought about it that he was
aggravated a lot and worked very hard at it. He sweated on songs. I
wondered why, and he said, “To make ’em better, sonny.” He was a
hardworking natural composer. A great idea man. And in later years wrote a
lot of lyrics too. But in those early years, being an immigrant, he didn’t
have the versatility with language that a lot of people did. So if he’d get a
Buddy DeSylva to write a lyric for him, or Howard Johnson, he’d be in
great shape. Later Al Lewis and other people. He had a lot of wonderful
friends in the business who worked with him. But Dad was always relied
upon to come up with an idea. Like “if you saw what I saw swimming in a
see-saw in Nassau by sea . . .” And the guy would write a hell of a song
based on Dad’s opening line. And he told us, “If you can’t do that, don’t be
a songwriter.”
That’s why we have so many unique words. We were always digging
for something nobody else had done. Like “Fortuosity” or “Bratifaction” or
“Supercalifragilistic,” I mean nobody did them. That’s why we did them. It
was Dad’s teaching. He said, “You’ve got to grab hold of somebody. You’ve
got to make them turn around and say, ‘What’s that?’”

You said he initially didn’t want you to become songwriters. Did he

ever change his mind?
Yes. Bob and I were both going off in different directions. We were both
out of college and living in this little tiny apartment. Out of necessity. There
was no question [laughs] that we couldn’t afford two apartments. We had a
little apartment over a cleaning store. Right on Pico Boulevard. Bob is
typing away at his novel every day. And I am at the piano, writing my great
musicals and my great thematic statements that I was gonna put into a
symphony one day. We were just kids, and I was in my early twenties. Bob
was about twenty-four or twenty-five. One day Dad came in and sat down
and said, “I bet the two of you don’t got enough brains between the two of
you to write a pop song that some kid wouldn’t give up his lunch money to
buy.” [Laughs] “And, you know, I don’t think you have the brains for it.”
Then he got up and left. It was the gauntlet.

He was challenging you?

Oh sure! I remember he said, “Listen to the radio. Listen to what’s being
done. And then do one better.”
And it wasn’t easy. It was hard. But we said, just for the hell of it, let’s
try one. So we started toying with ideas. And once a week Dad would come
over and listen to our stuff and say, “This has been done a thousand times.
There’s nothing new here. I expect this tune to go from here to here because
that’s your statement. But you’ve got to surprise me.”
He kept making us jump hurdles. To make it better, better, better. And
one day we got a real hook, a genuine hook. Because we were talking about
money. And wanted to write a song about money. We thought, “Gold, that’s
a good word.” So we started playing with that. And we thought, “You know
you can buy everything but you can’t buy love with it. You can’t buy love.
Gold can buy anything—but love.” And there was our title. “But Love.”
The “But Love” was the trick. So we had a hook. And that was the first
time we actually had a hook in a song. We had a statement: “Love, love,
love, you can’t buy love. Gold can buy most anything. Anything but love.”
It was just a gimmick, and we felt, yeah, now we have something strong.
Dad came over and said, “Yeah. Vine Street’s over there. There’s a lot
of publishers there. I’ll tell ya a couple of publishers who might want a song
like this.” He gave us some names, and he steered us. He told us where to
go and who to speak to and how to demonstrate it. He said, “Dickie, you’re
gonna go demonstrate it. And sing it with all your heart. Don’t be shy.”
’Cause I used to hold back. He said, “Sell it!” And we got our first song
recorded. And by none other than Gene Autry, the number-one country-
western singer in the country in 1951. On Columbia Records. And we were
absolutely over the moon.
Our song was called “Gold Can Buy Anything (But Love).” And
basically what happened was that it started breaking as one of the biggest
hits in the country. And at the time General Douglas MacArthur made a
speech in front of Congress. He’d been called back by Truman because he’d
overstepped the 38th Parallel. He had overridden the orders of the president.
And like MacArthur thought he was God. So he was recalled and he had to
retire from the Army. And he made a very famous speech and ended by
saying, “I want to conclude with an old ballad we used to sing when I was a
cadet,” and it was “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” And that
same day Autry recorded “Old Soldiers Never Die,” and our song was
pulled off the presses and never saw the light of day. And we wanted to kill
ourselves. We were up on top of the world, and all of a sudden we were
crashing.
Our dad said, “That’s called a curve. If you can’t stand a curve, you get
out of the game.”
We learned that real fast. And many a curve occurred over the next
several years. We had songs recorded; we had activity. But no hits for a
long time.

Would you both work on words and music?

We sat in a room together—I’d sit at the piano, he’d sit at his desk—
we’d scream at each other and write ideas. And I’d say, “No, no, no, let’s do
it this way.” It was a mutual thing. We both collaborated on everything.

That’s unusual, as you know. Often one does music, one does lyrics.
Yeah, it’s not that way in our team. I write music, I write words; Bob
heavily edits what I do. And he also writes lyrics very well. And we both
come up with ideas—it’s a mutual thing.

Will he have musical ideas?

Well, he can say, “Maybe you should do a lilting ballad.” He would start
me on something. We’d always start with an idea. With every single song
we have done there are three parts: the reason for a song, what it’s going to
be about, why write it. And therefore we didn’t just say, “I love you, I need
you, I miss you, I want you, I lost you, you’ve come back to me, please.”
Everybody has written those things. You’ve got to come up with something
special. It’s different. Our songs usually had a hook or a twist. Even if they
were lousy, they were original. They were different.
So at first you didn’t have one publisher—
No, no, no. [Laughs] Whoever would take our things. Eventually what
happened is our luck broke when Bob decided he had enough
disappointments with various publishers who would take the songs and
forget them or lie or cheat or do something else. So he decided to be his
own publisher, and he started a company called Music World Corporation;
that was his company. One day I saw him he said, “If you have any song
ideas and nobody else wants them, bring them to me.” I was writing by
myself and with people. One day I came over to his office with a song idea,
and he and his partner were working on a song. To support myself and to
keep my head above water, I was an artificial flower installer. Doing that in
dentists’ offices and mortuaries and private homes and wherever I could do
it. And writing at night and selling my songs in the afternoon. But in the
morning I’d get up in the bright, early part of the day and build a manzanita
bush [laughs] or build a rubber tree somewhere. That’s the way I made a
living. I made enough money to pay my rent and pay for my demo records.
One day I had this idea. I was driving along going to a job, early in the
morning. On Melrose Avenue at the time there was a store, and it was called
the Tall Girl Shop. And the word “tall” was not written horizontally, it was
written vertically. TALL girls. And I looked at it and all of a sudden a new
world happened. And I thought, “Tall. That’s a wonderful word. What
rhymes with ‘tall’? Paul rhymes with tall. Tall Paul, that’s a good title!
Nobody’s written ‘Tall Paul.’ Now there’s a grabber. You can go over every
book in the business. See, nobody’s written Tall Paul.” I thought, “Hey,
there’s an idea about the tallest kid in the class, and there’s his girlfriend.” I
had this whole concept going, and I came into Bob’s office, not with that
idea but with a ballad I had written. And he was working on this song with
this fellow, and they were writing a song with “Chalk on a sidewalk /
Initials on a tree, everybody knows it, he loves me . . .” They were playing
like a teenage pop song.
The phone rang and a guy named Frank Babcock called and said he had
a little girl named Judy Harriet and “She has a terrific voice. I need a little
teenage girl song. Do you got anything?” And Bob said, “Do we got
anything for a teenage girl?” And I said, “I got a title,” and he said, “Okay,
we got a song. Come over.” So in about thirty-five or forty minutes we
wrote “Tall Paul.” We changed the words they had to “Chalk on the
sidewalk / Writing on the wall / Everybody knows it / I love Paul / Tall
Paul, Tall Paul, he’s my all.” It sort of rolled out, and it was a teenage
rocker, which was exactly what he was looking for.
It was really the turning point in our career. We had never written
anything like it before, and so my brother, Bob—and Bob Roberts, his
collaborator at the time—we wrote this song. [Babcock] came over, and he
loved it. Judy made a record, and it didn’t break. Nothing big happened
with it. Except a guy named Moe Briscell in New York City, who had
gotten a memo from the Disney people, which said that Annette Funicello
still has about five months to go on her contract, she’s the last of the
Mouseketeers, and we were looking for some teenage rock songs for her
because she’s still very popular. So he was listening to the radio going to
work from New Jersey, on his way to the bridge to get over to New York,
and he heard this song by Judy Harriet. He turned his car around, went to
the radio station in New Jersey, and found out who wrote this song. Then he
made a deal with Bob to get the rights. So they split the copyright between
Disney [laughs]—the major Disney company!—and my brother’s little
company. And they published “Tall Paul.”
It was then recorded by Camarata with Annette Funicello. We doubled
her voice ’cause she had a little voice. We added echo to her voice, and it
became the Annette sound. A fantastic thing. And it became her sound. And
it was a huge hit.

So you produced it yourself?

Yes. We worked with Judy, and we had recorded so many bad singers
who couldn’t sing, so we used to use a trick, having them sing one version
and dropping it into a deep echo and then duplicate it on top of it so it
sounded like a bigger voice. And with Annette it worked perfectly, because
she was perfect with her synchronization. So it was a great sound. It
penetrated.
She was not a great singer, but she was a good singer. She sang right on
pitch. And so we doubled her voice. And then she had one successful record
after the other. Many were ours, because they asked us to keep writing for
her. “Pineapple Princess” was another record she had, and “Jo-Jo the Dog-
Faced Boy,” “Wild Willie.” Fifteen songs.
“Tall Paul” was rock and roll. As were those others. Was becoming
rock and roll writers something you wanted?
We said, “We’ve got to write a song. What’s selling?” Rock was selling.
We started studying rock. Listening to how Leiber and Stoller wrote a song.
I mean, they were the masters at it.

And like you, they produced their own records—

We were more interested in the writing. Although we did have to
produce records. Because not everybody was running after us. We were on
the periphery.
But then we had a giant hit with Johnny Burnette, “You’re Sixteen.”
That was another gimmick. We wanted to give the listeners something they
hadn’t heard. They heard so many hard rock beats. But nobody had heard
shuffle rhythms. So basically we said, “Let’s do a shuffle rhythm for the
verse, and then when you get to the chorus, you hit them with a hard rock
beat.” So basically it was all thought out before we wrote anything. But we
had the idea: “You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine.” And we
did it, and it’s exactly the way Johnny Burnette recorded it, because we did
a demo. And we just happened to do the demo with Dorsey Burnette, who
was Johnny’s brother. It was just pure coincidence. The powers that be, out
of Chicago, heard it and said they had Johnny Burnette. And Johnny was
such a talented kid, and he heard the demo his brother did—not knowing it
was his brother—and said, “Hey, I can do that. It sounds just like me!” And
he had a huge hit with it.
So we were not rock and roll writers. But we wrote some songs in that
style.

Funny that “Tall Paul” is about a football hero, which was the subject
of your dad’s famous song.
Dad’s first song that he ever wrote that was published was called “Good
as Gold.” And our first powerful song was “Gold Can Buy Anything.”
Though it wasn’t more than a flash in the pan, it was our first major
published song. So a lot of coincidences happen in this life.

So through Annette you met Walt Disney?

 Yes. He decided to put her into one of his films and wanted her to sing
one of her songs. So he told the people at the studio, “Why don’t you get
those young guys who are writing songs for Annette?” ’Cause we had done
a lot of songs for her. Four albums. We’d write three or four songs and then
get standards, all classics, and put them together. And her albums were all
selling lots of stuff.
So Walt recognized our stuff and liked our songs. He said, “Get those
brothers, I want to meet them,” and that’s how it all began, really.

What was your first meeting with Walt Disney like?

We met in his office suite at his studio in Burbank, California. We drove
out there with a little song we had written. We played it for Jimmy Johnson,
who was head of the music department. He liked it very much and said,
“Now you’ve got to play it for Walt.” We said, “Walt who?” He said, “Walt
Disney, of course.”
I said, “Walt Disney? We’ve got to make a demo for him. We can’t just
sing it.” Jimmy said no, that’s how he likes it—he didn’t like demos.
Because he could hear through to the end result. He knew what he wanted
to hear and could hear it through the performance. He was an unusual man.
He was a great, great producer, the greatest I have ever worked with. An
imagination beyond anybody’s belief. He could grasp an abstract concept
and refine it right there on the spot. He was an amazing man.

Was he intimidating?
Anything but. He was very sweet and friendly and nice. I mean,
knowing who he was, you were intimidated. But he was very friendly. His
opening line to us was, “Are you two really brothers? Or is it just an act like
in vaudeville?”
We said, “We’re really brothers, Mr. Disney.”
He said, “Walt. I don’t like Mister.” He put you at your ease. Then he’d
say, “When I was young I was in a vaudeville act with my friend Walt
Feiffer. We called ourselves The Johnson Brothers. And why? Because we
found some cards that said The Johnson Brothers. And it was just a
business.” So I told him, no, we had the same mother and father. And he got
a kick out of that.
 When he’d listen to a song, he’d never, ever say, “Great, wonderful,
perfect.” He only said, “That’ll work.” With a straight, bland face. Basically
he gave us one assignment after another. Always different. He gave us
something to write for Zorro, the TV show. He had us do songs for a
Western series. An assignment for German lieder. He was testing us and
accepted everything. For The Parent Trap—which was called at first We
Belong Together—he wanted to have a song about divorced parents. He
wanted to find out what was their song. So we didn’t just write a song; we
figured out that if this picture comes out in 1961, and the girl is fourteen,
we had to think 1946. Get a love song from 1946. So we wrote a song
called “For Now for Always,” which sounds exactly like something Dick
Haymes or Perry Como would sing from back then. Very smooth lines. A
very warm, lovely, loving concept. Totally different than anything that was
being played in the popular market. And we played it for Walt, and when
we finished he said, “How come you wrote it like that?” We gave him our
concept. So he said, “You think story, don’t you?” We told him we always
thought story. ’Cause every time we wrote a song we’d think who’s singing
it, where is he singing it, what year is it happening. If we wrote a Western, it
sounded like a Western. Everything we ever did, we always would box in
where we were going. Those were the buttons we’d push. I hate
anachronism in music. When you’re doing modern music in a period piece.
The first day we met him he reached around and pulled out a book and
said, “You know what a nanny is?” We said, “Sure, it’s a goat.” We thought
maybe this was a story about an enchanted goat or something. He laughed
and said, “No, no, no, I am talking about an English nursemaid.” So he
handed us this book and said, “Read this and tell me what you think.” Now,
he never said that to us before. He always said, “I need a title song for this,”
or “Here’s a lonely girl missing her boyfriend—write a song for her.” But
this time he said, “Here’s a book. Tell me what you think.” The book was
called Mary Poppins by Pamela Travers. The rest is history.
Mary Poppins is something we worked on for three and a half years. It
didn’t come out till 1964. We were at the studio for four years. We came
back with our ideas about Mary Poppins, and he must have flipped ’cause
he put us under contract. He put us to work for him. We worked on
everything that came out of the studio. We wrote song after song. He loved
everything we did. Rarely did he ever tell us to do something again. He was
very succinct in what he wanted, and we could read him.

And you always would bring a song directly to him.

Yes. Every time. God, we had something like 160 songs published by
Disney. We wrote every day. Sometimes seven days a week.
Anyway the success of Mary Poppins established us as writers who
could write musicals. Full-fledged musicals. So we never really did pop
music again. We never wrote straight for the pop market. And thank God,
because that’s the hardest thing of all. To sit there in a room and think,
“What are we gonna write about?” I mean, that is so hard. But when you’re
given a story, a situation, a character—it’s a pleasure. It’s great.

Is it true that you and Bob had a lot to do with shaping the story of the
film?
Yes. In the books there is no story line whatsoever. It’s only a series of
brilliant, wonderful, imaginative adventures. But there is no reason for
Mary Poppins to come in in the first place. She doesn’t actually change
anything. It’s magical. Mrs. Travers had invented this wonderful, magical
nanny who brings kids on wonderful adventures. But never explained
anything. So when we read these stories, we realized it needed a story. What
we did was create a story line and used six chapters that we really liked out
of that first book as our basis. It had the jumping into sidewalk picture and
things like that. Which we felt was a marvelous idea. And Uncle Albert
floating around in the air. And the old lady who sells bread crumbs. We
thought that could be not just the lady but the meaning of the story. The
father is not paying enough attention to the family, and the mother is busy
doing her thing. So Mary Poppins teaches them a life lesson—that it’s
important for them to stick together and care for each other. This was our
concept.

And you changed the time it took place?

Yes, we did. It was in the Depression, London, 1934 era. Yucch. There
was no character in the music; everything was imitation American pop
songs in England. But at the turn of the century they had a wonderful music
flavor. They had music hall. And I loved that music hall. They had a
wonderful ragtag sound they used to do, funny novelty songs like “Boiled
Leaf and Carrots.” Things like that. “Any old iron, any old iron . . .” Crazy
songs. I loved those songs. And that’s what gave us the trigger to do things.
I remember sitting in our little office with this little red book and
thinking, “What are we gonna knock Walt’s socks off with? Let’s do
something with one of those crazy words like we used to do in summer
camp. An obnoxious word. Yeah, let’s start with ‘obnoxious.’ And it has to
be super-colossal.” So that’s how we started. Because Mary Poppins will
teach the kids to say it, and it will feel good. And we felt “obnoxious” is
really ugly. So why don’t we say “atrocious”? It’s an English story. That
sounds a lot better, and you can sound like you’re really smart and you’re
precocious. So you have atrocious, precocious, and that could rhyme with
“docious”—yes. But super-colossal—everybody and their Uncle Harry
would write that. So we dropped out the “colossal” and said,
“Supercalifragilistic.” It just sounded like something big. ’Cause we would
yell out of the car when we were kids, “Your galvinator rod is dragging.”
And everyone would say, “My galvinator rod?” And there is no galvinator
rod. So we went with “supercalifragilistic”—from galvinator. That was
Dad’s trick. He came up with these great word sounds and put them
together.
We thought it wouldn’t be sung by anybody but these Pearlies. These
guys who would dress up with pearly buttons. At the racetracks in England,
they have pearly bands, families who would dress up with pearly buttons.
And it was the kind of song they would do.
Walt said, “Why do you call this the ‘Pearly Song’?”
We said because there was nobody else who could possibly pronounce
“Supercalifragilistic.” He said, “That’s your title!” We said, “Okay, Walt.”

Was that the first song you finished for Mary Poppins?
No, the first song was “Feed the Birds.” We wrote that before we met
with him. That first meeting was a turning point in our life. We played him
“Feed the Birds.” Said this is the story of the lady who sells breadcrumbs.
We think it means a lot. We spent a lot of time with him. He sent out for
sandwiches, and we had lunch with him. He was as enthusiastic as we were.
He said, “Play me that bird lady again.” We only had sixteen bars, the feel,
and the main chorus of it. He said, “That’s what the whole story is about,
right?” We told him how Mary is needed to help this dysfunctional family.
And then when she sets things up, she leaves. He liked the period thing.
We said, “Yes, Walt, that is what it’s all about.”
He said, “How would you like to come and work for me here?” And
that was the day he put us under contract, and it changed our lives.
Bob had an office on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. But when Walt
put us under contract we gave up the office. And we went to work for
Disney and moved to the studio. For eight years we were full-time contract
players out there. And we have had a fifty-year relationship with the studio.
We’ve done things for [Disneyland]. We did things for Epcot.

As a kid we so loved the Mary Poppins album. We cherished it, and in a

good part because of the great range of music on it.
That was a big turning point in our lives. We wrote thirty-five songs for
it. We were exploring chapters and exploring situations and ways to do
things. When we weren’t working on other things we would always work
on Poppins. It was the back-burner project. Eventually the best writer in the
whole studio, Bill Walsh, wrote the script. Using our story frame. The story
frame was Walt Disney, Don DaGradi, Bob, and myself. We made a story
out of it. And that’s when Mrs. Travers came and gave us the okay. Because
she was a tough cookie. Walt didn’t have the complete rights until she said
yes. She finally signed off on it. That’s a whole story in itself. She finally
acquiesced. And Bill Walsh wrote a witty script, and we added some new
songs.

Did you write the arrangements?

No. That was a musician named Irwin Kostal. He did West Side Story
and Sound of Music. He read the way we felt, and I could sing it for him,
and he could hear the end product. So many guys can’t. They put their own
personal stamp on it. We said, “We want it to be vanilla. We want it to be
1910.” So you would have none of these diminished chords or things you
heard in later contemporary music. And he said, “I am going to make this
song the way you want it.” And that’s what he did. We did five movies with
him. We did Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlotte’s Web,
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and The Magic of Lassie. All with Irving
Kostal. He was great. And a sweetheart. A wonderful guy.
Your song “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from Mary Poppins won the Oscar for
Best Song of the Year. And became the most famous song from that
show.
We were playing around. Don DaGradi found a chapter in a later
Poppins book. Mary Poppins shakes hands with this sooty little man, this
chimney sweep. And she says, “Don’t you know it’s lucky when you shake
with a sweep.” Don found that story and drew a picture of a chimney sweep
whistling, walking down a foggy London street, with his brushes slung over
his shoulder. And Bob and I saw that picture. Don told us about that
chapter, and right away we knew this was a song. We’re gonna write a song
about a chimney sweep. It was born right there. We went back to our room
and started playing with the word “chimney.” We started playing with how
we would get into the word “chimney” pronounced “chim-a-ney”—then
“Chim, chim-a-ney.” And nobody had ever written “Chim Chim Cher-ee.”
That is a completely created word. So we said that is what it’s gonna be.
Now we have to find out what it is.
So we said, “Now that the ladder of life / Has been strung / You might
think of sweeps on the bottommost rung / . . . Spending time with the ashes
and smoke / . . . There is no more happier bloke . . .”
Basically we’re telling the story of this little chimney sweep. Later we
learned that if he blows you a kiss, that is lucky. So we added that: “So
blow me a kiss and that’s lucky too . . .” We put that all together. It was this
magical thing. That the moment we got inspired by the chimney sweep, it
was magic.

That one has a lovely minor-key melody. In C minor, I believe?

Yes, it’s C minor, but it changes. Because there’s that chromatic line that
keeps going down. So it isn’t too Russian or Middle Eastern. It adds a kind
of English flavor too. Because originally it was written with strictly all
minor chords. And I loved it but I hated it. I felt, why is it so heavy? And
then I thought I would reinvent the thing. And I put that descending line in.
And already it changes the color: you get a pastel color, and it’s not so
heavy.

Which many people have imitated since, in so many songs—

 Yeah. A lot of times. But imitation is the highest form of flattery. This is
stuff musicians know. I reharmonized the basic feel. And it sounds like a
folk song. Which is cool too.
We thought maybe we should put a bridge on it and going into another
key. And my brother said [in gruff voice], “This is it. This is right. Don’t
change it. Christ, you’re gonna screw it up.”

Did you two generally agree on most stuff?

We came from different angles. Which was nice. We were totally
different. Built differently. Many times he’s right, and many times I’m right.
And we had to find a middle ground. We never showed a song to anyone if
we didn’t both agree that this was as good as we can do it. That is what kept
us going. These little simple agreements that kept us going over the years.
Because all brothers have differences and disagreements. So we sort of kept
apart so that nothing would get in the way of the work. We always agreed.
“Chim Chim Cher-ee” was a major song in our life. It won the Academy
Award. Perhaps if I had prevailed and we put a bridge into it, it wouldn’t
have been quite as charismatic. And perhaps if I hadn’t have been sick of
that Russian sound in there—it was a good lyric, the lyric stayed the same, I
was happy with the feeling in it, and it was driving me nuts.
Or the song “Jolly Holiday.” That’s the only time you play the melody
in the key of C. It starts on D, on the second chord in the key. But in order
to get that, you need five chord changes to get there. And I never had those
chords to make it work. For two years I was working on it! And one night I
got it! And that is what everybody takes for granted. [Sings] “You feel so
grand, your heart starts beating like a big brass band . . . boom.” Six
different chords to that phrase. If I had a piano, I could show you better.
These are things, I remember them, because it’s such a key element in my
career having that credibility. Because once we succeeded with Mary
Poppins, other producers would give us a whole picture. Not just one song
but a whole picture.

You wrote many songs for Mary Poppins that weren’t used?
Yes, many.

Weren’t used because Walt didn’t want them or you didn’t want them?
 No, no, because the story didn’t need them. We wrote four songs for a
sequence called the “Magic Compass” sequence. Which we didn’t use. We
worked on it for months, and one day Walt said, “You know, that compass
sequence, you really don’t need it, because we can go from here to here and
you’ll have a much smoother line . . .” And when you’re working for a
master like that and you have so much love and respect, you say, “Okay,
Walt.”

Walt Disney—
And he could hear through my singing to what a gorgeous, beautiful
little girl’s voice or what a beautiful little character voice would sound like,
through my performance.

Were you the one who would always sing?

I’m the demonstrator, yeah. I did the singing and playing. Bob sort of
suffered along with me. [Laughs]

Would you work nine to five at Disney?

No. We’d come in when we’d feel like it. Nine thirty or ten in the
morning. That is when Walt was there. When Walt left it became a machine.
A different kind of studio. You had to have your time cards and garbage like
that. With Walt, just turn in the work. And we’d sometimes stay till seven or
eight working. We just loved it. We’d come in on the weekends and
worked. We could always do it when we wanted to. As long as we met our
deadlines and things he needed, we were free. He was that way with all his
artists. Nobody punched a clock.

The songs you and Bob wrote for Poppins and others all seemed so
inspired. Could you always come up with something, every day, or were
there days you ran dry?
[Sighs] See, that’s the good thing about having a collaborator. If I was
dry, Bob would come up with something. If he was dry, I would come up
with something. We both were workhorses. We loved to work. I don’t think
there was ever a time when we both looked at each other and said, “I can’t
come up with anything.” One of us would come up with something. And
we’d come in the next day with a fresh idea. We’d scribble down some idea
or title. And come in and say, “Hey, yeah! We can do something with that!”
And Bob and I were professionals. A professional doesn’t wait for the
muse to come and loft in—you sit down and you work. If you have the
ability to do it and you’re inspired by an idea, Bob and I have always said,
“The idea, the idea, the idea.” Anyone can write notes and words. It’s the
idea that motors the whole thing.
We were very lucky. To be in the right room at the right time with the
right producer. Here’s your work with the right recording artist. You know
you can have the most marvelous song in the world and the wrong ears hear
it or somebody doesn’t hear through your rendition of it to a final
performance. But I was lucky. Bob and I were signed by the finest
storyteller of the last century.

OceanofPDF.com
Jeff Barry
 River Deep Mountain High
Burbank, California 2015

“You know what Kitty Hawk was?” he asks with laughing eyes. “That’s
where the Wright Brothers rolled their first plane off the hill to get it to fly.
And that’s what we were doing. We were inventing modern pop. At least
the New York sound of it, and it was great.”
There was a “vacuum,” as he put it, into which he and his partner in
song and life, Ellie Greenwich, introduced a remarkable profusion of
exultant hit songs and records that painted the sonic landscape of the early
sixties and beyond. In 1964, the same year the music of The Beatles was
first played on American radio, they had seventeen songs on the pop charts.
Seventeen songs! And each a deliciously infectious pop treasure concocted
by a husband-wife team in love with the unchained promise of the new
American pop song.
The previous year, 1963, they wrote “Be My Baby,” which is not only
one of the most famous songs of our time but also equally famous as a
record, produced by Phil Spector. Brian Wilson (see page 271) called it “the
greatest pop record ever.” Others have declared it “the Rosetta Stone for
studio pioneers.” It was tailor-made for the siren sound of Ronnie Spector
and the Ronettes. She possessed the perfect voice for the task: soulful,
deeply in the pocket, expressive, and full of yearning. It was also right in
that sonic zone where it cut through all the production like butter, delivering
that beautiful tune and lyric with remarkable power and grace. John Lennon
so loved the record that not only did he listen to it repeatedly for weeks, he
cut the song himself years later for a solo album.
Brian Wilson famously said that he first heard it on the radio while
driving on the Pacific Coast Highway and had to pull over and park so as
not to crash while taking in this miraculous song. “It blew my mind,” Brian
said. According to legend confirmed, he’d go into the studio and listen to it
over and over. The engineer said, “I’d like to have a nickel for every joint
Brian Wilson smoked trying to figure out how I got the ‘Be My Baby’
sound.” He’s said to have listened to that song in excess of a hundred times
a day. “Don’t Worry Baby” is the song he wrote for The Beach Boys’
response.
“To this day, all these years later, it still does it for me. There is so much
love in that record, in that song, in that vocal. It’s a miracle.”
Had Jeff written only this one song, he’d matter. But he and Ellie, in
love with each other and with music, wrote successive classic songs
together, including “Chapel of Love,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Hanky
Panky,” “River Deep—Mountain High.” He wrote “Sugar, Sugar” with
Andy Kim, and with Peter Allen he wrote, “I Honestly Love You,” a giant
hit in 1974 for Olivia Newton-John.
Jeff is also one of the rare ones who has given back to this industry in so
many ways. He was the chairman of the board for several years of the
National Academy of Songwriters, the nonprofit organization that also
employed this author, for twelve great years, to be the editor of their
journal, SongTalk. Jeff worked there in an unpaid position to educate,
inform, and support songwriters at all stages of their career.
He was born Joel Adelberg on April 3, 1938, in beautiful Brooklyn,
New York. Before meeting and working with Ellie he recorded several
singles for RCA, including “It’s Called Rock and Roll,” which he also
wrote. Then the great Sam Cooke recorded his song “Teenage Sonata,”
which became a hit. And “Tell Laura I Love Her,” which he wrote with Ben
Raleigh, was a number-one hit in the United States by Ray Peterson and a
number one in the UK for British singer Ricky Valance.
Jeff and Ellie officially met in late 1959 but quite possibly had met
earlier, as they were actually distant cousins. But it was at a Thanksgiving
dinner when they formally met, bonding over turkey and talk of music.
Before even teaming up as a songwriting duo, they put out a record. The
song was written by Jeff and called “Red Corvette,” and the band was
credited as Ellie Gee and the Jets. At the same time Leiber and Stoller [see
page 26] had offered each a job as staff writers for their publishing
company, Trio Music.
In October of 1962 they got married and decided to write together
exclusively. It was through Ellie that Phil Spector came into their picture,
and the Barry-Greenwich-Spector triumvirate created successive classic
records, all the essence of the girl-group sound: The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron
Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me,” The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and “Baby,
I Love You,” and more.
In that magic year 1964 Leiber and Stoller invited Jeff and Ellie to
become staff songwriter-producers for their label, Red Bird Records. Some
fifteen Barry-Greenwich songs hit the charts, and all became hits: “Chapel
of Love,” “People Say,” and “Iko Iko” by The Dixie Cups, and “Remember
(Walkin’ in the Sand),” and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las. “Do
Wah Diddy Diddy,” originally recorded by the girl group The Exciters,
became a reworked number-one hit by British Invasion darlings Manfred
Mann.
Although they got divorced in 1965, they continued working together.
Always on the lookout for genuine talent, they found Neil Diamond and
brought him to the attention of Bert Berns, a famous songwriter who also
ran Bang Records. Berns signed him, and Barry and Greenwich produced
Neil’s famous first records, including “Solitary Man,” “Cherry, Cherry,”
“Kentucky Woman,” and “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” It was the same
time they teamed up with Phil Spector to work on “River Deep—Mountain
High” by Ike and Tina Turner, and “I Can Hear Music” by The Ronettes
and The Beach Boys. All of which is discussed in the following.
One of his most poignant songs, however, was never a big hit but
remains one of his most beautiful songs and most moving song-origin story.
“Walking in the Sun” was recorded by soul legend Percy Sledge and
revolves around a single line of truth. It’s a line, like many we find in pop
songs, that we might find perhaps insubstantial but is, in fact, the core of the
thing. It is also, to me, an ideal organic metaphor for recognition of the
divine and does resonate that way. But Jeff, whose father was blind, insists
this is literal and not a metaphor: “And even a blind man can tell when he’s
walking in the sun.”
Either way it’s a deeply personal image for Jeff Barry, and it’s there that
our discussion begins.
This interview was conducted in front of a live audience at the
Songwriting School of Los Angeles as part of a web series I am doing with
the school called Songwriters on Songwriting Live. Jeff agreed to do this
because he’s a steadfast believer in the value of songwriting education and
even offered to take home songs by any students wanting his feedback.
Throughout the show we had many great vocalists sing his famous songs, a
delightful musical journey—that ranged from complex (“River Deep—
Mountain High”) to very simple (“Hanky Panky”) to exultant soulful pop
(“Be My Baby”) and beyond—that said more than words ever could about
the great span of this one man’s body of work.
I took advantage of the opportunity to perform myself his song
“Walking in the Sun,” and it’s with that song that our conversation began.

Jeff Barry: I’m probably the only songwriter in the world who could
have written that song—or would have—because my father was blind, and I
grew up with a blind father. And also a mentally retarded sister. So that’s
probably one of the reasons I don’t use metaphor. I like to say I don’t even
use meta-three.
Because if you think about it, when you try to communicate with
someone who can’t see, your references have to be other than the visual.
And when you’re trying to communicate with someone who is mentally
handicapped, you have to be simple, succinct, and very clear to both of
them. And I realized way into my life and career that first I’m a lyricist,
melody second, and chords a distant third.
I was fourteen years old. I was with my father, and he was an insurance
salesman, and we lived in Brooklyn, but he’d have to go to Manhattan once
in a while. On this one afternoon I would go with him, and we were coming
back, and it was late in the afternoon in New York City. The sun is on an
angle, we’re walking, and it’s chilly. Probably in the fall sometime.
And my father, who’s the blind one, [laughs] says, “Is the sun out across
the street?”
And I didn’t think of that, and I look and go, “Yeah, it is.”
 So we crossed over and walked on that side, probably going to the
subway to go back to Brooklyn.
Many years later I had my offices at A&M Records, and Jerry Moss
said, “Why don’t you write for yourself and make an album?” What the hell
—why not? So I had no idea what to write, and this song came out, and it
wasn’t until years later I realized it was because of that incident that I wrote
“Even a blind man can tell when he’s walkin’ in the sun.”
And it’s a cool truth that probably I am the only one who might have
had an experience like that and gone on to be a songwriter. So that’s that.

You wrote the song, and that line just came out?
Yeah. It just came out, because I sat down to write for me. I didn’t know
what that was about, writing for me. So whatever came out, came out.

Percy Sledge cut that song—a great, soulful record.

Glen Campbell had it on the country chart too. A whole different record.

That one you wrote alone. But most of your songs you’ve cowritten.
Yes. I like to write with people who know all the chords. [Laughter]

You famously wrote with Ellie Greenwich, who was your wife. But
before you and Ellie wrote together, you each were writing with other
people. So what brought you and Ellie together?
Ellie and I met, as the story goes, when she was three and I was four.
[Crowd laughs] Her cousin married my cousin, and we were at some family
thing. Fade out, fade in. Twenty-some-odd years later, she was graduating
from Hofstra College, studying music. And I had had some hits already, and
they said, “You guys should meet,” which we did. And we kept on meeting.
And we were married for about three years and had a whole bunch of hits.
And unfortunately Ellie passed on a couple of years ago. She was great,
obviously—a great singer, great person.

It’s unusual that there were several husband-wife teams writing

together: Goffin and King, Mann and Weil.
That’s what it was. It was Barry and Greenwich, Goffin and King, Mann
and Weil. We were the three married couples. We were all friends; we all
kind of started out together. The sixties is when this is all happening. We
were actually in the Brill Building. And it was what I call Kitty Hawk. You
know what Kitty Hawk was? That’s where the Wright Brothers roll their
first plane off the hill, and hey, it flies. [Laughter]
And that’s what we were doing. We were inventing modern pop, at least
the New York sound of it, and it was great. I mean, the word “retro” didn’t
exist. We were creating what’s today’s retro. [Laughter] And there was
really nothing to look back at. It was all just making up the rules.

Now, my understanding of the Brill Building is you go in, and you’d be

in cubicles.
They called it cubicles. They were rooms.

Okay, you’re in your own room.

Yeah, we had a room. It was kind of nice.

So you’d go in and work every day, every day, on songs, writing songs?
Yeah, but no, it was fun. We didn’t work. I feel like I’ve never worked a
day in my life.

With Goffin and King and Mann and Weil, one did the words and one
the music. But you and Ellie did both, is that right?
Yeah. I mean, I kind of did the lyrics.

But you also brought musical ideas.

Yeah, I don’t write lyrics; I sing ’em. And the melody—it would either
stick or not.

And she would bring the chords?

Yeah. When Ellie passed away, somebody sent me an obituary from
someone in the Midwest somewhere saying how remarkable it was that she
had the ability to tap into the teenage girl’s psyche.

And Ellie was a really great singer and performer.

Absolutely.
You guys had a group called The Raindrops. Were some of the songs
you were writing for yourself?
Yeah. We formed The Raindrops. I’m not sure really why. I guess
because we could. Know what I mean? We could do anything we wanted.
We had twelve things in the Top Ten. No one’s going to say no.

Did you write “Hanky Panky” for yourself?

When you book a band, you have them for three hours, period. Three
hours, you’re done. Anyway, whatever song it was we were going in to
record, we made the tracks first for the Raindrops. We got done in, I’d say,
two hours.
A lot of the time in a session is at the beginning, when the engineer has
to get the sounds on the drums. The kick, the snare, the hi-hats, and all that.
And then get the sound on the guitar and the piano and the bass. That can
take at least a half hour. And then you have two and a half hours left. But
whatever it was we went in to do, we were done.
So I said, “Wait a minute. When we put an album out, if you put a
single out from the album, if somebody buys the single, they already have
two of the songs on the album. Doesn’t seem fair.” I said, “Look. Let’s go
out in the hall and write a simple, simple song that we will only put on the
B-side of the single for the next Raindrops single. And if somebody buys
the album, they’ll have nine new songs,” which I thought was pretty nice.
The lesson is, be nice. [Laughter] I’m very serious about that, by the way.
So we did that, put out the next single.
Tommy James was a fan, he bought the single. He turned it over and
listened to the other side and cut “Hanky Panky.” So because of being nice,
we had a big hit. It’s true.

And how long did it take to write “Hanky Panky”?

Twenty minutes. [Laughs] If that.

It’s interesting that you guys had your own group, because that was
right before the time when the singer-songwriter emerged, and Carole
King obviously became a singer-songwriter. Songwriting shifted when
people started writing for themselves.
 True. We were still looking for artists, and sometimes they were great
songwriters too. We discovered and produced Neil Diamond, who was one
of the biggest stars ever.

He wrote “I’m a Believer,” which you produced.

I produced that with The Monkees. That was the Record of the Year.
I produced Record of the Year twice. That and “Sugar, Sugar” by the
Archies. That one I get a real kick out of because the Archies didn’t exist as
a real group. It was a comic book that they were bringing to TV, and they
called and said, “Do you want to do this?”
I said, “Well, yeah, but I don’t want to just, like, rewrite ‘Happy
Birthday’ and all those PD [public domain] melodies.”
They said, “Duh, that’s why we’re calling you.” [Laughter]
So it was a group that didn’t exist—Record of the Year, 11 million
singles, by a group that did not exist, a song that was written for
preschoolers. [Laughs] Really, that was the assignment. It was going to be
on Saturday morning TV for preschoolers. Which I had at the time. I had a
three- and a four-year-old.

It came out in 1969, when I was ten and just starting to write songs. We
were a little past preschool, but we all loved it. That was the essence of
what they termed “bubblegum” pop—but it was great.
You know where the term “bubblegum” comes from? A song called
“Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy)” [written in 1968 by
Arthur Resnick and Joey Levine; recorded by 1910 Fruitgum Company].
Some writer dubbed that “bubblegum,” so anything that was cute became
“bubblegum.”
But someone was talking to me about it and why I don’t write other
things. She said, “Because I’m not stupid. Write something for an adult,
will you?”
And I said, “You know, you’re right.” I said, “The other day I was
reading a poem by Rod McKuen, and it said something about ‘the
loveliness of loving you.’”
She said, “That’s what you should write.”
I said, “Really? That’s from ‘Sugar, Sugar.’” [Laughter]
It is remarkable that you and Ellie wrote and produced so many great
songs in this one time, and at the same time, your peers were writing
some of their greatest songs. Do you have any idea what enabled so
many powerful songs to emerge at the same time?
There was a vacuum. A disc jockey by the name of Alan Freed said the
words “rock and roll” on the radio for the first time in 1955. That’s the
cornerstone of when rock and roll, modern pop, whatever you call it, began.
And that’s when the rhythms of the South were coming up, and lo and
behold, the guitar and drums were the center of everything.
Some of the northern writers were starting to write young songs by
young people for teenagers. Teenagers, kids, were not a market in the
monetary sense until the fifties, when Eisenhower was in and things were
good. There was no war at that time. It was a decade of peace. It was very
strange. And things were good, and kids literally had a buck as allowance.
The word “allowance” was there then.
So the adult writers who were writing for all the artists and bands, the
big bands in the thirties and forties, they tried to adopt and adapt to this
burgeoning market, and I think that’s where songs like “(How Much Is)
That Doggie in the Window?” came from. You know, the writers felt,
“That’s good—the kids will like that.”
But then young people, like myself and Carole and Gerry and Ellie—
literally teenagers—started to write for teenagers about what we were
interested in, which was not puppies. [Laughs] And from when no one was
writing for kids, by the end of the sixties no one was writing for adults
anymore. The market was all kids, all young people. And it was absolutely
wonderful to be there. I mean, I was at ground zero.
I joined BMI in 1958, had my first hit in 1960—first big hit in 1960—
and was pretty much on the charts all through the sixties, and these were
crazy times. There was a vacuum that needed songs to fill it.

Would you guys be always writing, or only when you’d go into work?
Always. I’m writing right now.

Would you come in with ideas—

Probably. [Laughs] I was probably in charge of ideas.
“Be My Baby” famously starts with Hal Blaine on drums. Was that
drum figure your conception?
Yeah, you know, I used to bang on this file cabinet in the office when
we were writing. And that beat is basically called a baion. It’s on every
record today. It’s either that or four on the floor, right?

Yeah.
It’s a Latin baion. Leiber and Stoller (see page 26), they used that on a
lot of stuff. In my fledgling production days that rhythm was always in my
head. It’s constant today. You cannot listen to the radio and not hear [plays
beat]. It’s just there.

Ronnie Spector’s vocal on “Be My Baby” is so powerful. Was that

written with her voice in mind?
No. We would just write songs. [Laughs]

Some of your songs came very fast. Would you distrust them if they
came fast without much work?
No. It all comes easy. We used to feel that working on a song forever,
something’s wrong. It’s a problem. Seriously. It’s maybe an unnatural idea
or title or something’s wrong. If you can’t figure it out, it’s not happening. It
could very well be that there’s something wrong.

Ordinarily would you and Ellie finish things pretty quickly?

In a normal flow. I would say usually it would take two sittings and the
song was done. Not that it wouldn’t necessarily change, even in the studio,
last minute. Somebody’d get an idea about something. It’s never done until
it’s out. Then it’s too late. [Laughter]

Were there ever times when your well ran dry and you had nothing?
No. I have never had writer’s block. Well, there were times when I’d
write something like “Hanky Panky.” Pretty close to writer’s block.
[Laughs]
The challenge of songwriting is how to try to find some angle on this
stuff that hasn’t been covered, because that’s what songs are about. Ninety-
nine and a half percent of things on the charts are about the human
condition, and love is the word that is literally undefined. “Love” is the
most important word, unless you’re not healthy, and then “health” is. We all
want to be, to use the pedestrian word, happy. That’s the word. You need
love to be happy. And for something that’s so important to human
happiness, there’s absolutely no education to it, let alone definition of what
the word means. There’s no education on how to find it, recognize it, keep
it. None. We all get pushed out into the river of life, and it’s like, “Good
luck.” [Laughs] You know?
Some part of me says that if someone would ever figure it out, besides
divorce attorneys being out of business, I think songwriters are out of
business. Because part of the psyche leads us to believe that one of these
songs is going to have the answer.
[Laughs] I have nineteen-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and at this
point I’d love to be able to pass along some advice, something to save one
dark night, one heartbreak. There really, really isn’t much you can say and
pass along, really. So what we’re doing is trying to write about something
that we have no idea what it is. It’s kind of interesting.

You wrote songs with your wife, so that love was not something outside
of you but always there when you were together. Did that affect you?
Did it? I have no idea. I have no idea. We didn’t have kids yet. We had
songs.
So what is the definition of love? Is it not love if it doesn’t last? Is it
only love if it lasts for frigging ever? I don’t know. I don’t profess to know.
Were we in love? Is the answer, “Well, evidently not, because we were only
married for three years”? Or maybe love is for however long it is? It could
be for a “Hi, how are you?” and a chat and be absolutely, totally in love and
never see each other again. I have no idea. Or it could go on and on and on
until death do us part. [Laughter] But that’s another hour and a half we
could do.

You and Ellie continued to write songs after the marriage was over.
How hard was that to do?
That was momentum, honestly. We were never enemies, so it wasn’t
like some ugly thing happened; it just wasn’t anymore. That part of our
relationship which was about the writing, that was still there. So we kept
writing.

After all these years of writing songs, have you any advice to offer
about how best to do it?
I can’t teach songwriting. But I can inspire. You get an idea, something
you want to say. You sit down and you write that verse, and it’s just great.
And then you have a chorus, where also the title is. You write your chorus.
Now, second verse, right? Nothin’. Nothin’ comes! Have you had that
happen to you? Consider this: you already wrote the second verse. It’s your
first verse. You said the meat of it. Take your first verse, make it your
second verse. You’ll see how easy it is to write the pre-, the setup.
I have done it so many times. You say it, and it seems there’s nothing
more to say. But there’s a lot to say.
The other advice is to learn the rules. Here comes the joke, so you’ll
know what not to do. Know the rules, but then see what happens if you
make up your own, because there are no rules. I mean, yeah, if there’s a C
chord, there’s going to probably be a G chord somewhere, you know.
[Laughs] But the important thing is, all art, all creativity, is about one thing.
All art, all showbiz, is about one thing: creating emotion.
The oldest adage in showbiz is, “If you leave ’em like you found ’em,
you blew it.” You’ve got to make them feel something. People pay to have
their emotions move. Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em sad, make
’em happy. Make ’em something.
The shape of the audience for your song is like a football. Your
audience is that fat middle of the football. On one end are people who
you’re not going to try to reach, and on the other end are people you’re not
going to try to reach. But these people in the middle are like you. We’re all
issued the identical set of emotions when we’re born. So if you’re afraid of
it, everybody’s afraid of it. If you love it, everybody loves it, except the
people at the ends. [Laughs] I mean, at the ends are the psychopaths and my
sister. [Laughs]
It’s not a joke. People who aren’t normal, mentally normal. But we’re
not writing for those people. I joke around a lot, but I’m serious. We are
writing for us. If it moves you, it’ll move them. So you never have to worry,
“Is it good or bad?” Do you like it? It’s good. It’s so simple. Twelve notes.
We all have the same book of words—it’s called a dictionary. And the same
set of emotions. So what’s the friggin’ problem here?
I’m writing now, perhaps, more than ever. I am a better songwriter
today. I just have more life behind me, and I’m much more particular. Think
about this: in your songs which note, which word, is not important? They’re
all important. And you write the song and then make sure every word and
every note is as good as you can make it.
But here’s another little hint. I hear myself say this all the time to my
people I’m working with: “We got that line. We got that line. It’s not going
to go away. Let’s see if we can find another way to say it, a more interesting
way to say it. Let’s not do ‘feels so right in the middle of the night.’ Let’s
take that same thought—maybe there’s a cooler, edgier, better, newer way
to say it.”
Don’t be lazy. Don’t be lazy. It’s not genius because it rhymed. Trust
me. And it may not be ever genius. “Genius” is the wrong word. But a lot of
people are very satisfied because it fit in the right amount of bars and it
rhymed. First of all, rhyming is not that important anymore. It’s more the
thought. Nor do the melodies in the first verse have to match exactly. The
chords will be the same and the melody will be close. It doesn’t have to
match exactly. It’s more important to impart the emotion.

In 1966 you and Ellie wrote “River Deep—Mountain High” with Phil
Spector, recorded by Ike and Tina Turner. I understand that Phil
agreed to do this only if Ike wouldn’t be in the studio.
True. I never saw him. I never met him.

Yeah? So he wasn’t there.

No.

And Phil Spector famously spent $20,000 on this one record, which at
the time was like a million dollars.
It wasn’t twenty thousand. I think it was nineteen actually.

Tina said she had to sing it over and over, that she was drenched with
sweat. She said, “I had to take my shirt off and stand there in my bra to
sing that song.”
 Right. Phil liked to torture people.

Where did the title “River Deep—Mountain High” come from?

That’s about as close to metaphor as I do. People always ask where the
ideas come from, and I tell a quick little story about this centipede and this
spider. We all know what a centipede looks like: a hundred legs. A
centipede’s in a limo, and a spider comes over and he says, “Can I talk to
you a second?”
The centipede stops, and the spider says, “Look, I have eight legs, and
I’m always thinking, like, ‘Oh, second one from the back, and oh my God,
oh gee, got one over here.’ And you have a hundred legs. How do you do
it?”
And the centipede thinks, and he never moves again. [Laughs] That’s
my little story in answer to where the ideas come from. I don’t know. And I
kind of don’t want to know, because if there is a place, I might go there and
see what’s in the box.
It seems like there’s an endless, astronomical, incalculable number of
combinations of those twelve notes, and then when you start to add octaves,
forget it. There are less words and even less emotions, so it’s amazing that
we can write about the same thing using those notes and those emotions and
those words and keep coming up with things that are legally nonsueable and
are different enough. That’s our challenge, and it’s such fun. And when you
do come up with an angle on it and beat it, it’s really gratifying.

Well, I asked about that one because it seems different. “River Deep—
Mountain High,” that title, it’s kind of elemental.

So how did that come together? Do you remember writing “Sugar,

Sugar”?
I wrote that with Andy Kim. We used to write in my office, and he
would sit opposite. I would sit at the desk, and my desk was the drum, and
the side of the desk was the kick drum, and the top was the snare. He would
play the guitar.
We wrote, “I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you” for four-
year-olds. You know? But I was always very conscious back then of what I
was writing. I really wanted the parents to like the songs. “Edgy” was not a
term then. I actually believe that a baby girl born in the fifties, who was a
teenager in the sixties, and a baby girl born early this century that’s a
teenager today, when they’re born they’re identical in who they are. So
where does the fifteen-year-old girl today supposedly become antilove and
doesn’t believe in it anymore? Where does that happen? I think it’s dictated
and they go along with it, but I think every human being on the face of the
earth—I don’t care how cynical you are—somewhere you’ve got to believe
it can be done, and you’re going to find it. Love, that is. You believe in
love.

“Sugar, Sugar,” like “Hanky Panky,” is talking about love but using
other words for it. It’s an adult song, “Sugar, Sugar,” though it’s
written for kids.
Well, I don’t know about the “You are my candy girl” part. [Laughs] I
mean, we do have to realize, as a professional, “Okay, yeah, right.
‘Loveliness of loving you’ aside, we’re writing for four-year-olds. What do
they like? Candy.” [Laughter]

“Pour some sugar on me”—that’s an old blues kind of idea.

It is?

No?
You got me.

I think it could be.

Sounds like it.

You wrote “I Honestly Love You” with Peter Allen, which became a
huge hit for Olivia Newton-John in 1974. How did that one come
together?
I was going to produce Peter Allen. He had no success at that point at
all as a writer, as nothing. And he was an interesting guy, and A&M wanted
me to produce him. So I listened to his songs; I didn’t hear a radio song at
that point. And I started on a song, and he was at the piano—it’s one of
those snapshots in my head—he was at the piano in my office, and I said,
“You know, I have an idea for a song, something that hasn’t been said.” I
thought it would be a really sexy song for a guy to sing. “I’m not trying to
sleep with you”—I cleaned that one up—or even stay up with you. In fact, I
honestly love you. No one had ever said that before. And I thought any girl
who would hear that would have to say, “Well, can we just do it once?”
[Laughter]
So I sang the opening—I had the opening line. [Sings] “Maybe I hang
around here / A little more than I should / We both know I got somewhere
else to go.” I had that. And to me it was like a three-chord country song.
He’s at the piano, and I sing him that. Peter had, like, eleven fingers.
And he starts playing these chords. Holy shit. And we wrote that in six
hours. Three hours that afternoon and three more. That’s the only song I
know, besides “Hanky Panky,” exactly how long it took.
It was so complicated chordally that I had to make a demo: vocal, piano.
Sat at the piano, microphone. Because when I’d get with the arranger for
those weird chords, right? For strings and horns. And somebody in the
publishing department who was going to play songs for Olivia Newton-
John heard the demo, didn’t ask, went off, came back the next day, and said,
“Olivia loves the song and she wants to—”
“What song?”
“That ‘I Honestly Love You’ song.”
And I said, “Oh no, no, no. I’m cutting that with Peter Allen.”
So Peter and I, we sat and I said, “Look, Peter. She’s the hottest female
artist in the world, and if she has a hit with it, that’s really good for you. Not
bad for me either,” [laughs] “but it would certainly kickstart your career.
And if she doesn’t have a hit with it or doesn’t even put it out as a single,
you can still record it.”
So he thought that made sense, and it actually was forced out of the
album by radio. She was having hits with mid- to up-tempo kind of nice
little radio songs, and the record company, they hated it. I heard from them,
and they just hated it. But radio really liked it. It was just solo piano; there’s
no drums or bass on that record. They made the perfect record. It’s her
singing a song she loved, with the piano part from what he played on the
demo.
And they footballed—you know what “football” is? Whole notes?—
they footballed the strings and the voices, so it was just sheer in the
background. Nothing’s in the way, which is a good lesson when producing.
Get out of the way. Your job is to present a singer singing a song. That’s
your job. No showing off allowed. Don’t bury the vocals.
That’s the story of “I Honestly Love You.”
With the Phil Spector productions, there was so much going on. He
filled in all the space. Yet it still always focused on the vocal.
Yeah, well, that’s just a good mix. You make a pocket. Look at your
record from the side view, like you’re standing in the wings looking out at
the stage from the wings, and leave a little shelf—leave a pocket for that
vocal to sit in.
That kick drum is under the vocal. The other stuff’s on top of the vocal.
The stuff there in the range of a vocal—guitar, certain keyboards, that are in
the range of a vocal? They’re behind it. Don’t show off.

These days do you find songwriting is any easier or has shifted?

No. I come from a place of where I hate everything. But it’s a good
place. I mean, I’m like that about myself. I don’t please myself that easily.
At this point I don’t go too far into a song unless I can’t wait to finish it and
show off with it. You know, I can’t wait for somebody to hear it because
that’s really fun to do.
I don’t fool myself. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. The hardest
thing—I almost wish I never heard it, but I’m going to do it to you too—is,
“Who cares?” Ask yourself, “Who cares about this song?” It’s, ugh,
terrible. But it’s of value if you can answer it. If it’s like, “Uh, I don’t care
myself,” move on. Junk it. Go on.

Preparing for this, it’s been a joy to hear so many of your classic songs.
And none of them seem old or dated—they are as great as ever. “Be My
Baby” is undiminished by time. If anything, it sounds better. Do songs
still matter as much as ever?
Yes. There’s never been a civilization we’ve discovered that doesn’t
have a form of song, music, and I think even dance. And for some reason
we need it, and it’s part of the human condition. I don’t know if we have
time, but I can tell you my theory of why.

Please.
 When we were coming out of the caves and the brain was developing, it
was all about one thing, and that was survival. Fashion didn’t exist. Nothing
existed except survival: stay alive. Which is the first law of nature: self-
preservation. Second law of nature? Anybody know what that is?
Propagation of the race. Third law of nature. Anybody? It’s a joke—there is
none. [Laughs]
But seriously, nature says, “Stay alive and do it.” It’s true, right? Think
about it. So the brain is developing. It’s all about survival, right? There’s no
language even. Language comes along. I’m trying to shorten the history.
[Laughs] There’s forty to sixty people in a club, whatever they call them.
Tribe. And they would literally move all day and pick and find things to eat.
Until fire. And they knew how to keep fire burning when they found it:
keep putting stuff on it. And fire was good. So they would stay there. Why
do we stare at fire today? If somebody has a fireplace? They advertise the
house. Who cares about a fireplace? We rarely use them. You have a
fireplace—do you turn it on? No, but it’s good. They advertise it. Because
the fireplace was so important. The fire would give us safety and light and
warmth and scare the saber-toothed tigers away.
So all we knew was that when the fire got low that we’d have to put
more fuel on it, and it was so important that they would stare at it. They had
to stare at it, and when it got low they would get excited and get wood and
put it on it. Before we learned how to start fire. But that was a long time.
Anyway, we still stare at fires.
So people are dying. Why? What happened? They ate those red berries.
Ahh, that’s why. Everyone who died ate those red berries. Don’t eat the red
berries—you’ll die. Very important. Not funny. You don’t know whether
I’m joking or not. When it’s death, I’m serious. [Laughs] Don’t eat the red
berries—you’ll die. Pass it on. Tell everybody. Don’t eat the red berries—
you’ll die. It goes on for a hundred thousand years, whatever.
Now, rhythm and tonality are realized, and they’ve discovered they
were always there, obviously. And somewhere along the line, they realized
that [sings] “Don’t eat the red berries / You’ll die” sticks better. [Laughs]
And you can all sit around the fire and sing it and pass it on to generations.
So the brain said, “This is good.” And I think that’s why, to this day, the
singer of songs is revered. Probably, come to think of it, as this tonality
thing caught on to survival, there was probably a singer of the “red berries”
songs. You know, he would sing these songs and was a very revered person
who passed along this life-saving survival information. And to this day we
will buy someone’s CD and then get in the car and drive in traffic and pay
to park the car and pay a lot of money to go into this huge place and see in
the distance that same person who’s singing on your CD.
Why? Because we like to sing songs with the singer of songs. We still
go and do that. Justin Timberlake working in a McDonald’s. Girls, would
you look at him twice? With the goofy white hat? You put anybody on
stage, they’re better looking. Why? Because now they are the singer of
songs. And we still revere that. We’ve not giving any life-saving
information anymore, but we’re out of the caves, they say, for a split
second, right? It’s been a split second since the caves in the full context of
time. And it is still ingrained in us, and we still stare at fires, and we still
want to hear the singer of songs sing whatever it is. And that’s my story and
I’m sticking to it. And our job is to supply the singers of the songs with
songs.

That’s an important job. The industry has changed, technology has

changed, the world has changed. But people still want songs. They
don’t want something instead of—
The twelve notes, the book of words, and the emotions have not
changed.

The words and melody together? You can’t beat that.

It’s called a song. The song, to me, is the part the singer sings: words,
melody. And the chords, totally important obviously, those are the makeup
and the lighting and the costume and the scenery in the film. And the words
and the melody are the script. And you can sing a cappella, and
theoretically, if it’s a good enough song, they’ll still get the message. How
many records start with vocal and one instrument?
And then, because of radio, somewhere along the line here comes the
bass. You have to make a record out of it. I may try changing that, actually:
if the song is that great and the singer’s that great, before they realize it, the
record’s over and nothing else ever came in. You get away with it.
OceanofPDF.com
Paul Anka
 From “Diana” to “My Way”
Los Angeles, California 2013

The man wrote “My Way.” For that and that alone he deserves a chapter in
this volume. Not only is it one of the most recorded and sung songs of all
time, it was also the signature song for the man many consider the greatest
singer ever, Frank Sinatra. It was a song that reflected the paradigm shift the
world was traveling through, reflected in our music—as the songs of
Sinatra were supplanted by rock and roll. When Frank confided to Paul that
he was considering retirement, as rock and roll had made him irrelevant,
Anka embraced the moment and created an iconic song.
Its full origins—written to a modest French pop hit—are related in the
following conversation with Anka. When he wrote songs for people, he
didn’t write insignificant ones. He wrote their essential songs. Their theme
songs. “She’s a Lady,” for example, was handcrafted for Tom Jones like a
fine suit. And there’s none more famous than “My Way.” What he reveals
in our following conversation is that Frank had been asking for a song for
years. But Anka felt unworthy of putting words and melody into the mouth
of the man he considered the greatest of all singing stars—until the
poignant and unlikely birth of “My Way,” which is related herein.
But he also wrote one of the most famous theme songs of all time, the
theme for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the origins of which
he divulges (it went through three incarnations), setting that record straight
once and forever.
Born in Ottawa in 1941, he started playing piano and writing songs
when still a tot. By fourteen he already wrote and recorded his first single,
“I Confess,” and by sixteen was taking on “Diana.” The subject of that
famous unrequited love ballad was real, as he recalls here. Throughout the
decades he surmised that reality underscores the themes of songs better than
anything. “Yes, there was a real Diana,” he said, “a beautiful girl. I never
spoke to her. I was too shy. So I put it all into the song.” It also taught him a
lesson he has always embraced: the beauty of lyrical simplicity, of saying
the most with the fewest words. Though it earned him a hit as a singer, he
knew it paved the way for the career he most wanted: to write songs.
Though he continued to record his own material through the decades, it was
always about the writing for him.
He also learned early on never to trust anyone’s opinion of a song. In
1974, when he wrote and recorded “(You’re) Having My Baby,” everyone
he knew told him that it was unsuitable for pop radio. They were wrong. It
went to number one.
He also wrote several songs with Michael Jackson, including “I Never
Heard” (later reworked and retitled as “This Is It”). Although rights to these
songs were disputed following the death of Jackson, Anka’s memories of
working with MJ remain pure.
His hero was not only Sinatra but also those who wrote songs for Frank,
especially the composer Jimmy Van Heusen and lyricist-genius Sammy
Cahn (interviewed in SOS I). “Sammy was my guy,” Anka said when I
mentioned our shared love of Mr. Cahn. “Sammy,” he said, “I stayed at his
house. I learned a lot of my craft from him.”
But unlike Sammy, who always wrote the words for others to sing and
record, Anka began by singing his own, one of the first to do so in a
business not yet used to this phenomenon of one artist doing so many jobs
—singer, lyricist, composer—all in one. Today it’s normal. But he was one
of the first in pop music, and it’s there our conversation commences.
Although he was one of pop music’s very first singer-songwriters,
scoring number-one hits with his songs “Diana” and “Lonely Boy” in 1958
when he was all of seventeen, he says he was just doing what needed to be
done. “I needed some good songs,” he said during a recent talk at his sun-
kissed California studio. But what he created was more than a good song;
he stretched the boundaries of what pop songs are about from the very start
with classics like “Diana” and “Lonely Boy” long before he wrote his most
famous songs. He went on to become not only a beloved artist and singer of
his own songs but also one of the most recorded songwriters of all time.
“My Way” shares the same realm as “Yesterday” (by Lennon and
McCartney, his pals) as being one of this world’s most covered songs. (“But
when you add up all the karaoke versions,” he said, “my song is number
one.”)
He’s written countless other classics, including “Puppy Love,” “Put
Your Head on My Shoulder,” “She’s a Lady” (which became Tom Jones’s
signature song), “You’re Having My Baby,” and the theme for The Tonight
Show Starring Johnny Carson, often called “Toot Sweet.” The origins—
many quite unlikely—of all of these songs is related in the following
conversation.

Carole King often gets credit for being the first singer-songwriter, but
you were writing and singing your own songs before she did.
Paul Anka: Yes, she came after me. I started about six years prior to
her. When I first met The Beatles in Europe before anyone knew them here,
they said, “Yeah, we are patterning ourselves after you. Doing your own
songs, your own lyrics.” It was kind of unheard of back then.

Many songwriters back then who wanted to be performers had a tough

time making that transition. Was it a challenge for you to be the singer
of your own songs?
It wasn’t a challenge as much as a necessity. When I started, pop music
was in its infancy stage. I was a kid in Canada. Fourteen, fifteen—writing.
There was no American Idol. Television had barely started. Everything was
radio.
So I was listening to all that music, and I just wanted to sing. My
parents didn’t know what to make of it. My mother supported me, but my
dad wanted me to do something more tangible. I was working at a local
newspaper to become a cub reporter, and he wanted me to be a journalist. I
studied shorthand. But I also studied music. But I realized there was nobody
who was going to write [songs] for me.
 I was singing, and I just sung what I saw. And I wrote what I saw. I was
a teenager, so I saw this girl Diana, and I wrote about her.
“Puppy Love” was for Annette [Funicello]. Just observation stuff.
“Lonely Boy” came because a lot of my friends and guys you talk to, and
they’re lonely. Back in the day when sexuality was repressed. We didn’t
have such broad parameters.

You wrote “Diana” and “Lonely Boy” when you were very young. Did
you write some bad songs first, or were those your very first songs?
They were pretty much near my first songs. “Tell Me That You Love
Me” was on the back of one of the records. That was one of the first ones. I
was just playing make-believe stuff. Stuff that I didn’t even put to paper. It
happened so young. I wrote “Diana” when I was only sixteen years old.

Yeah! And such a wonderful song.

I didn’t have fifty-eight songs that were bad. Tinkling on the piano led
me to land on those songs. “You Are My Destiny” also came then.

Is it true that you wrote “Diana” for a girl in church you didn’t really
know?
I saw her at church and saw her around socially. I saw her in the
community, which was a small community. You know, teenage girls always
have been a lot more sophisticated than guys. Certainly back then. So I’d
see her in the distance, and there’d be a smile and a wave. And the girls
would go off, and she’d date older guys. I’m just a little guy, you know? I
was no teenage heartthrob. So I just looked at her and got inspired, and that
is how I expressed myself. Kind of like Cyrano.
I sat there and just wrote it for her. And I would play it at parties, and
kids would like it and look at me and see me doing it. But I didn’t get near
her until after it was a hit. By then I’d already been to France and Italy and
everywhere and I was back.
So, yeah, we knew each other.

As you said, pop music was in its infancy. Soon great writers like The
Beatles would learn how to write songs by imitating your songs and
those of some of your peers. How did you learn how to do it?
 I didn’t. I played piano. I was listening to R&B music and country
music. All the R&B groups. Had my own group called The Bobbysoxers.
Emulating Bill Haley and “Moonglow” and all that stuff that was around.
When I started piano I just started writing for myself. I would read
whatever books were out there. I had Hit Parade—remember that
magazine? I’d read a bunch of books. But there wasn’t much about the craft
of songwriting. It was pretty simplistic back then.
So I just sat down to write for myself and write from my feelings.
Because nobody would write for me, and I wanted to be a singer. Once I
broke into Chuck Berry’s dressing room when he was onstage. Because I
wanted someone to hear me. He listened and said, “That’s the worst song I
ever heard. Go back to school.”
So I just wrote for the sake of writing. But nobody was teaching me. I
would just study the way songs were built.
Remember, pop music was in its infancy stage. Television was just
starting, and everything was limited. It hadn’t really evolved yet. I
remember when I saw The Beatles, and all the kids and the fans and how
remarkable the sound was. I came home to my agent and tried to explain it.
There was no media then, there was no CNN, no way of knowing. All he
had was a telephone. Nothing else whatsoever.

Not surprised The Beatles would appreciate your songs, because like
them, you have rock and roll songs with some really interesting chord
changes. “Diana” is like that—it starts off simple but then goes to
unexpected places harmonically.
Well, when [the arranger] Don Costa and I would create those records,
we’d throw in those off-chords for intros. You know, he was a genius, not
me. He was a great engineer, great arranger. I’d be singing lines and licks
and playing chords. You had to realize you only had a vision and a sound in
your head. You didn’t have the technology then like today to be sitting there
with drum machines and all that stuff and work it out. You had to take what
was in your head and put it on paper, but you still don’t hear it.
And when you get to the studio and you’ve got it on paper, you’ve got
musicians there and a quarter-inch tape, mono, right? And you didn’t know
what you had until you were hearing it. And you were changing it as you
went. And then you stood in that room, and you sung it. There was no
sitting around for three years and spending two million dollars. You’d get a
record done in a day!
So what I’m saying is that you worked at it. You really worked at that,
licks. [Sings lick from “Lonely Boy”] You’d sing licks.

But would Don suggest chords or—

No, he would take it off of my chords, and he would do the blocking of
the chord. I would go out and do licks to it, and he would translate it to the
music. He was brilliant with strings and all that.
About The Beatles’ emulation, they admired what I did, they got what I
was doing. But they liked Chuck Berry more. And Buddy Holly, my friend,
who I wrote “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” for, which was his last tune.
They liked those guys. Because they were guitar driven. I wasn’t. Even
though I used [guitars] in experimental ways in the studio. I think they
admired what I was doing; they got what I was doing. But they were a
group. I wasn’t a group. The only group they liked in the United States then
was Sophie Tucker. They called her America’s favorite group. [Laughs]
Poor Sophie!

But like you, they were serious craftsmen of songs—

Well, that guy [George] Martin. He was very instrumental there. Like
Don was with me. Those guys are the unsung heroes. The George Martins
and the Don Costas. One and one makes three.

That’s generous, but in terms of songwriting, you wrote the song and
chose the chords. What they did was arrangement and production—
but songwriting is different than that.
Well, let me tell you something: success has many fathers. And I know
that process. Yeah, I brought the chords and the licks, but I still like to give
credit to those guys. I really do. George could really pull it together till your
hair stood up. I couldn’t do that. I can’t do arrangements. And make those
notes happen. I can sing licks, but they fucking do it. A lot of guys don’t get
enough credit. I’m not for that. I can craft a song. I know how to do
something like “She’s a Lady.” I know where to put it. But there’s still guys
there who get the other half of that tape rolling. I’ve always been an
arranger guy and respect guys who can do that.
The other link with you and The Beatles is that they wrote their songs
for themselves, but those songs began to get covered a lot. And that is
certainly the same with you. “Yesterday” and “My Way” are the two
most covered songs of all time.
Yes. “My Way” is the bigger karaoke sing-along. A lot of that.
“Yesterday,” yes, a lot of play. “My Way” is a whole other song.

As a singer yourself, were you as happy when other people cut your
songs, or did you prefer to be the singer?
I realized early, as much faith as I had in myself, the business began to
change, and we looked up at the Rat Pack, and there was nothing quite like
that till The Beatles. And I realized that I wasn’t going to have the hits all
the time, and I was a writer first. I was always a songwriter first.
Sometimes I had to do the songs because there was nobody else who
was going to do those songs. You can’t walk up to any modern-day singer
and say, “I have a song called ‘Diana’—‘I’m so young, you’re so old . . .’”
Who’s that? That’s the first line.
I knew it was all about songwriting, and I knew if I was going to last
and if I was going to have any gravitas, that’s what really worked for me—
Shakespeare: “The play’s the thing.” What a creator was. They’re always
going to have the clout.
I remember seeing the evolution into when if an artist didn’t write their
own songs, they couldn’t get signed. And that was never a problem for me.
I instilled that in myself, that I was always going to put myself in the place
of someone and write for them, whether it was Buddy [Holly] or Connie
Francis or the Tonight Show theme or “Longest Day” [the theme song for
the movie of the same name]. An eclectic array of stuff that I was writing
for, honing my craft. Knowing if I wasn’t making it on record that I would
be writing and would still have the gravitas ’cause I was an entertainer. I
was schooled with Sinatra and those guys. I was sort of a strange sort of
enigma. I was the one who lasted from the fifties. You know, when new shit
comes, they don’t want to know about yesterday. And here I was still
surviving. And then I’m running over to Italy and selling millions of
records writing with Italians. Nobody was doing it. And I was still the odd
guy out with what was contemporarily happening. [Laughs] It was very
weird because that’s from the fifties.
 So that became my life. Be the writer first. Because then it gets you to
“My Way.” Then it gets you to “Let Me Try Again.” Then it gets you to
“Havin’ My Baby.” The writing came first. The fun became the performing.
That gave me the lasting credit, the longevity.
You sound like you’ve got some vintage, you’ve got some brains there.
I think you understand what I’m saying to you. I was never the star of the
sixties. I was a guy from the fifties that was lasting. And everyone was
wrestling with why and how? Here’s this guy with the Rat Pack in Vegas.
Everyone laughed at Vegas! Now they became hypocrites because they’re
all working it now that they can make a lot of money. It’s always about the
money. So the songwriting was really important to me because I didn’t
think I would last without it. You wouldn’t be talking to me without “My
Way” and all that.

Yeah, I’d say you did pretty well with that decision. As a songwriter,
your success is phenomenal. If only for “My Way,” which is a truly
iconic song. And one with unusual origins. I know you adapted a
French melody—but how did that happen?
Really simple. I vacationed a lot in France and spent a lot of time over
there. Took my family over, married my wife there. I was really into that
scene, and I know everybody. I like the diversity and the balance of it. And
I heard this song on the radio. A mediocre hit by a French singer called
“Comme d’habitude,” which means “as usual.” It’s about a couple in a very
boring marriage, a relationship, which is as usual—they get up every day,
and “the smell of your breath, I love it . . .” Very graphic French shit.
So I heard it, but I knew there was more in it. ’Cause it wasn’t a huge
hit. I knew the publishers up in Paris. You got to remember this is ’66—and
I called them up to see if I could get this song. I mean, we weren’t buying
the pyramids here. It was done in thirty minutes: [in French accent] “Yeah,
here take it.” It was a two-page contract. I had a vision. They were so-so
about it in France, which wasn’t a big market.
So I brought it back. And I was just keeping it in the drawer. I’d play it
on the piano. I didn’t refer to the French record at all lyrically.
So all through this period, knowing Sinatra and working with him—you
know, he hated pop music—he hated Presley and The Beatles. Never got it.
He didn’t understand it. He was from the real pure world, old standard
American classic. He wanted to be with it, but he couldn’t. He tried. And
then he married Mia [Farrow]. But he never got it. He would sit there and
say, “What is this shit?”
So Sinatra’s teasing the shit out of me all the time, saying, “When are
you gonna write me a song?” Which I knew wasn’t going to fucking
happen. But it bugged me. Because I loved him and adored him like all of
us did. And I decided that one day I was going to do it.
The long and the short of it is that I was down in Miami, he’s doing a
movie. I go to dinner with him. He said, “I’m quitting.” Kennedy was all
over, Bobby Kennedy. The Rat Pack was waning. He said, “I’m quitting.
I’m getting out of here.”
That really motivated me. When I went back to New York, sitting there
at one in the morning, thinking, “This is for real.” I called Costa and said,
“The guy’s done. He’s quitting.”
And I started at one in the morning at the typewriter-piano. I wrote it as
if Sinatra were writing it. I used a lot of his language. I started
metaphorically: “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” I
wrote it just for him. And put the demo together. Brought it to him.
Two months later he calls. He’s in LA, I’m in New York. I put the
phone on the speaker. He said this was the one. And that was it for me. I
started to cry. It was a turning point in my life. Even though I’d been
nominated for an Academy Award when I was a kid, for The Longest Day,
even though the Tonight Show theme was cooking every night, for me to get
a Sinatra record on a song like that, which I knew was the most different I’d
ever written, was a monumental day in my life.

I can imagine. And that explains where that song came from, because
you were only twenty-eight when you wrote it, yet it’s about being an
older man.
Well, it shows you about writing, when you know your craft, when
you’re a writer, there is no age barrier. But when you’re the singer
performing the song, there is. RCA was pissed at the time that I gave it
away. I said, “Hey, I’m young enough to write it, but I’m not old enough to
sing it. It belongs to Sinatra. He’s the guy who’s gonna get it out there.
That’s his song.” You check your ego at the door. And I would never, ever,
ever try again.
And to have any song recorded by him would be great, but that became
his signature song.
Yes. And he came back and said, “I’m gonna try again.”

Why is it, when he first wanted a song, you didn’t write one for him?
I didn’t have the capability. All through those early years I did not feel
ready. You have to remember, as you’re growing and maturing and working
at your craft, that’s not overnight. There’s a certain kind of song that you
write for your age and your intellect. It comes from learning your craft and
maturing as a person. I never would have written that song when I was
younger. I wasn’t capable.

Were you worried that writing that the end is almost near would upset
him?
No, because he always talked about age. He hated getting old. He hated
old age.

And the song admits to being old.

Yes. You’re old, you’re vintage. But curiously enough, people are living
into their nineties. Look at the life expectancy.

You mentioned the Tonight Show theme, which was the theme song
during Johnny Carson’s long reign. Is it true that started as a different
song?
It started as a song for Annette [Funicello]. It was called “It’s Really
Love” [also known as “How Will I Know Love?”]. But it was going
nowhere. And it meant nothing. Written for her. “Puppy Love” was the
biggest one I wrote for her. So I just copped that song, because no one was
ever gonna hear it, and that’s it.

It always seemed like the ultimate dream for a songwriter, to have your
song performed every night on the Tonight Show. And the real one.
With Johnny Carson.
Exactly.

Do you remember how that felt when they accepted it?

 I remember going to the studio. It was nowhere near the vibe of what I
had originally written. I took a big band in, because that’s what was on the
show, with Skitch Henderson. I did the demo and sent it to him. Skitch
didn’t want it ’cause this kid was coming in, cutting in on his turf. And then
it wasn’t going to happen. So I gave Johnny half the song.

So it was that melody with a full set of lyrics?

Yeah. I wasn’t sure if they were gonna take it, accept it. I was covering
myself. But knowing it didn’t really matter because they were only going to
use ten seconds. There wasn’t a full song needed, though I presented it as a
full song. So I didn’t know if they were gonna use it, if Skitch would throw
it out, or if I should keep it with Annette. I was just juggling basically.

When I was growing up I knew you mostly for “Havin’ My Baby,”

which was a big hit in 1974.
After “My Way” all that stuff started over. I was maturing, and I got a
record deal. And experiencing what I was going through. Having kids. Five
girls. That was the next real decade in my contribution.

And like “My Way,” it had new lyrical content for a popular song.
Nobody else was writing that song.
I tested it with disc jockeys, and they said they wouldn’t play it. Can
you believe that? With all the shit that’s on the radio now, with the rap and
all they talk about, that back then you couldn’t talk about having a baby!
[Laughs] Now anything goes, the language. What were they getting on me
about having a baby in a song, but the Washington Post and Time magazine
came to my rescue. They got on it, which drove it to number one. But those
DJs, they weren’t going to play it.

It’s a great lesson for songwriters, that some of the greatest songs get
resistance like that.
Exactly. Don’t compromise because you’re going to get nowhere. Don’t
ever compromise to please everyone and be liked. You’ve got to take those
chances. Good is the enemy of great. You’ve got to push it.
Some of your songs are enormous hits, and others are great but aren’t
as well known. Are the hits the best ones, do you think?
No. There are greater ones. Today it’s scary because there’s so much
stuff out there, and it’s all about marketing or other dynamics. But there are
other songs that I have that I think are better. There are tunes of mine, they
weren’t as big as the hits, but that doesn’t make them any less. “She’s a
Lady,” I like it. Would I have done it myself? No, it was for Tom [Jones]. It
was what he’s about, and I just wrote it in a commercial sense. It’s a huge
song. Known all over the world.

I didn’t realize you wrote that for him. You are great at writing the
perfect song for an artist. As Sammy Cahn did with Sinatra.
Well, he was a great guy to write for. And Sammy and Jimmy knew him
inside and out. Sammy knew how to do it.

And you do as well. “She’s a Lady” became Tom Jones’s theme song.
Yeah. It was his only number-one song.

One of your most beautiful songs is “Hold Me ’Til the Morning

Comes,” which you recorded with Peter Cetera.
Yeah, I love that song a lot. See, to me that should have been bigger
than it was. Even though it was a top AC record. I love that.

You’ve written so many great songs. Any advice you can offer about
how you get to that place where a great one can come?
Well, I got to where I did with the young stuff without really knowing
how. It was just honest and pure stuff. But later, in the early sixties, you just
know when you study the rudiments of rhyming and structure and melody.
When I got there with “Longest Day” and the records I did for RCA, I knew
there was a certain level that you needed to get to if you were wise enough
to know what was good and what was mediocre. You were still writing to
write a hit song. Not that any of us know. We don’t have that crystal ball.
But you know, as a craftsman, that you’re at the level that you want to be at.
And you think it’s got a shot.
I was never a craftsman, writing all the time. I did write all the time. But
I always had the avenue of performance. I only wrote songs because I had
to write. I was writing to cover the French, German, Italian market. So I
was writing and writing and writing. At least I had the outlet. I didn’t have
the rejection. A lot of guys would write songs every week and get rejected
and not get any records. And that’s tough.

Would you start songs with music or with words?

Sometimes a key line that would start me off. Then I would get the
structure of the melody. Because it’s only as good as the word on it. But I
needed that infrastructure of that note, and I need the infrastructure of what
the vibe of the song is, what’s going to carry me through. And then the
words would come later, even though I’d get my key line. A lot of the lyrics
would be dummy lines. So what I’m saying is that I need to get a structure.
And then the word starts falling in—where the vowel belongs or what the
emotion is.

Do you generate melodic ideas from chords or separate from chords,

just pure melody?
It’s mixed. It’s eclectic. I play chords to generate melodies. Sometimes I
think of only melody, because I want to keep it simple, and put the chords
around it. It just depends on the song. I would hear it and then work on the
chords, to get the chords where I want it to go. But it has to have a bass line,
and sometimes the bass with the melody will define the chord. [Sings
melody to “Longest Day”] It depends. It’s not always the same.

You wrote a song with Michael Jackson in 1980 called “I Never

Heard,” which was later reworked and retitled “This Is It.”
Yes. Michael took all the tapes and, unbeknownst to me, rerecorded
them. He had obviously kept them in a drawer after rerecording what he
took into the studio. After his death his people thought it was a new song.
The original title was “I Never Heard,” as you said. “This Is It” was
actually the first lyric I had.

What was it like working with him? Did he bring as much to the words
and the music?
Yes. We worked at my studio in Carmel, and he was my houseguest. We
just sat in a room. I was banging away at the piano, and we came up with
ideas.

So he brought as much to it as you did?

Oh yeah. Absolutely. He was very talented. We just played off of each
other, like all duets. He was talented, shy, but confident. He had a great
knack for melody, and he loved music.

He was such an astounding singer and performer that his talent as a

songwriter is often overlooked.
They don’t know because some of his hits were written by other people.
But he contributed. You sit in a room and hear things. He wasn’t a
craftsman, really. But he did all of the background vocals.

One of the main tests of a song is how many different versions there are
by different bands and singers. And your songs have been recorded by
a remarkably diverse array of people. The Sex Pistols recorded “My
Way.” And The Misfits recorded “Diana.” What did you think of those
versions?
You know, you’re always pleased. Some of them didn’t thrill me,
obviously. But an interpretation of a song by someone who has honestly put
their soul into it, you can’t be judgmental about it. But I have my choice to
say what my favorites are. Were the Sex Pistols my favorite? No, but I think
the guy did an honest attempt. I think he honestly felt it. I think he did it to
the best of his capabilities in interpreting it. So I can’t judge them for that. I
liked Presley’s version, I liked Sinatra’s version, I like Brook Benton’s
version.

Did you know Elvis?

Yes. I knew him all through the years. But when he came to Vegas and I
was working there, we’d sit and talk. And you get to know a guy like that.
We saw the whole physical change he went through. Just by sitting with
him. And I loved him. He was a great artist and a great guy. Not a malicious
guy in any way. He was a great singer. He had a black man’s voice, frankly.
He would sit with me in the seventies, and he’d go [imitating Elvis],
“Hey Paulie, I love that ‘My Way.’”
I’d say, “Elvis, it’s not your kind of song.”
 And he’d say, “I love it, man. It says so much to me.”
And I said, “I wouldn’t recommend that you do it.” You know, he would
do that other stuff, the three-chord stuff. But it meant so much to him
because of what you’re going through. And you can’t shut a man down.

He tired of three-chord rock and roll songs early on. He wanted to do

the kind of ballads that you were writing—
Yeah. So he went in and did it because I think internally he really was
going through something.

During his Vegas time, according to so many of the books about him, he
was miserable. Is that right?
Part of the time, yeah. He was getting old. And he was no dummy. He
could see what he was doing to himself. It was not easy for him. I’d say to
him, “Hey, you’re Elvis! You’re gonna get old—we’re all getting old. You
just got to be graceful. You’re Elvis!”

Many songwriters have said it seems songs come through them. Does it
feel that way to you?
Yes. Absolutely. Through the experience that you’re going through. And
then some from when you’ve got a definite project in mind or someone in
mind, and you’re putting your brain to it. Thinking as the artist. But the
others are coming from something that’s affecting you, and it is coming
through you, that’s absolutely true. And it’s a beautiful feeling, to be the
one who brings one in.

OceanofPDF.com
Kenny Gamble
 Inventing the Philly Sound
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2008

The idea was to have a catchy melody so closely linked to a title that you
could never think of that title without the tune. Think of any of their famous
titles and listen to the music they conjure: “If You Don’t Know Me by
Now,” “You’ll Never Find,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “Love Train,” “I’m
Gonna Make You Love Me,” and many more.
All of those songs were written by Kenny Gamble with his partner in
song and business, Leon Huff. Together Gamble and Huff were the
architects of the Philly sound. Like Motown in Detroit, Gamble and Huff
built an empire on song. They wrote the songs and produced the records,
teaming up with a phenomenal group of musicians, arrangers, and engineers
to create a remarkably unbroken chain of soul masterpieces.
Besides being tremendously savvy songwriters, Leon and Kenny had a
great ear for talent—always on the lookout for not only strong voices but
unique ones. Voices you never forget once you hear them, like Lou Rawls
or Aretha Franklin.
Kenny Gamble was Philly born on August 11, 1943. His first records
were cut when he was a kid at penny arcade recording booths. He started
his own group, Kenny Gamble and the Romeos, all about great harmony
soul vocals and smooth songwriting. Teaming up with Thom Bell, he met
Leon Huff and split up the work: Gamble and Huff would write the songs
while Thom Bell arranged them.
As related in the following, the very first time Gamble and Huff sat
down to write a song, they wrote ten.
Rather than attempt to truly compete with Motown, as was the
conventional wisdom around them, in fact the Philly sound, as Kenny
explains herein, was created entirely in the image of Motown and with great
reverence. Gamble and Huff didn’t only create a catalog of songs, they
started their own label, Philadelphia International Records, for which Clive
Davis of CBS did the distribution. Their records crested the R&B and pop
charts, romantic and soulfully infectious classics such as those by The
O’Jays (“Back Stabbers” and “Love Train”), Harold Melvin and the Blue
Notes (“If You Don’t Know Me by Now”), and Billy Paul (“Me and Mrs.
Jones”).
In his native Philly on a sunny but snowing day, he spoke. It was soon
after the election of Obama, leading us to a talk of the African American
impact on music, of which he was a fundamental and lasting force.

You and Leon Huff together created a phenomenal chain of classic

songs. Is there a feeling you were meant to meet? Was it providence
that brought you together?
Kenny Gamble: Yeah, I think so. Because we just fit together like a
hand in a glove. The day I met Huff I met him in an elevator. And we were
working in the same building. We was on the sixth floor and I was on the
second floor, and I had never seen him before. I had never seen any African
American people in there, period. And when I saw him, we struck up a
conversation. I told him I write lyrics and play guitar a little bit. He said, “I
play piano and I write songs,” so I said, “Let’s get together.” We got
together [laughs] that weekend, and we sat down to write. And we hardly
even knew each other then. But we sat down, and we must have written
seven songs together in a couple of hours. Unbelievable! That is forty-eight
years ago now. It really was destiny that we got together. And the beautiful
thing about Huff and my relationship that, I always say, is that not only did
we have the ability to write together and to come up with some great
concepts and ideas, but we opened the door for so many other great writers,
like Thom Bell and Linda Creed, Sherman Marshall. The list goes on and
on and on of some of the great writers we were able to bring into our
company.

Had you written songs before working with Huff?

Yeah, quite a few. And he likewise had written quite a few songs before.
But the magic of Gamble and Huff was that Huff was a piano player—and
an extraordinary piano player—and basically I’m a lyricist. My strength
was writing lyrics. His strength was playing the piano. So when we got
together it was magic, it was unbelievable.
We inspired each other. I inspired him and he inspired me.

That inspiration comes across in the songs. Would you both do both
words and music? Would you sometimes have musical ideas and would
he sometimes have lyrical ones?
Oh yeah, yeah. Sometimes I’d play some chords for him and he’d take
the chords and embellish on them. And sometimes he’d have ideas for
songs, and then I’d take them and finish writing them out. The way we
really worked was we would have a legal pad, and we’d write down
hundreds—hundreds—of titles. And when we’d go to work, we’d say,
“Who are we going to write for today?” And we might say, “Okay, this is
for Lou Rawls today” or something like that. We’d be in a Lou Rawls state
of mind.
In fact, when we first started out, we started to name our publishing
company Tailor-Made Music. We settled on Mighty Three Music. That was
the name we settled on. Because we figured that we tailor-made the songs
especially for the artist we were writing for. Like the O’Jays. When we
would come in and write for the O’Jays, we’d be thinking like Eddie and
Walt and William and all these guys.
You’d notice that the amount of artists we did was substantial. And none
of them sound alike. The music was different, and the songs were all
catering to their abilities. Like Lou Rawls, he had such a wonderful baritone
voice that we would write songs that would be in his register. We knew the
keys that he sang in best. And when he would come in to record, we would
rehearse with him, and the songs would fit him just like a tailor-made suit
for you.
I was wondering if that was the case, because I think of your song
“You’ll Never Find.” And I can’t think of that song without thinking of
his voice with it. It is so perfect for his style, his voice, and delivery.
Yeah. We were lucky on that one. We really were lucky. We got a
gigantic record on him, the first song out. “You’ll Never Find”—it sounded
just like him. When we were writing the song I thought, “This sounds just
like Lou Rawls.” And man, when he came in he gravitated to it just like a
duck to water. [Laughs]

And then you would tailor-make these songs also in the studio by
producing the song around the artist.
Yeah, but that’s the hard part. Well, all of them are hard. But writing the
song was probably the easiest part. Then going into the studio and having to
relate that to a group of musicians, the kind of atmosphere and the mood
that you wanted to create with the music. So we had tremendous musicians
that worked with us.

You sure did. The MFSB [Mother Father Sister Brother, a pool of more
than thirty great Philly musicians].
Yeah, the MFSB was a tremendous orchestra. And we had great
arrangers, Bobby Eli and Thom Bell. We were all like a great team working
together. In addition to that, we had great arrangers. Because the fidelity on
our records is just unbelievable. When you listen to those records today you
say, “Wow, these are great-sounding records.”

You said the writing of the songs was the easy part. Did it always come
easy? Or were there times when you would work and not get anything?
Oh yeah. Quite a few times we’d come in there and be empty. [Laughs]
So we’d have to take a few days off. Or sometimes we’d fly to Jamaica or
someplace like that. Jamaica was a wonderful place to write because, boy,
we might write ten or fifteen songs down in Jamaica when we were there.
Jamaica is beautiful. The environment is beautiful, and you’d have
somebody to cook for you. And the phones weren’t ringing all day long. So
you didn’t have anything to do but write songs all day long.
Is it true you and Huff would work together on songs and then you
would take them home and finish them?
Well, sometimes we would write and then I would take the songs home
and work on the lyrics to make sure the lyrics were just right. Sometimes
maybe I wouldn’t even have a lyric, and I’d sing “la-dee-da-dee-doo” or
something like that. [Laughs] Then I’d have to go home and think about
how to make the story and the song work its best.

Would you and Leon discuss what the song would be about before you
would take it home?
Oh yeah, no question. No question about it. When we had all those titles
we’d sit down and discuss. Let’s say, for example, a song like “Love Train.”
We were talking that day about how people all over the world were so
disunited and there was so much trouble in the world! So we said, “Hey,
let’s write a song about people all over the world, and let’s make it a love
train.” When you hear the lyrics to “Love Train,” you see we tried to
mention every country that we could. [Laughs] Every country from all over
the world.

At Motown all those writers would compete every day to get a cut.
Same thing with the Brill Building writers. They competed and wrote
amazing songs that way. But for you and Leon, since you owned your
own record company, there wasn’t competition like that, was there?
Yeah, but we competed. We followed the blueprint of Motown. Yeah,
Motown was the blueprint. That was my favorite record company. I’d say
Motown is the greatest record company that has ever been in the music
business. We followed that same blueprint, where we had an office full of
great writers. And the O’Jays would come in, or Harold Melvin and the
Blue Notes would come in on a certain date. And we’d say, “Listen—bring
your songs in.” And then we’d review the songs and we’d pick the best
ones out of the batch, and then those songs would go into the studio to be
recorded.
For example, if the O’Jays came in to record, during those days you
might have eight or ten songs on an album. But we would record maybe
twenty. Twenty songs to get the ten best. It wasn’t easy. Taking a song and
going into the studio, you don’t know what’s going to come out. It doesn’t
always come out the same way you heard it.

And you and Huff would make those decisions—which song would get
on the album?
Yeah, we would make the decision on what songs would go on an
album. And that would be pretty much it because we were pretty much
responsible for that. Somebody has to make the last decision, you know?
When you look at the albums, you’ll see Huff and I used to write maybe 50,
60 percent of each album. And the rest of it would be other writers and
producers.

And when the other writers would bring you a song, would you tell
them how to change it, or would you accept them as they were?
Oh no, no. I’d tell them how to change it. Yeah. As a matter of fact,
today I look back and think I should have gotten the piece of royalties on
that song. [Laughs] Sometimes I’d have to write a whole verse.
But it was a good camaraderie. We had excellent relationships with
everyone who worked there. We had a great team. It was teamwork—that is
what made it work.

Motown, of course, had the Motown sound. And you and Leon created
the Philly Sound. Was that a conscious choice, to create your own
sound, or did that just happen organically?
Like I told you, we followed the Motown blueprint. And at that time
they had the Memphis sound, they had the Motown sound, so we said,
“Let’s call ourselves the Philly sound.” And then that’s how it all happened.
We basically did what Motown did. Motown was the blueprint that we
followed.

Yet the Philly Sound itself was different. You “put the bow tie on funk,”
as the saying goes—
[Laughs] Yeah, that was Fred Wesley from James Brown’s band who
said that.
Our sound was different for a couple of different reasons. One is that
Motown was basically doing it in the early sixties, and pretty much most of
the music and technology was mono. When we came along, which was the
late sixties and the seventies and the eighties, everything had changed to
stereo. So of course, stereo is much, much more appealing to the ear than
mono, and it’s a whole other recording technique. And in addition to that,
the technology had changed tremendously.
Also, we had a tremendous orchestra, the MFSB. That orchestra was
unbelievable, and I think stereo really showed that sound off. And then,
again, during the time of Motown most rhythm and blues stations were AM
stations. When we came along that was during the time rhythm and blues
stations had changed to stereo stations. So we were able to reach a wider
audience. And it was all because of technology. Just like technology is
changing today.

Among the great songwriters of our time, not many were also great
producers. Leiber and Stoller obviously were, and you and Huff. When
you would write the song would you think in terms of the arrangement
and production, or did that come after?
That came along as we were writing it. Because the whole arrangement
of those songs were designed in the song. And that’s what we were trying to
achieve. ’Cause you can hear it in your head. You can hear how you want it
to sound. And pretty much you just have to go in the studio and relay that to
the musicians. ’Cause they don’t know. They come in cold. And you have
to relay it to them. And many times what we would do is play the tape with
Huff and myself singing it so they’d get a feel for it. And fortunately it
worked out very well.

So you and Leon would record the song like a demo first?
Oh yeah. Well, when we were writing we would write with a cassette
player on the piano. So we have thousands of tapes of us writing. All the
mistakes and everything. [Laughs]

And you both would sing?

Yeah, sometimes we’d both sing. And sometimes it sounded pretty
good! I look back on it, and probably some of them songs Huff and I could
have done. [Laughs]
When I listen to your records I’m always impressed by the great vocals
you always got. Of course, these were wonderful singers. But what was
your technique for how you enabled singers to get such a great vocal
performance in the studio?
Well, I think we were very fortunate to be able to have some exceptional
singers, number one. I mentioned Lou Rawls. We went for the uniqueness
in a person’s voice. That they would have a sound of their own. Like Patti
LaBelle. When you hear a record on the radio and you listen to it and you
know. You say, “That’s Patti LaBelle, right there.” Or you’d say, “That’s
Lou Rawls,” or “That’s the O’Jays,” or “That’s Aretha Franklin.” Because
they had their own individual sounds. And that’s what we were looking for
when we signed an artist. How unique was this particular person and the
sound of his voice?

Would you and Huff equally guide a recording session?

Yeah, no question about it. We collaborated. We collaborated like one
person. We’re like one person in the studio.

You would always agree?

Yeah, no question about it. Because we’d talk it over so much. It was
almost unanimous, everything that we did together.

You’ve written so many great melodies. Any way of explaining what

makes a melody good?
Well, I think what makes a song and a melody good is you putting your
heart into it. And as far as the melody is concerned, it just has to be
something very simple that people can actually sing along with. You have to
have a great sing-along. And that’s what we always tried to do, was have
great hooks so that they would stay in a person’s mind for a long, long time.
For example, if you think of a song like “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,”
you can hear that song in your head.

Yes. And that’s true of all of them. You name a title like “Me and Mrs.
Jones,” and you hear the music when you say those words.
Yeah, you can hear it. You know, you can hear it. And look at Billy Paul
—look at how unique his voice is. And he was a friend of ours. And he was
a longtime favorite in Philadelphia as a singer. In the local nightclubs. But
he was so unique. That he was able to come off. And he performed “Me and
Mrs. Jones” tremendously.
The other thing too, with most of the artists we had, is that they were
great performers onstage. And that, in my view, was maybe the biggest
compliment that we had. That the artists were not only able to not only
perform the records, but they would be able to go on tour. And dazzle the
audiences. And that made it easier for us to write for them. It made it easier
for them to build up fans all over the world.

“Me and Mrs. Jones” is about a guy having an affair—

Yeah, well, that song alludes to it. It doesn’t say that it is, it just
appeared that they were having an affair. Because Huff and I used to go
down to a little café that was downstairs from our office at the time. And as
a songwriter you’re always watching and looking at everything. Everything
you do, everything people say, what they do can potentially be a song for
you.
So on a couple of days we used to watch this guy come into the café,
and he would go sit in a certain booth. And then maybe fifteen or twenty
minutes later, a young lady would come in. And they would play certain
songs and sit there, maybe have a drink or whatever the case might be. And
then they would leave, and the next day they would come in again.
And Huff and I would say, “Hey, this guy was here yesterday! And the
girl, the same girl!” And we thought, “Yeah, it’s ‘me and Mrs. Jones, we got
a thing going on.’” And we went upstairs and started writing the song.
That’s called inspiration. Inspiration. The whole world around you is a
great inspiration.

Yes. And some songwriters, we can connect with inspiration at certain

times. But not always! Yet you guys seemed to be on a roll. You wrote
so many great songs for so long.
Yeah, we used to write every day. Every day we used to write.

Is that part of the key to doing it so well for so long—to do it all the
time, constantly?
 Yeah, and also, too, we had an outlet with CBS Records. Which was a
wonderful thing. Because the greatest thing that a songwriter can have is an
outlet for his songs. To get the temperature and find out if the audience and
people really like their songs. So once we were able to get a couple of hits,
it was like hitting a vein. And then you just keep draining from that vein.
You think, “If we did it before, we can do it again.” And thank God, we
were able to have a long, long successful run, being very prolific. And the
only thing I can credit that to is that we were really blessed, and we were
inspired to write all those songs and have a great relationship, Huff and I, as
friends first and also, too, as business partners.

That is good advice for songwriters—that you shouldn’t sit around and
wait for inspiration. You guys were working. It was a mixture of hard
work and inspiration.
Yes. You can’t just sit around. We were always working. And were
always looking for new artists. And people that would inspire us. Certain
artists, you look at them and they become a challenge. It was a challenge to
write for the O’Jays. Or a challenge to write for Teddy Pendergrass.
Because their vocal ability was just unbelievable. When they came in to
record we had to be ready. We couldn’t hand them no halfway songs. Those
songs had to be almost perfect, you know?
I think the artists help inspire us. And the world around us. That we
were able to talk about through our songs.

Was there a feeling sometimes that songs came from somewhere that
was beyond the two of you?
We always used to say, “Wow, where did that song come from?”
Because once we finished a song it was just so amazing that we could even
come up with the song. And then, on top of that, once we recorded it and
released it, and then within a couple of months it would be a number-one
record, we’d say, “Wow. What’s going on?”
It’s unbelievable.

Where do you think the songs do come from?

I think we were really blessed. Really blessed to even have the gift for
writing songs. I think that we wrote songs from our heart. And from our
soul. You kind of spill your guts out in the songs. You make things a reality.
You’re writing for people, and you’re putting words into their ears and
words into their mouths that they will say themselves. Like our song for
The Three Degrees, “When Will I See You Again.” Now this is something
that people say every day. When will I see you again? So that song came
from a conversation I had with a young lady. I saw her outside of my office,
and I said, “I haven’t seen you in a long time.” We would talk for a few
minutes. Then at the end of the conversation I said, “So when am I gonna
see you again?” And right then it popped into my head. I said that’s a great
title.
Every day you hear people say certain things. Another example. The
O’Jays’ “Family Reunion.” That was from a time, especially throughout
America, people were having family reunions everywhere. So a guy came
into our office, and we were talking, and he said, “I just got back from
North Carolina, and I went down to a family reunion.” And, wow, that was
it. That sparked off that song, you know?

One of my favorites is “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.”

Yeah. That comes from another conversation. Like with one of your
girlfriends or your wife. And they always ask you, “Where you been at?”
and “Whatcha been doing?” So that song was, “If you don’t know me by
now, you’ll never know me.” This guy was telling her, “You know, I love
you, and we’ve been together for ten years. Come on now—this is who I
am.”

When you would work on a song, would you sometimes have to work to
find the perfect melody that worked—or did it always come easy?
To be honest with you, most of the songs that we wrote, we used to
write those songs fast. When it comes, it comes quick. That’s why we had it
on tape. Because it’s hard to remember it when it’s—what is it the rappers
say, freestyling? We were freestyling writing songs. [Laughs] It was
something that you had to catch it when you could.

You talked about how much heart these songs have. And that’s been
proven over the years that a song like “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”
became a hit again—when Simply Red did it. The songs weren’t just
about the time you wrote them; they were just great songs.
Yeah, they’re timeless. These songs are timeless. In fact, when we
started Mighty Three Music, Thom Bell, who was our partner in Mighty
Three, he came up with a logo first, which was three elephants. And I said,
“Why did you pick three elephants, Thom?” And he said, “Because they
say that elephants have the longest memory of everyone.” And he said that
our slogan would be “You’ll never forget our tunes.” And that’s come true.
And it’s really happened. Because the songs are being recorded still. Rod
Stewart just did “Love Train.” He also did “Only the Strong Survive.” And
so the songs, people still record them, and so many of the young new artists,
the rappers, have sampled our songs, it’s hard to even count. [Laughs] So, I
mean, it’s timeless. The music we are a part of, it’s timeless.

So you always felt that the songs would transcend the time and always
be loved?
Well, you know, we always said, when we were writing, let’s write
standards. We used to drill that into our heads. To write standards. A lot of
the songs, we just discarded because they’re not good enough. And that’s
why when we came up with something special, we’d say, “Wow, where the
hell did that come from?” Sometimes you’ve got to dig deep to get the best
out of yourself. So Huff and I, we literally put our heart and soul into
writing those songs.

I always thought you wrote “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” with
Huff, but you wrote it with Jerry Williams and Jerry Ross, is that
right?
Huff was writing under an anonymous name at that time, Jerry
Williams. That was him. He was writing so much he decided to use an
anonymous name. That was me and Huff and Jerry Ross. That’s Leon Huff
right there. And the thing is, we wrote that song for Dee Dee Warwick,
Dionne Warwick’s sister. She was the first one who recorded it. It didn’t do
that well with her, but a few years later Nick Ashford, from Ashford and
Simpson, he took that song and he produced it on The Temptations, and The
Supremes, and it became a number-one record. Beautiful.
Did you write “Back Stabbers” with him or was that one he wrote
alone?
No, Huff wrote that with [Gene] McFadden and [John] Whitehead.
Yeah, I didn’t get in on that one. I tried to get in on it, but they finished it by
the time I got there! [Laughs]

You produced a great album with Laura Nyro—one of my favorite

artists of all time—Gonna Take a Miracle—with LaBelle on it. It’s a
classic. She is not your usual artist—how was it working with her?
Yeah. She was great. I enjoyed working with her. Because she was
different for us. She wanted to come to Philly to record with us.

A lot of people don’t understand the difference between a record and a

song, that you can write a great song and not make a record out of it.
What was the key to making a great record out of a good song?
Well, I think the key to making a record out of a good song was Huff
and I, we wanted to make sure it sounded just like we heard it. Being able
to relate your feelings to the musicians and the musicians responding to
you. We worked with this band every day. We were like one. And a lot of
that had to do with the musicians and the engineers and the technical people
so that they would record the efforts of what we were trying to do. And then
the song took care of itself. Once you got the music right, the song took
care of itself. And if you had a great artist, like Teddy Pendergrass or Patti
LaBelle or The Jones Girls or whoever we were working with, then it
becomes a lot easier.

Would you have the vocalists perform live with the musicians? Or
overdub the vocals?
Not that often. Every now and then we would do a live session with the
artists singing with the musicians. But generally we would do the tracks
first. Then we would bring the artists in to overdub their voices. And then
we’d do the arrangement after that. We’d put in the horns or strings or
whatever else we were going to put on that record. And then we’d mix it.

When writing songs to be standards, were you thinking of what would

get on the radio or just trying to write a great song?
 Well, we were trying to write a great record and a great song. Because if
you have a good song and a good artist, the rest takes care of itself. You
only can do the best you can do. So we really wanted it to sound the way
we wanted it to sound. And we were very fortunate so many people
gravitated to our music.

Now with this election of Mr. Obama, we see America shifting. And
perhaps one of the aspects of that shift is a real recognition of the black
impact on our culture. What would songwriting in our lifetimes have
been without you and Motown? The world would have been a much
different place. And less soulful.
[Laughs] It’s true. The contributions that have been made are
unbelievable. As a matter of fact, I was talking to some people the other day
about slavery and about how our people were brought over here. I said, you
know, the way it’s going, with Barack Obama being president and the
African American influence in America, it’s almost as if we were sent here.
For this time. Instead of being brought here, we were sent here, and we
were put through a cleansing period. Our ancestors were put through the
fire so we could bring some kind of balance to how great America really is.
As a people. So African American people have a tremendous role to play in
the future of America.

Are you hopeful about America?

No question about it. I just think that the spirit of America is so
powerful that we as American citizens, we have to educate the citizens of
America so they can comprehend the environment, comprehend the value
of America, this life here. Once the country is focused on educating
everyone, especially African American people who have been denied so
many of the rights that this country offers. And I think when you’re
educated, you pick better leaders.
You look at Barack Obama and his presidency, and that wasn’t just
African American people voting for him; that was the whole country voting
for him. So creed and color doesn’t matter anymore because we are all
human.
I think once you can come to that consciousness where we’re all
humans and we all come into the world the same way and go out the same
way, it’s not when you’re born or when you pass away; it’s what you do in
between that time. It’s the dash that matters on your tombstone, when they
have the date of your birth and the date of your death—it’s that dash that
counts. This creation is incredible, and everything you know has been
created for a reason. America can lead the way in showing the world why
we’re here. And that is to be the managers of earth and to keep it. So far we
haven’t been doing such a good job. [Laughs] But I think we can learn from
our past.

Speaking of that dash, most humans spend that just getting by. Taking
care of business, of their families. But some humans—like you and
Leon Huff—have created something lasting that impacts all of us and
gives us something to hold on to. You’ve created something which will
transcend your lifetime. How does that feel?
It feels great. Because it’s something that I always wanted to do, and I
feel very blessed to have met Huff and have written those songs. Those
songs were from inspiration. We were inspired to write those songs. And
I’m very thankful that I had an opportunity to participate in the music we
wrote. Music that uplifted people’s spirits.

OceanofPDF.com
Norman Whitfield
 Through the Grapevine
Hollywood, California 1991

He lived in Detroit because his dad’s car died there. The family was driving
cross-country, from New York to California, for his grandma’s funeral. But
heading back home, the car broke down in Detroit, and so the family stayed
there. For years. And it’s there, in the Motor City, that he established his
career.
“Words and melodies are forever,” he said, and in his own work there
lives the truth. With his partner, Barrett Strong, he’s written some of this
planet’s most soulful and enduring songs, classics such as “I Heard It
Through the Grapevine,” “Just My Imagination,” “War,” “Papa Was a
Rolling Stone,” “Smiling Faces,” and more.
More than anything, these masterpieces emerged from the fierce,
fighting environment of Motown, where Whitfield and Strong had to
compete on a weekly basis to have their songs cut. “If you’re in a basketball
game and everyone is a six-footer, you can’t come in at five foot eight and
expect to win,” he said, referring to the Motown giants against whom he
competed, prolific geniuses such as Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-
Holland.
Whitfield, who embraced the challenge of being creative under this kind
of pressure, also had the job of evaluating new songs from Motown and
sometimes had to admit that his own was simply out of the running, such as
the week when Smokey Robinson brought in “My Girl.” But rather than get
defeated, Whitfield and Strong would write an even better song and cut a
hotter track. Such was the world of Motown.
Though Smokey beat them out a couple of times with The Temptations,
Whitfield had his greatest successes with the group, writing songs for them
with Strong and producing them by himself. When their song for the
Temps, “Unite the World,” actually failed to go Top Forty, Strong and
Whitfield changed direction again and wrote a romantic ballad for the band
called “Just My Imagination.” It went to number one within eight weeks.
The first song Strong and Whitfield wrote together was “I Heard It
Through the Grapevine,” now one of the most recorded songs of all time.
Artists who have recorded it include the Temptations, Ike and Tina Turner,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Elton John, and
many more.
In 1971 Strong and Whitfield parted ways. Strong moved to California
to launch a solo career and to release two albums. Whitfield kept working,
writing, and producing the entire Masterpiece album for the Temps as well
as other records. He scored a hit in the late seventies with his title song and
track for the movie Car Wash.
This interview was conducted in my Hollywood office. He came
dressed as if ready for a basketball game, in jersey, shorts, and sneakers. In
fact, he was heading to a nearby game after our talk. The man, as he
discusses in the following, loves to compete.

It’s true you ended up in Detroit because your dad’s car died there?
Norman Whitfield: Yes. I was born and raised in Harlem, in New York
City. When I was fourteen we came out to California to attend my
grandmother’s funeral. And on the way back my father’s car broke down
and we wound up staying in Detroit.
We stayed there for most of my early career. That was where the actual
interest developed to become a songwriter or to have something to do with
the business that would be lucrative enough to keep me interested. [Laughs]

When did you decide to make music your career?

When I saw Smokey Robinson driving in a Cadillac. To be absolutely
point-blank honest. That’s what inspired me. And I actually ran up to him
one day. I scared him a little bit. I ran up behind him and asked him, after
he was halfway frightened by then, “How do you get started?” And he gave
me the most ridiculous answer I’ve ever heard in my entire life. He said,
“Make your own bed, brother, because you’ve got to sleep in it.” [Laughter]
I later dethroned him, dealing with the Temptations. [Laughs]
You know, the Motown experience was really quite an experience. It
was an absolute philosophy of music over there. This was the Berry Gordy
period: the Hollands, Dozier, so on.

Is this when you met Barrett Strong?

I knew him before I ever got in the business. Barrett is the guy who
wrote and played “Money” a long time ago, and it was a number-one
record. It was on a very small label called Anna records. Berry Gordy
produced and cowrote the song.
I was like anybody else. I was very young, and I had seen him perform.
And we got to know each other because I was hanging around Motown long
before they let me participate, writing and producing. And we had some
run-ins with some girls . . . [Laughs]

Did you and he begin collaborating on your own, or did Berry Gordy
team you up?
We kind of got together on our own. I was down in one of the Motown
rehearsal rooms, and he was much more familiar with the Motown thing
than I was, to be honest with you, but what happened was that I had a hit
record on Thelma Records called “I’ve Gotten Over You,” and Berry Gordy
was dominating the town then, Detroit, and Berry Gordy sent his A&R
director to find out who I was. The song got picked up by a larger label, and
Berry made me a little offer. He said, “Look, man, why don’t you come
over here? We’ve got this big machine over here. You’ll probably love it,
and it’ll give you a chance to make a lot of money . . .”
Of course, I was only making $15 a week then when I did go with Berry
Gordy. And another $15 a week he paid me for any or all royalties. Which I
didn’t mind, because I knew in order to make money, you needed to be
around a situation where there was some real money being made. And it
was an opportunity. The absolute opportunity of a lifetime.
 I was down in the rehearsal hall one day, and Barrett came in and we
started talking. We talked about some old times. About girls, you know. We
were never really very fond of each other. There was a subtle rivalry there
because of the girls; the only difference was that I had the girls, and he was
always trying to get them.
We sat down. I said, “Look, I got quite a few hit records.” I played him
a few things. I said, “If you are interested, I can at least guarantee you
$100,000 a year. To write together.”
He said, “Well, yeah. Sounds pretty good.”
I said, “I can only guarantee it to you verbally. I can’t put it on paper
because it would have a lot to do with how much we would put into it.” So
it worked out pretty well. From that point on, we were writing.

What was your first song that you wrote together?

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” That was a lot of years ago.
There’s a tremendous story behind that song, and nobody knows the story.
Barrett doesn’t even know the story.

Can you share that story with me?

I wish I could, I really do. It’s a story in itself because of the political
obstacles and things that happened. And I personally wouldn’t want to
incriminate Berry Gordy. He’s like a father to me. It would be something
very special for you to have, but I’ve got to be honest with you, there’s a
deal pending, and I wouldn’t want to dilute the value of it. Other than the
fact that it has been a song that, since day one, Barrett and myself, we’ve
always had a very strong feeling for this song. And I guess it didn’t
transcend to other people till later on. Because the first version was done on
Marvin Gaye, but it never got released. Then I did it on Gladys Knight and
the Pips, and it went to number one. I had just come off their first hit record
for Motown called “Everybody Needs Love,” and it was a perfect chance
for me to take a song that Barrett and I had felt so strongly about and put it
on an artist who just came off a hit record.
I personally went and looked up where the saying “heard it through the
grapevine” came from. It went all the way back to Confederate black
soldiers. They had a grapevine in order to pass on their words and
experiences to each other.
You wrote the songs with Strong but produced them alone?
Yes, I shared in the writing, but I always produced alone. Kind of like a
solo. I’m such a loner when it comes to music. I think it would be a strain
for somebody to produce with me because there are so many things that I
envision. What my mind can conceive, I can achieve. I’ve lived by that
code for a long time.

Does that make it hard to write with somebody else?

No, because I’ve come to a certain level of writing. I’ve mastered every
style of writing there is.

Where did you and Barrett write?

At my home or in the office or at his house. And Barrett is a very good
piano player, and a lot of time, from being a percussionist, I can figure the
rhythm out, and he’d be struggling with a little piano lick and trying to keep
the intensity up. When you go over it so many times it gets hard, especially
when you’re writing up-tempo songs.
When we wrote “Cloud Nine” on the Temptations, I started studying
African rhythms on my own, and I wanted to know how to make a song
have as much impact without using a regular 3/4 or 4/4 backbeat. And it
turned out very successfully. It went to number two or three.

So you can have a hit without a backbeat?

Yes. It has a lot to do with the feeling. Of course, nowadays the kids are
pretty dance oriented and the records don’t have as much substance. But it’s
something you have to learn to live with.
Melodies and good lyrics are forever. That’s the philosophy we were
raised on. Also that competition breeds champions. We had a very
competitive atmosphere at Motown. Very. But in some cases it made people
stronger. In my case it made me stronger. I went through a tremendous
amount of adversity. I don’t even want to go into it! [Laughs] I was really
the new kid on the block. Everybody else was pretty much established
there. But I managed to hang in there and make my way. I was probably the
fastest-growing producer in the history of Motown. At least, that’s what
Berry Gordy told me. [Laughs]
 I also worked in quality control. Because Berry discovered, when I first
got there, that I have an absolutely perfect ear in terms of picking hits. So
he gave me the job in quality control, which would justify the $15. [Laughs]

Did you pick a lot of hits?

Oh, I picked many. I picked “Where Did Our Love Go?” I mean, a lot of
hit records. I enjoyed it because I felt something, and when I felt something,
I was always right. An alarm would go off inside me emotionally when I
would hear something special.

Did you do that with your own songs as well?

Later on it got like that because I realized I had to be the recipient of the
bad news, and the good news for Smokey Robinson when he sent up “My
Girl.” You know? It came up; I had to evaluate it. [Laughs] I had to take it
into Berry Gordy. I said, “Berry Gordy, I do not have a record to submit at
this time. This record is absolutely a smash.”
And it stirred something inside of me to make me say, you know,
“Norman, you’re really going to have to step into this.” And eventually I
changed the sound. And Smokey was doing records that I thought were not
as intense or as lyrically strong, and I got a chance to beat him out. And
then once I beat him out, nobody ever got a chance to have the Temptations
again while I was there.

Your songs all are timeless. They sound great today if not better as ever.
Can you explain how you write a song that will last?
Yes. It has everything to do with the standard that was instilled by Berry
Gordy. There was no sense in turning in things that were basically
mediocre. And the standard was so high; the competition put the edge on it
and would carry you over. And I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. I actually found
out that when the going got tough, the tough got going. And I wasn’t like
that in school. When I played basketball I would react just the opposite. But
with music there was a certain tenaciousness inside of me and something
that would always drive me to make something very special out of a
common situation.

Do you remember writing “Just My Imagination”?

 Yeah. I wrote that in Barrett’s basement. We kind of felt that it was a
step back because we had just come off of “Can’t Get Next to You.” And
we’ve always enjoyed driving the other groups crazy because we were the
leaders. We would take the Temptations and make a left turn, even with
everyone saying, “Well, you know, they’re going to turn right again,” so we
just go left. That’s part of being a front-runner and being the best in the
field: you are allowed to be innovative and do anything you want as long as
you keep in mind the standard.

Did you like doing your song “War” with Edwin Starr?
Yes. I also had offered this song to The Rare Earth. I did it on the
Temptations first. It was a much different version then. I cut a track that was
strong enough to be a single, and I tried to give it to The Rare Earth. And
they refused it. They said, “We want to play on our own records.”
And Edwin was walking down the hall, and I said, “Edwin, I got a song
for you.” When we got ready to dub it in, I got a couple of classes of school
kids to share the experience with him, of them coming to Motown. They
were between nine and eleven. I did that from time to time because I
realized there was no vision there because of the poverty.

Did you like Springsteen’s version of “War”?

Yes. I was very thrilled when I heard it because I thought it was really
quite a compliment to have it on his first live album. I was very excited and
very grateful.

How about the Rolling Stones version of “Just My Imagination”?

[Laughs] Well, it was different. And I can’t say that I absolutely liked it.
I can’t say that I accepted the fact that they did it because they were who
they were. And it was such a beautiful song—it was very close to me and
Barrett, you know. When I heard it, Mick Jagger had such a different
rendition. It totally caught us by surprise.
After a while you start accepting that somebody else has a different
rendition of it. But it was anything but romantic. But it did pretty good in
the dollars-and-cents category.

Can you talk about writing “Papa Was a Rolling Stone?”

 First I better say this: The Temptations didn’t do the first version of it;
The Undisputed Truth did. And it did about three hundred thousand. And I
thought there was more to the song. So I went and cut it a whole different
way because I wanted to stay away from the original version. And the
Temptations were a little reluctant because they felt it was a used tune.
Eventually we saw eye to eye and we worked on it very hard and got
excellent results on it.

Do you have a favorite song you’ve written?

It’s not “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Because that one was
written and produced with the same intensity as all the songs we did. It’s
one of my favorites. The phenomenal success it has had is undeniable. I like
a song very much, like “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” which
Marvin Gaye did, it did a quiet 2 million. I love “I’m Losing You.” I
thought the song had pie-in-the-face, so to speak. It said what it said, and it
said it so cleverly.

How does it feel to have written standards?

I am still experiencing the thrill of it. It’s phenomenal, and I thank God
that whatever He gave me, that the songs have longevity. And the people
are really the people that make the songs what they are. We as writers, we
only do what we do, and then we have to give it to the public. They’re the
ones who determine if you’re a genius or a failure. So it’s an exhilarating
feeling.
I’ve had it for so long, but I don’t take it for granted. I try to remember
what it took to get it to that level. Lyrics and melodies are forever, but
music can change. It changes with the times. I’m always going to be a
chancy person and a nonconformist. I conform only to my feelings.

OceanofPDF.com
Loretta Lynn
 Songs from Butcher Holler
Nashville, Tennessee 2014

So overflowing with inspiration was she when writing “Coal Miner’s

Daughter,” combined with rich remembrance, that she wrote ten verses.
Owen Bradley, her producer, said it was too long, so she threw away six
verses. Completely. Not saved for some future boxed set. We’re talking
gone.
But the song, as the world knows well, was so beautifully crafted, so
rich in the textures and times she was in, that it became an instant classic. A
standard from day one. And after that, she didn’t throw away anything.
Miss Loretta. She’s royalty, of course. The first lady of country music.
She’s been mythic for decades, both for her beautiful voice and for those
vivid songs from Butcher Holler she wrote herself, painting an American
picture so poignant and real, you never forget them. Yet as mythic as she is
—having been portrayed, after all, by Sissy Spacek in the movie of her life
—she is a real person, and an especially warm, funny, charming, and
gracious one. The time spent with her is time I will cherish always. And I
have a feeling everybody who has met her feels the same way.
Some people are just born with it. With the gift for writing songs. Songs
come to them, and they simply need to write them down. It doesn’t take any
agony or even much thought; it just takes time with a guitar alone to capture
them as they fly by. It’s how she started. Right out of the gate, Loretta Lynn
wrote songs richer and deeper than the finest songs emerging out of
Nashville. And she sang them with robust bravado, this little girl “dressed
up like Annie Oakley,” and ascended swiftly to Nashville royalty as one of
country music’s greatest singers and songwriters.
Born in 1932 in Kentucky, she married her beloved Doolittle when she
was only thirteen and had the first four of her six kids before she was an
adult. He gave her a guitar for her twenty-fourth birthday, and she started
playing and singing as if she’d done it her whole life. Her first two songs,
“Whispering Sea” and “Honky Tonk Girl,” were also the twin sides of her
first single. And when people heard that voice with those songs, songs that
reflected country life as it was really lived, they fell in love.
After those two, the songs kept coming. When the Nashville crowd first
heard her songs they were stunned. Roy Acuff said he couldn’t fathom how
she could write such astounding songs—“every one a little movie”—after
never writing before. Gradually she created a bounty of work, a deep well
of country music splendor from which singers have drawn for years—and
continue to. She attributes it all to telling the truth. Her most famous song,
“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” is entirely autobiographical—every detail, every
fact. Plugged into her rich memory of the past, she overflowed with verses
—writing ten for that song alone (and cutting out six, throwing them away
forever). But sometimes the truth wasn’t what the good ol’ boys in
Nashville wanted to hear because it reflected too closely the reality of the
changes America went through in the sixties, such as “The Pill” and “Rated
X,” both of which were promptly banned from radio and both of which
went to number one, sparked by controversy.
Today she’s home in her sun-dappled writing room, tending, as she
often must, to the business of being Loretta Lynn. But as anyone who
knows her will attest, she is no diva—quite the opposite. When told that it’s
an honor for this writer to interview her, she just laughs and says, “Honey,
don’t say that. You can interview me anytime.”

You once said you would rather be remembered as a songwriter than a

singer—
Loretta Lynn: I would. Way before I started singing I was trying to
write. I lived out in the state of Washington, and I had my four babies out
there. I was trying to write every day, and I didn’t know how. So I looked at
the songbooks and thought that anyone could do that, so I just started
writing. “Whispering Sea” was my first song, and then “Honky Tonk Girl”
was my second song.

Did songwriting come easy to you?

Yes. When I started writing, my husband was out on the ocean, fishing,
and I wrote “Whispering Sea”: “Whispering sea, roll on by, don’t you listen
to me cry.”
“Honky Tonk Girl” came from a lady who kept coming into the little
club. Doo got me a job working for five dollars on Saturday nights, a little
club. She came every time I worked. She told me that her husband had left
her for another woman. She’d set there and cry. And I wrote “Honky Tonk
Girl” from that.

Some songwriters never write story songs.

Yes, that’s true. I always do. I start with an idea. I thought, “Well,
‘Honky Tonk Girl.’” I turned it into a song because she picked strawberries
with me during the time when strawberries were ripe. And then when
strawberry pickin’ was over with, she kept coming to the club and cryin’.
And I’ve always had to have something to write about.

So you have an idea first before you start writing?

Yes. The idea first. I had to have a real reason to write a song. I wrote
them about true things. And I just kind of kept that up. I’d write the words
by thinking and watching.

Do you write a whole lyric before music?

No. I start the music on guitar with the first two or three lines.

Many of your songs are in odd keys, not normal guitar keys. “Honky
Tonk Girl” is in C sharp.
Yeah, I know it. [Laughs] I don’t know why. They told me in Nashville
they couldn’t believe it, what you’re writing! All your keys are funny.
’Cause they wrote D, G, and A, you know. I was going out on a limb a little
bit, but I didn’t realize that. I started playing rhythm guitar with my brother
and a steel player when I first started singing. And I played barre chord
rhythm. I had all sorts of notes on the guitar at that time. Now I probably
wouldn’t remember all of them.
Since I learned all the keys, I just thought everybody did it that way.
And evidently I was different. I was so far away from country music. I was
a long way from Nashville, Tennessee.
I never knew another songwriter until I came to Nashville and met
Harlan Howard. And he said, “Who in the heck taught you to play rhythm
guitar like that?” I said, “I taught myself.” He said, “I can’t believe you’re
the writer you are and taught yourself to play rhythm guitar like that.” But I
did.

How old were you when you started playing?

Twenty-four. Well, I had four kids, one right after the other. And when
all four kids were in school, I started writing. My husband got me a job
making $5 on a Saturday night and I thought I was gonna get rich. [Laughs]
I saved my money up and bought me a black skirt with fringe and these
cowboy boots—they were $14—and, well, I looked like Annie Oakley. I
didn’t know that people didn’t look like that. I come to Nashville, and I’m
the only one who walked in looking like a country singer, with my boots
and my guitar ’round my neck—I’ve come to sing. [Laughs]
When I first started singing, although I was writing songs, I did other
people’s songs, like “I Walked Away from the Wreck.” Owen Bradley told
me, “You start doing your own stuff.” But I was afraid they wouldn’t go
over. I put out records, but they didn’t do nothing until I started doing my
own songs. And they went to number one. I was hitting home with them, I
guess, with the honky-tonk music.

Your songs are so rich in detail. Did that come naturally to you?
Yeah, it just come naturally. I think anyone could do it. I think a lot of
people try to write songs that are a little out of reach. And they should just
sit down and write what they know. And what they see.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” is such a vivid picture of your childhood.

I had more verses. Owen Bradley said, “Loretta, there’s already been
one ‘El Paso’ and we’ll never have another one. [Laughs] Get in that room
and start taking some of those verses off.” Yeah, I took six verses off.
Six? It has four we know, so it had ten verses altogether?
Yeah, I had a whole story going. I wished I’d never thrown them away.
If I’d kept them, I could record them now and put them back in the song.

You don’t remember them at all?

No, but I should sit down and start rewriting on that song and come up
with some more verses. I threw them away, and I should never have done
that.

Do you remember writing it?

Yes. I wrote it on a little $17 guitar. It didn’t stay in tune. And $17 was a
lot of money, ’cause at the time we didn’t have any money. But then Gibson
gave me a guitar, and I wrote all the others on that one.
Every word is true. My daddy would work all night in the coal mine.
During the day he would work in the cornfields. There were ten of us. He
had to make a living for us. Eight kids. I was second, so I would take care
of the kids while Mommy did the sewing and the cleaning and everything
else. I think that’s why I sing. I’d rock the babies to sleep and sing to them.

The song says your mother’s fingers were bleeding.

Yes. I’d seen them bleed many times. In the wintertime we had these old
clotheslines made out of wire. It would be so cold that her fingers would
stick to that wire. She’d pull them loose, and I’d see the hide come off of
those fingers. I would hide and cry. Monday was wash day. She’d scrub on
those washboards all day, and her fingers would bleed. But she didn’t
complain.
My mommy, to me, was beautiful. I’d see everything she’d do, whether
it was crying or laughing. She would rock the babies by the coal oil light,
like in the song. That was our light. We didn’t have much light. Butcher
Holler, Kentucky, was dark at night. You go up a long holler, and there’s
trees everywhere, and it’s very dark.

There is the line about having no shoes—

We would wear our shoes out before it would be warm enough to be
without shoes. We’d have holes in our shoes and put paste-board in our
shoes. But halfway to school the paste-board would come out.
 One time my daddy found me by the creek with my shoes off, just
crying, ’cause it was so cold from those shoes with holes. And Daddy
picked me up and carried me home. And Daddy only weighed 117 pounds.
I don’t know how he did it, but he did.
You know, you hear about poor people in other countries. There are a lot
of poor people in our country if you go to the right places. There are a lot of
hollers, not just Butcher Holler—I’ve seen them. I guarantee you there’s
kids right to this day in the Kentucky hills that don’t have shoes.

So touching is the line, “Daddy always managed to get the money

somewhere.”
Parents do what they have to do. Daddy would usually try to get two
hogs, one to raise and one to sell. So the other hog would pay for itself. We
had a rough life. It was a hard life. Mommy would raise a garden in the
summer, and we’d help her. She would can, and I would pick wild
blackberries. I would go and pick from morning till night. And Mommy
would pack up a hundred quarts of blackberries.
The song doesn’t tell half of it. If I told the whole story, nobody would
believe it now anyway.
Owen knew it was about my life, and he didn’t care about my life and
figured nobody else would. So I cut out, I think, four verses. And I cried the
whole time. And I have lost those verses, I do not remember them. I wish I
did.
We cut it in Owen’s studio in his barn.

Did he arrange it, or did you?

It was my arrangement. I told him exactly how I wanted it, whether I
wanted the steel to start it or the fiddle. Then I sang the song to the band
and said, “This is what we’re gonna do now.” And I sang it live with the
band. Just sang. I didn’t play guitar. Just a couple takes at the most. I never
did many takes of anything. The more I sing, the worse I get. I like to make
it fresh.
It was my husband Doo’s idea to put a banjo on it after. He was right. It
added so much to the song. None of us could believe it.
It was a fun session. I stopped at the store before going to the barn. I’d
get a half a roll of bologna cut up and cheese, bread, onion, potato chips.
We made everything fun. I didn’t have a drink, but whoever had a drink had
a drink. A hillbilly party. I didn’t want my sessions not to be fun. Because if
you go into a recording studio and you think you’re a better singer than the
boys that’s gonna play behind you, then you better not go. It’s a thing you
are feeling and you can sense, and I know the musicians can sense it.

It’s amazing to think of you writing a song like that so easily. Not only
is it richly detailed, but you have great craft in there, like rhyming
Butcher Holler with “poor man’s dollar.”
Well, that was the truth. Everything that I put in that song was true. I
lived all of it. I’ve lived a lot of stuff that I wrote. Of course Doo, my
husband, wouldn’t have wanted to heard that. [Laughs] But I did. I never
had to lie about anything I was writing about. That was my problem. I
didn’t lie. And sometimes Owen would say, “I don’t know whether you
should put that out there now. Doo might divorce you.” [Laughter] And I’d
say, “Let him divorce me—it’s the truth.”

And he never did.

No, he never did. He knew they were true.

Would you always play new songs for him?

Oh yeah. I let him hear it first.

Was he honest in his response?

Yeah, he never denied any of it. He was always honest. If he liked it, he
liked it. If he didn’t, he’d say, “I don’t think that’s so good.” And I’d throw
it away and start again.

What inspired “You Ain’t Woman Enough”?

“You Ain’t Woman Enough” come to me when a little girl come
backstage and said her husband didn’t bring her to the show—he brought
his girlfriend. This was before the show started, and she wanted me to look
out the curtain and see what this girl looked like. I peeked out, and there she
was, painted up like you wouldn’t believe. I looked ’round at the little girl
that was talking to me. And she didn’t have no makeup at all. And I said,
“Honey, she ain’t woman enough to take your man.”
 I went right straight to my dressing room and wrote it in ten minutes.
Ten minutes and a lot of money I made on that song. [Laughter] A lot of
people have recorded it.

Is writing a song in ten minutes unusual for you?

Sometimes they work, and sometimes they just won’t. Sometimes you
get hung up on them. When that happens, you just throw it back, and maybe
come back to it two or three weeks later.

Some of your songs were quite controversial and even banned—such as

“The Pill,” about birth control.
Oh yeah. “The Pill.” Also “One’s on the Way.” They started hollering
about some of the songs and banned them from the radio. But immediately,
when people would hear they’d been banned from the radio, they’d hit
number one in a hurry. [Laughter] And then [radio] would have to play
them. If they had listeners, they’d have to play the one that was banned.

Did you enjoy making the album Van Lear Rose with Jack White?
That’s the country-est album I’ve ever done. I told [Jack] that, and he
said, “Well, thank you.” [Laughs] And he’s not a country guy—he’s rock
and roll. But when my movie came out he said he was nine years old, and
he said, “I sat in the theater and watched it all day long.” It just kept coming
back on and he kept watching it. He’s a good guy, Jack White is.
I didn’t know he was gonna sing with me on “Portland, Oregon.” I
walked in the studio, and I said, “Who is that man singing it with me,
Jack?” and he said, “That’s me.” [Laughter] I like Jack. Anything he did I
thought was cool.

Do you write the music for a song before you finish the words?
Yes. I write the melody as soon as I finish the first verse. It’s got to fit
the song. If it don’t fit the song, I don’t think it’ll come easy. But I think if it
comes easy, then the melody is gonna be okay.

How do you create melodies yourself?

When I write a song, the melody just comes in my mind to fit that song.
And if it’s a slow tempo, I think of a slow melody to get in that mood. I let
the song come to me. I just gotta get by myself and get that song. And if it
don’t come easy, I lay it down. And sometimes I’ll pick it up, and
sometimes I won’t ever go back to it.

Can you write at any time of day?

Night is best.

When you come up with an idea, do you always write it down right
away?
If I don’t, I’ll never remember it. [Laughs] I’ve got to write it down
right then, or I’ll lose it.

Do you remember “Miss Being Mrs.”?

Oh yeah. You know, that just come—to be truthful with you—from one
of those things where I just thought, “I miss being Mrs. tonight.” When
you’re not married anymore—which I’m not, my husband passed away
fourteen years ago—naturally you’re gonna feel that way. And you just
miss being Mrs.

You’re good with wordplay like that. Like in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,”
when you say “I remember well the well where I drew water.” A
beautiful use of language.
Well, when I thought of that I felt it was a good line to use. And then I
got to thinking maybe nobody will really understand that line, so maybe I
shouldn’t use it. But I let it go anyway and thought, “Yeah, I’m gonna use
it.”

And we understand.
[Laughs] You knew it was good, didn’t you? Well, bless your heart.
Boy, I’ve drawn a lot of water out of that old well back in Kentucky. That
was my job. To go and get the water.

Do you remember writing “Rated X”?

Yeah, that was about a married woman. Things didn’t work out and she
was divorced. I probably sat down and talked to her. She told me the story,
and I just wrote it.
I love your song “Van Lear Rose.”
I had to talk about Mommy in there. She had the biggest bluest eyes I
ever seen. She was a beautiful woman. I remember back when she was
thirty-two, thirty-three years old. Mommy was so beautiful. I always
wanted to be as beautiful as Mommy. [Laughs] Never made it. She had long
black hair, beautiful blue eyes, and a dark complexion. She was Indian and
Irish. My father was Indian and Irish. And the Irish have great personalities,
you know. And most of them sing. People from Ireland, you know, they
come into this country singing. There’s a couple of them in Branson right
now singing. And Indians are in touch with nature. That’s me. I wrote about
things that have happened. I probably took after the Indian part on that.

Do you remember writing “You’re Lookin’ at Country”?

Yeah. I remember we came home. We’ve got about twelve or thirteen
hundred acres. I was out riding around, and I looked over toward the field.
Doo and Hattie all planted some corn, and I thought, “Now you’re looking
at country.” And immediately I come into the house and went to the writing
room and wrote it.

Are there songs you start that you can’t finish?

Oh yeah. I’ve had a lot of them. I don’t know why I don’t go back and
finish them. I just kind of quit writing. I haven’t written a song in a long
time.

Why?
Lazy. But I’m gonna get back to it.

You’ve written so many classics that you have nothing left to prove.
True, I don’t have a thing to prove, but if I write, I’m gonna prove
something. Don’t do anything that you can’t do best. I don’t believe in
doing something that I don’t know is good. If I go back to writing, I bet
there will be a good song out of it. If I write ten songs, there will be three
good ones out of it. I won’t dedicate my life to something that’s not good.

What advice would you give songwriters about how to write good
songs?
 Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody’s living
that. Not just somebody—there’s a lot of people.

OceanofPDF.com
Sheldon Harnick
 Of Fiddlers on the Roof
New York, New York 2015

Considering the old American songwriting tradition of Jewish songwriters

submerging their Jewish identities to write, instead, gentle songs like
“White Christmas,” the writing of an entire Broadway show about Jews in
the old country—Fiddler on the Roof—seemed brave. Courageous, if you
will.
He’ll have none of it. He being Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist who wrote
the famous songs with his partner in song, Jerry Bock. Of course, like my
father as well, he was a member of the greatest generation who went to
Europe to fight in World War II. “We were fighting Hitler,” he said. “That
took bravery. But to write a Jewish show and hope it gets on Broadway?
That’s not brave.”
Okay, granted, compared to fighting Hitler and ultimately saving the
world, creating this celebration of Jewish culture for Broadway was
relatively risk-free. Still, it was unprecedented and even considered
forbidden territory. To bring Jewish culture, humor, myth, and even
language to Broadway was bravely brilliant. “To Life (L’Chaim)” not only
introduces Yiddish exultantly into song, it also provides the translation.
 But it’s not the bravery for which his songs from Fiddler are most
remembered; it’s for their poignancy. A tremendously savvy comic
songwriter, a genius with rhyme and meter, he’s also deeply gifted with
serious ballads. He’s the man, after all, who wrote the words for “Sunrise,
Sunset.” It’s a song that has reverberated through our lives, one of the best
ever in capturing the sorrow woven into our lives, the swift passage of time
as our children grow up and change so quickly. He wove it all into one line,
a beautiful natural image that matches perfectly the organic simplicity, the
enduring ascension and descent of the title sun. Here in the garden we see
infinite unfolding as “seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers.” With those
few words he gives us the full span of life, with people blossoming as
naturally as flowers under the perpetual sun.
Born in Chicago in 1924, he attended Northwestern University (a
sentence I like, as it applies to my dad as well in every respect), but he
started writing songs as a kid. Words came first, and before he wrote songs,
he wrote poems. Meeting up with a pal in high school led him on a path to
musical theater songwriting. “I was writing poetry, and it was getting
published in our school paper,” he remembered on a crisp autumn day in
Manhattan. “One of my classmates who was interested in the theater looked
me up, and we began to write sketches. Then we also wrote parodies of
songs.”
This early songwriting training served him well when he enlisted in the
Army, and it was determined early on he was better with words and music
than rifles and ammunition. Fellow soldiers, recognizing his gifts, would
invite him to write songs for their girlfriends, which he did, thus honing his
craft while serving his country.
At Northwestern he wrote songs for their famous Waa-Mu Show, the
original student musical comedy they produced each year. Though he was
adept at piano, his main instrument was violin, and he intended to play it in
Chicago dance bands upon graduation. “My ultimate dream,” he confessed,
“was to be in the second violin section of a second-rate symphony orchestra
somewhere because I knew I wasn’t good enough to be in the first violin
section of a first-rate symphony.”
It was hearing the musical Finian’s Rainbow, with beautiful tunes by
Burton Lane and brilliant lyrics by Yip Harburg, that led him to understand
writing songs was to be his life. An early meeting with the great Yip, who
wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz (with music by Harold Arlen), gave
him a glimpse of the world in which he could live, and he devoted himself
to musical theater.
His most famous show is Fiddler on the Roof, based on the writings of
Sholom Aleichem, which he wrote with his longtime partner, Jerry Bock.
But he wrote many other musicals, including Fiorello! about the legendary
mayor of New York, as well as a musical—Rex—with the legendary
Richard Rodgers (who normally wrote only with Hart and Hammerstein).
On a cold and gray but snowless Manhattan day he took time to amply
delve into the annals of his remarkable career. Although he was past ninety
years old when we spoke, he was sharp, funny, and in happy awe of the
remarkable life he’s lived in song.

When you were growing up what was the music that you were listening
to, and what was the music in your home?
Sheldon Harnick: Ahh, it was on the radio. It was whatever popular
music there was. I loved hearing songs, all kinds of songs. There was not
much classical music except for what my sister was playing on piano.

I read that Yip Harburg was one of your idols. So at some point you
became aware of who was writing the songs and who he was, yes?
That happened when I was in college at Northwestern. I was
contributing songs to the Waa-Mu Show, and the first song that I had done
in this show was sung by a performer named Charlotte Lebowski, who later
became Charlotte Rae and had a lovely career in television. Charlotte was
terrific. We became good friends, and when I was a junior, around 1948, she
went to New York on the Christmas holiday. When she came back she
sought me out and she had an LP in her hand. She said, “Sheldon, you of all
people have got to hear this.” And she loaned me a copy of Finian’s
Rainbow, and when I listened to that, I suddenly thought that is what I want
to do with my life. I hadn’t paid too much attention up to that time about
who was writing the songs, but I wanted to know who wrote the lyrics to
Finian’s Rainbow, and it turned out to be a man named Yip Harburg, and he
became my idol.
Finian’s Rainbow has such beautiful songs but also a social
consciousness. Was that part of what attracted you to it?
Yes. It was the fact that he had the social consciousness but that his
lyrics were so playful. I thought you have to listen to what he’s saying even
if you should happen to disagree with him. Also, when I got married Burton
Lane was a neighbor, and so we became very good friends with Burton.

I understand that when you met Yip Harburg he gave you some advice
to work with many composers and also to write comic songs, not
ballads. Is that correct?
More or less. Charlotte called me, I came to New York, I had written
this song for her, and she was working at the Village Vanguard. She called
me and said through a friend that they had invited Yip Harburg down to the
Village Vanguard to see her act, and if I wanted to meet him, I should come
down. And so I did. And he was very gracious. I asked whether I could play
for him, and he said sure. So I went to his apartment. I’m not a pianist, so I
got a pianist and I went and auditioned. Mostly what I was auditioning was
the stuff I had written for the Waa-Mu Show. I hadn’t written that much
new material in New York, but he was very encouraging and he did say,
“Oh, I had an uncle in Chicago who had done a lot of theater,” and when I
came to New York he gave me introduction to a composer named Jay
Gorney, who by coincidence had written with Yip Harburg. “Brother, Can
You Spare a Dime” was their big song.
So I went to see Gorney, and Gorney’s advice was to write ballads
because producers want to make sure that you were able to write a
successful ballad. That was his advice. When I met Yip, his advice was to
write comedy songs and character songs because they’re the most important
part of doing a show. His advice was that if you can do a good ballad, that’s
terrific, but he said more important are the other kind of songs, the comedy
songs or the character songs. Yip knew that I was writing my own music,
and he suggested that if a good composer invited me to work with him, I
should accept that. He said that it would facilitate my career to work with
other people, other composers as well as myself.
And he did something else that was just so incredibly gracious. About
three days after I had auditioned for him I got a card from him in the mail.
It was a greeting card. And on the cover was a picture of a barefooted harp
player, a woman playing the harp, and the message was:
“Dear Sheldon:
Keep doing what you’re doing. I am sure you will be successful if you
keep wanging that lyre.”
And it was signed “Yip.” That’s the part I treasure most.

That’s great. And it’s interesting that you got that advice to write
ballads and that advice to write comic songs. You ultimately did both
very beautifully.
Well, you have to for a musical, or any imaginable kind of song for any
imaginable kind of character.

When you were writing your own songs, did you do it at the piano?
Yeah. I had to. I was not a pianist, and it was a very arduous
proposition, just so. And as a matter of fact the first songs I wrote, the piano
accompaniments I wrote just did not serve the songs well. And when I got
pianists to play what I had written I thought, “Oh my God, that’s terrible,”
because what I had written kept getting in the way of what the singer was
singing. Little by little I learned how to write a proper accompaniment that
supported the singer without competing with them.
That took a while. If I had been a pianist I think I would’ve, like so
many pianists I know, accompany singers so they get used to what proper
accompaniment is supposed to sound like.

Before Yip suggested you write with other composers, were you
thinking along those lines or were you thinking you would do it both
yourself?
I was thinking I was most interested in doing it myself.

When you first started writing songs did it come easy to you?
The lyrics came fairly easily. The music did not. But lyrics, from the
time I was in grammar school, [pause] it was fairly easy to write poetry.
Right now I can look back and realize I had a gift for it. I didn’t think of it
in those terms in those days. My mother used to celebrate every bar
mitzvah, every wedding, and so forth by writing a piece of poetry, and so
my sister and I began to do that too because we were influenced by my
mother.
My sister was actually a very fine poet and a serious poet. So when I
started to write poetry I thought I will write light verse so that I don’t find
myself competing with my sister.
Although my sister wrote a two-line poem that I think was very funny.
Which was “In the summer, it is warmer.” [Laughter]

That’s like Ogden Nash. That’s great.

Yeah. Well, we were both great fans of Ogden Nash. And as a matter of
fact, I was Ogden’s assistant on one television show he did. Burt Shevelove
arranged it. He was a friend of Burt’s, and Burt knew that Ogden was not
musical and would need help. He had been hired to set lyrics to Prokofiev’s
melodies. It was a television program, Art Carney Meets Peter and the
Wolf. The centerpiece of the program was going to be Art Carney narrating
Peter and the Wolf. But on the rest of the program they intended to have
songs with music by Prokofiev and lyrics by Ogden Nash.
Ogden needed somebody to give him dummy lyrics so he could tell
what the rhythms were because he didn’t read music. I got the job, and I
wrote a lot of dummy lyrics. I wish I had saved them because I was trying
to write dummy lyrics that might amuse Ogden, and the only pattern I can
remember was one where there was a Prokofiev melody that went “da da da
dum, da da da dum, da da da dum, da da dum.” So I wrote a dummy lyric
that was “Canada Dry, Canada Dry, Canada Dry, Alaska.” [Laughter] And
Ogden laughed.
Ogden, by the way, was an absolutely charming, warm human being. He
was just wonderful to work with.

Wow. That’s really interesting to hear that you worked with him,
because like him, you are a great rhymer of words but also so playful
with words—there’s always humor in there.
I asked him whether he had ever discovered that somebody had
anticipated a rhyme of his. And he laughed. He said when he read Robert
Browning he was always constantly finding rhymes that he thought he had
originated but Browning got there first. [Laughter]
You’ve always been an amazing rhymer. Spanning your whole career
there is great rhyming throughout.
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I must say, rhyming is great fun.

Yeah. That fun is reflected in the songs.

That’s nice to hear. I hope so.

Speaking of funny songs, I was listening last night to “The Merry

Minuet,” which you wrote alone, correct?
Yeah. I remember when that got written, it was early in the 1950s, and I
had been reading the newspaper and I kept the news, it was like today, the
news was constantly bad. I would turn the page, and I would start to read an
article, and I would start to shake my head, and I would go, “Oy! Oh my
God, oy!” Then I started to laugh at my reactions, and I thought that it
might be fun to do a song like that. Where the singer keeps saying “Oy,
Oy.” Then I thought, “No, rather than that, I’ll have him whistle.”
I was playing a lot of chamber music at the time, so it was natural that
the song took the form of a Mozart minuet.

It’s a brilliant song, and I’m sure you know that often people assume
that Tom Lehrer wrote it because of the dark humor. And Tom
[featured in SOS I] confused the matter more by performing the song
himself.
Yes. I’ve met Tom, and he did a darling thing. He was performing in
Australia, and he sent me a copy of the program just to show that he was
singing “The Merry Minuet,” but on the program he gave credit to me, and
he wanted me to know that.

It seems tailor-made for him and his delivery.

Well, I was very flattered that he chose to use it because I love his work.
As a matter of fact, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but he is my son’s
favorite lyricist.

I love him too. I had the pleasure of interviewing him, and like you, he’s
a great craftsman. He’s obviously very funny but such a great rhymer
and good craftsman.
 Yeah. He’s terrific.

Sadly, “The Merry Minuet,” like most of his songs, is still so relevant.
Maybe more now than ever.
I know. I loved writing the song. Harry Belafonte once asked me if he
could use the song and if he could change the lyrics to be about Southern
bigotry, and I allowed him to. And a number of people have done that
because it can be done in a very bitter way. I don’t think I did it in a
particularly bitter way but it expressed what I was feeling which was sad,
very melancholy.

It’s so beautifully crafted. Talking about a great couplet, you have, “We
can be tranquil, grateful, and proud / Because man’s been endowed
with a mushroom-shaped cloud.” All those interior rhymes—that’s
such great writing.
Thank you.

Also it rings true now with global warming and the idea that what
nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.
Oh right. I did a song about global warming after reading the book
about that forty or fifty years ago. I wrote a lyric, “When the Sea Is All
Around Us,” and music by David Baker. It’s remarkable how that song has
held up. It’s unfortunate how that song has held up.

The Kingston Trio recorded “The Merry Minuet,” and afterward they
say, of the song, “That was written in 1949, and due to our consistent
foreign policy we didn’t have to change any of the lyrics.”
Hah! [Laughter] It was written in 1950 actually. I hadn’t come to New
York until 1950.

So with them doing that song, did that encourage you to do more songs
along those lines or were you ready to go to musical theater?
I was looking for somebody to write a musical with. I wasn’t
particularly interested in writing more songs like “The Merry Little
Minuet.” I was interested in writing songs that expressed how I felt, so it’s
possible there could’ve been more songs like that, but basically I was
looking for somebody to team up with to write a musical.

My understanding was “Boston Beguine” was your first song that was
produced.
Yeah. That was the result of a trip to Boston. My first wife was in a
show they were trying out in Boston, so I went to visit her. While I was
there, in the newspapers there was a kind of miniscandal, a new book, a
standard sex manual. It wasn’t an erotic book—it was an educational book
—but several of the churches had written big articles trying to get the book
suppressed, and it infuriated me, so I wrote this song about a young woman,
an inexperienced woman in Boston who has an affair but is unable to
consummate the affair because she’s never read the proper manual on how
to go about it. That was the story of the “Boston Beguine.” Leonard Sillman
had done a series of [Broadway] shows called New Faces, and he wanted to
do another. Alice Ghostley was the star, and so I played “Boston Beguine”
for Leonard, and he said this would be perfect for Alice, so for heaven’s
sake, finish it! I did. And Alice did it superbly. That was my introduction to
the world of musical theater, my debut as a Broadway songwriter in New
Faces of 1952.

So how did it happen that you met Jerry Bock?

That was through the actor Jack Cassidy. Jack and Jerry Bock had
worked in the Catskills together at a summer resort. Jack had been an actor
on the staff, and Jerry had been a composer on the staff. They met and they
became friends, and there was a musical version of Shangri-La with a score
by [Jerome] Lawrence and [Robert Edwin] Lee. When the show went on
the road they found they were in trouble and needed to stay on the road
longer than they thought they would. But Lawrence and Lee already had
commitments to go work on Mame, so they had to leave the show, and they
needed somebody in case any new lyrics needed to be written. I got the job,
so I went out to join the show on the road.
One of the actors was Jack Cassidy, and we became friends, and Jack
said, “You have to meet Jerry Bock.” He said Jerry had been working with a
lyricist he met at the University of Wisconsin and they’d been fairly
successful—as a matter of fact, they did the score for the first act of the
Sammy Davis show Mr. Wonderful. But something had come up, something
had happened in their relationship. They broke up, and Jerry Bock was
looking for another lyricist, and Jack Cassidy introduced me to him and the
meeting took. We hit it off immediately.

When you said you hit it off immediately, did you talk about music and
songs that you like? Is that how you bonded?
Well, I knew his work. I had seen his songs in the off-Broadway revues
that I went to, and he knew my work and liked it, so that was a good
beginning. We respected each other’s work right from the start.

I was fascinated to discover, reading an interview with you, that when

the two of you would write songs, generally he would give you a whole
bunch of melodies, and then you would go through those melodies and
choose ones, and then later you might write words first.
He was very generous. He would go into his studio while we were
working on a show and write songs and record them. Then he would send
me a tape with anywhere from eight to twelve or more songs on it, and I
would listen to the songs. On any one tape there might only be one or two
songs that coincided with ideas I had, so he was very generous because all
the rest of those songs went back into his trunk.
That’s the way we always started. Sometimes when we were in the
midst of a show I would write lyrics first. So when our relationship broke
up I was curious to see which came more often—the music or the lyrics. I
went through every song we had written, trying to remember whether the
music had been written first or the lyrics. To my surprise, it turned out to be
almost exactly fifty-fifty. We always started with music first, but then a
moment would come where I had an idea for a song and nothing Jerry had
written fit that lyric, so I had to write the lyric first. Ultimately I wrote
about half of the lyrics first and I wrote to music about half the time.

It’s just hard to fathom there’s all those Jerry Bock melodies that you
didn’t use. So were those never used, those ones that you didn’t choose?
I don’t know because Jerry did a lot of work that I didn’t know about.
And as a matter of fact, after we split up he worked in Texas, and he might
very well have used a lot of those melodies. I don’t know.
And would those be just him playing piano, or would he be singing as
well on the tape?
Yeah. He would be singing nonsense syllables, yeah.

Were they totally complete songs—verse, chorus, the whole thing—or

just sketches or ideas?
Usually they were complete—verse and chorus. Sometimes they were
just chorus.

And what kind of process was that for you to listen to those? Did you
listen carefully to each one with ideas of what the content needed to be,
or did you go through them quickly?
No, I couldn’t go through them quickly because it was on a tape, and I
had to wait until the song was over. But I was always excited when I got a
tape because, you know, in a way it was a world premiere. I was the first
person besides Jerry to hear these songs unless it was Jerry’s wife.
I would listen, and on every tape there were always a couple of songs
that really excited me, and I thought, “I can’t wait to put words to that.” I,
almost invariably, didn’t have any words kicking around in my head that fit
what I heard, but when I got excited by the melodies I couldn’t wait to put
lyrics to them.

It’s especially surprising because the words and music of your songs
work so beautifully together, it almost sounds like someone sitting at
the piano with him and crafting them both at the same time.
Well, I am a good musician and I’m very comfortable with music, so it’s
fun. It’s fun to be that kind of craftsman and to make the lyrics fit the music
as comfortably as possible.

When you would write lyrics to one of these melodies would you then
learn it and play it on the piano to work on it, or would you work with
the tape?
I would work with the tape. I would memorize the music, and then I
would just walk around singing the tune in my head and trying to fit lyrics
to it.
 I remember I almost got killed walking doing that once. I had this
melody of Jerry’s going through my head, and that’s all I could think of,
and suddenly I heard this loud horn blow, and I looked up and there was a
huge truck that was about four inches away from me. I had walked right in
front of the truck, and he had honked the horn and saved my life. I’ve made
a joke out of it by telling people that I told the driver, “It’s okay, driver, I
got the lyric.” [Laughter] But that wasn’t true. I was scared to death when I
saw how nearly I had been killed.

I’m glad you weren’t hurt. But it’s such a chapter from a songwriter’s
life that even while walking around you were working on the songs.
I find, especially when there’s a problem with a lyric that’s not coming,
if I walk, it facilitates the process for some reason, so I love to walk when I
am working on a song.

Paul Simon told me he would drive his car with the tape going, and
something about the movement helps sometimes to get to the words.
Oh, I wouldn’t dare do that! I was doing that once. I was driving down
to East Hampton, and luckily there wasn’t another car around, but suddenly
I hear this siren behind me. I was working on a lyric, and I pulled over and
the cop came over and said, “Mister, did you know that you were doing
eighty-five miles per hour?” I said no, I was working on a lyric. He
laughed, but he gave me the ticket anyway. [Laughter]

Besides walking, when you are having a hard time and the words aren’t
coming, any other advice besides walking? How you finish a song and
get to the right lines?
The other thing I do is work on the song shortly before I go to sleep
because I have found quite often I will wake up with the solution to a lyric
problem.

What do you think allows that to happen? Is your brain working on it

while you’re sleeping?
Yeah. My brain unconsciously is working on it. And does the work for
you at night. It’s a curious phenomenon, but it seems to be true. It’s true of
me, and I’ve talked to some other lyricists who have had the same
experience.

It’s the amazing thing of the lyricist’s job, especially writing to a

melody, that when you’re finding words, you can’t dictate what the
words can be—you have to really discover the words that fit. Yet if
they’re being written for a play, you have strict content and dialogue
and plot things you’re trying to advance.
I know. It can be very tricky. As you probably know, we had Rothschild
& Sons just open at the York Theatre. There’s one song in particular there,
it’s called “Rothschild & Sons,” and I remember Jerry had sent me the
music that I loved, and I remember how hard I worked on that song because
I loved that melody and I couldn’t wait until I had the right lyrics for it. But
you’re right—it had to fit the situation. It had to fit the characters, and it
was hard.

Do you generally write more drafts for songs until you hone in on the
perfect lyric?
I don’t know if that would be the way to express it. I have yellow pads
and just keep writing. Of course, I try different things until I begin to see
the shape of the lyric that I want. But along the way I will have done
different line lengths, different stanza forms, just searching for something
that makes sense to me.

Sometimes your rhyme schemes are quite intricate. I was surprised at

all the different lines that rhyme. Does that come from the music
suggesting where the rhyme should be?
Quite often that’s the case. The music rhymes, and so you feel the lyric
has to rhyme. When I first came to New York I remember I was very aware
what other people were writing, and I thought there are so many clever
writers who are doing these wonderfully intricate things. I decided to go the
other way and keep my lyrics more simple, which I tried to do. Then there
was a period where I got interested more in rhyme, and then when I began
to write with Jerry, sometimes I had to write rhymes because, as I say, the
music called for it. The music rhymed, and so it would have sounded odd if
a repeated musical phrase was not rhymed.
Yes. Did you create any writing routine? Any time of day best for
writing?
No, I’m very undisciplined that way. Whenever the muse strikes. Of
course, one of the things that make the muse strike is a deadline, [laughs]
and when I get worried that I’m not going to make that deadline, then I
begin to really work around the clock.

Were there times when it was just impossible and stuff was not coming,
and if so, what would you do?
Oh yeah. I was working with Mary Rodgers on something, and I was
stuck. And thank God, Mary was also a capable lyricist, and because Mary
was able to come up with two or three lines, we were able to finish the
song. I just couldn’t come up with it, but she did. That can happen.

So the first show you did with Bock was The Body Beautiful?
Yeah. We didn’t choose it. Tommy Valando was Jerry’s publisher.
Tommy performed an absolute miracle. Somehow he persuaded the
producers of The Body Beautiful to hire Jerry Bock and me to write the
show even though we had not written a song yet. This was a real leap of
faith on their part and of course for me. Ooh, I had been longing to write a
Broadway show, and here was the opportunity. So it didn’t matter at that
time that the show was about boxing. And boxing was something I was
totally unfamiliar with and actually didn’t particularly like. But I did the
show anyway, and I think the show may have suffered because I really was
not a boxing fan.
But it was a Broadway show, so we started to work on it. There were
problems with the show, big problems with the book. We did a lot of work
on the road, and a lot of good work. But there was just too much wrong
with it, and we didn’t have time. A director needs at least four to six months
to just study the show before it goes into rehearsal, and that did not happen.

You didn’t have to go through many of those kinds of experiences. Your

next show was a huge success, Fiorello!
Yeah. That was [producer] Hal Prince, and he knew that and [director]
George Abbott knew that, so we did work on it a long time before it
opened.
The show is about the New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. An
unusual topic for a show.
The director Arthur Penn had been asked to do a documentary about
Fiorello, so he started to work on it, and the more he learned about Fiorello,
the more he began to feel that he was such a colorful character that instead
of a documentary, it should be a musical.
So he went to Hal Prince with his idea, and Hal loved it. They went to
George Abbott and presented the idea, and at first Abbott was against it. He
had done a musical about a mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, and he
said, “I don’t want to do a political musical.” But Hal and Arthur Penn said,
“George, it’s not just politics. Fiorello had two very important love stories
in his life,” and that was what interested George Abbott. He said, “Really?”
So and then they hired Jerome Weidman to do the book, but Weidman
was a novelist, not a theater person, but Weidman knew that his cowriter
would be George Abbott. And the two of them worked together and created
a wonderful book. Then they had a competition for songwriters. My
reputation was from the revue songs I’d written. Steve Sondheim had seen a
preview of The Body Beautiful, and although he had great problems with
the show, he thought that Jerry Bock and I were very talented, so he called
Hal Prince and said, “You should acquaint yourself with the work of this
new team, Bock and Harnick.”
And so, sure enough, on the opening night of The Body Beautiful Hal
Prince was there. At the party afterward the first reviews had been read—
they were bad. Most people had left the party. Hal came over and
introduced himself. He said, “I had problems with the show, but I love your
work, and I hope to be working with you guys soon.”
And sure enough, when he did Fiorello! he hired Jerry immediately, but
they thought that when they went to the book writers, the book writers
would express their wish to write their own lyrics. So that turned out to be
true, and that included Jerome Weidman. He wanted to write his own lyrics,
and I asked Jerry Bock, how are his lyrics? He said they are like small
novels—they just went on and on and on, and at some point Hal Prince
said, “Mr. Weidman, we want you to do the book but not the lyrics.”
At that point they began to look at various teams, and they gave Jerry
and me the opportunity to write four songs on speculation. They told us the
spots in the script where they wanted the songs, and then Jerry and I wrote
them. We went to Hal’s apartment and auditioned them, and we got the job.

Did the topic of Fiorello seem in any way unwieldy to you, or were you
up to the challenge?
All I knew about Fiorello at that point was that he was a particularly
colorful character, and when I read what they had written so far, I was so
taken with it. I thought that it’s really not about politics as much as it is
about this man and his love stories. I read the script and thought it was
wonderful, and I couldn’t wait to get involved.

Had you and Jerry already adopted that process of him doing melodies
first and sending you a tape?
Yeah, we had. On The Body Beautiful, yeah. So I knew that that’s the
way we would start.

When he would send you these melodies, they would be specifically

written for this show?
Yeah. He would designate that this was written in such and such a scene
by such and such a character. He was very careful about that. Once in a
while he’d say—and it me made me laugh—“I don’t know what in the hell
this song is but I like it!” [Laughter] Then he would play me a melody, and
quite often those were among the most appealing melodies of all.

That show went on to not only win the Tony but the Pulitzer Prize.
Yeah. It’s a good show. Unfortunately around the rest of the United
States people tend to think, “Well, it’s such a local New York show that our
audiences wouldn’t understand it.” And of course, every time it’s done
somewhere, the audiences absolutely understand it. There was just a very
successful production just opened up in California.

Yeah. It’s a wonderful show. You’ve written great songs for shows that
were hits, but also great songs for shows that flopped. But the songs
were always great. How is that, as a songwriter, to have your work
attached to a sinking and, ultimately, sunken ship?
It’s depressing. It is depressing. I have to confess it, yeah.
Like in 1960 you did Tenderloin.
Yeah.

That show didn’t succeed, but you wrote the great song “Artificial
Flowers.” Which became a hit for Bobby Darin.
Well, at least that one we had some action on because Bobby recorded
it. When Kevin Spacey did the movie about Bobby Darin, he not only did
the song but he did the complete version of it. I was surprised when he
started to sing. I thought he’s just going to do a little bit, but Kevin Spacey
sang well enough to do the entire song. So we did get action on that song.

It’s a great song. And a hit. Went to number twenty on the charts.
Well, it came because of Burt Shevelove, who suggested that as a
theater lyricist that I should go out and find a set of six books by a
newspaper man, called Our Times. It went from about 1900 to the early
1930s. It was written as a popular history of the times. Instead of political
events, it was about the fashions and the songs and the movies. I bought the
set, and I remember when I was looking in the Fiorello era there was a
picture of a young girl who was working on a hat, but she was supporting
herself because her parents had died, and I thought that’s a very melancholy
thing, but I think it could lead to a song. And that led to “Artificial
Flowers.”

Yeah. A great song. So 1964 is when Fiddler on the Roof emerged. I’m
Jewish, and at the time it came out I was a kid and didn’t understand
that shows about Jews weren’t that common. To me that seemed,
“Great, these songs are about Jews.” [Laughter] Now I see how brave it
was in a lot of ways and also beautiful.
I know. So many people have told me how brave we were. We never
thought of that because, look, I was a soldier in World War II, and we were
fighting Hitler. That took bravery. Right now to write a Jewish show and
hope it gets on Broadway. That’s not brave. And we thought these stories
[Tevye and His Daughters by Sholom Aleichem] were wonderful. Why not
work on them? Why not do a musical on them?
My dad, born in the same city and year as you, also fought in World
War II. And I agree, compared to fighting in World War II, it’s not the
same level of bravery at all! Not even comparable.
Yeah.

But in terms of songwriters, all the great Jewish songwriters, like

Irving Berlin, didn’t write Jewish songs. Berlin was writing “Easter
Parade” and “White Christmas.”
[Laughs] That’s true.

Generally Jewish songwriters haven’t written about the Jewish

experience.
Not very much, no. Though when Irving Berlin was starting, some of
his special material songs were about Jewish subjects, but very few people
know those songs.

You and Bock then not only wrote these songs but songs so authentic
and beautiful. Did they start like usual—with Jerry giving you a tape of
tunes?
Yeah, he gave me a tape, and I remember one of the songs on the tape
turned out to be “Sunrise, Sunset.” I put a lyric to it and went over to Jerry’s
place and we worked on the song. I had to do a little polishing, but then
when we were finished we invited his wife to come down, and we
auditioned it for her.
And I’ve learned not to look at people when I audition—I look over
their heads. But we sang the song, and then when we finished it, I looked at
his wife. And to my astonishment she was crying. I thought, “My goodness,
we must have something special here.”
And then, because this song is very simple, I learned the
accompaniment, and I played it for my sister, and the same thing happened.
I finished playing, I looked at her, and she was crying. And I thought, “My
God, this is a very special song.”

Yeah. So many people have cried to that song since. That’s just
remarkable to me that the music came first, because that lyric,
“sunrise, sunset,” so fits that tune—it ascends on “sunrise” and
descends on “sunset.” Did that title come when you heard that song, or
did that come after?
When I heard the music, for some reason almost immediately those two
words came to me. It was a “dee dum, dee dum,” and almost immediately I
began to sing, “sunrise, sunset.” There must have been something in my life
that suggested that.

Harry Chapin wrote “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which touches on the same
topic—how quickly our kids grow up. My son is sixteen now and seems
like it was yesterday he was a tot. And I sing that song to myself all the
time. There is no better song for the subject.
Thank you.
An ordained minister was performing a wedding ceremony for two
guys, two gay guys, and they wanted to know if I would consider rewriting
“Sunrise, Sunset” so it could fit—they wanted it performed at their
wedding. I thought that was such a charming idea. It was such a simple
change that I did it, and they had it performed at their wedding.

What was the change?

The line was “When did she get to be a beauty?” And I changed it to
“When did he get so handsome?” Yeah. An easy change.

[Laughs] That’s wonderful.

You were talking about using such simple language. I think part of the
beauty of it is the simple language, but then there’s the poetic line that
has always touched me so much: “Seedlings turn overnight to
sunflowers.” Such a lovely and natural way of saying that.
Yeah. Reading so much about that part of the world, where Sholom
Aleichem was writing about, the word sunflowers kept popping up. There
were a lot of sunflowers there. So that was in my mind.

You said how this now-iconic title, “Sunrise, Sunset,” just came to you.
Other songwriters have described that feeling, that they arrive like gifts
sometimes. Do you have any understanding of where that comes from?
 Usually I find there is something going on in my life. It may be
unconscious, but there is usually something important going on, and so
when I hear a new melody, words spring to mind unconsciously because of
what’s going on in my life.

John Lennon said he felt sometimes like a channel, channeling things

from somewhere else.
Yeah. It’s the same thing.

You feel that? That there is a spiritual source?

I don’t think of it that way, but now that you mentioned it, sure, yeah, I
would agree with that.

The song “If I Were a Rich Man”—did that come melody first?
That was a melody first, but as I heard it, there was an interesting
genesis to that song. Jerry and I went to a Hebrew actor’s benefit because
we thought we might find some performers there who were right for the
show. A mother and daughter came up and performed a Hasidic song. There
were no words to it; there were just Hasidic syllables, sounds. I didn’t know
it at the time, but Jerry was simply enthralled, and he went home and he
worked all night.
He called me the next day and asked me to meet at our publisher’s
office. So I went to Valando’s office, and Jerry played me the melody for “If
I Were a Rich Man” and he sang his version of those Hasidic syllables. And
I loved the song, and he said, “Look, when you write the lyrics, I think it
might be fun to have a couple of bars where instead of words, we use some
Hasidic syllables.”
I thought that’s a terrific idea. My problem was I had no idea how to
spell those Hasidic syllables. So I had to come up with something that
sounded a little like them, and I came up with “digga digga didle digga
dum.” [Laughs] Whatever I put in there. Which is meant to sound a little bit
like those Hasidic syllables.

It does, and it’s so joyful too. And spoke to all of us who grew up with
that sound, which is a joyous sound. That lyric seems like it would be a
special challenge to write because they are very long lines: “I’d build a
very tall house with rooms by the dozen.”
Oh, but that, if you go back and read the story about Motl and Shpil,
you will practically find all of those lyrics in there—or the ideas for them.
When I read that story there was just the whole image of Tevye kept saying,
“Ah, if I was a Rothschild.” And it was easy enough to change “if I were a
Rothschild” to “if I were a rich man.”
And he talked about what being rich meant, so many of the lyrics in the
song are just based on sentences that Sholom Aleichem gave Tevye.

And that one has an interesting rhyme scheme. It’s two pairs of three
lines, and the second and the third line of each section rhymes.
I’ll take your word for it.

It’s a perfect rhyme scheme. It rhymes perfectly every time.

Thank you.

“Miracle of Miracles” is a beautiful song. Decades before Paul Simon

wrote, “These are the days of miracles and wonder,” you wrote these
words: “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles . . .” Which is from
the Bible, yes?
Yes. That was written on the road. That one, the lyric came first. Motl
was singing a love song, a ballad. I think we were still in Detroit, and after
one of the matinees we had a meeting with Jerry Robbins, and he said, “You
know, instead of him doing a ballad there, I think he should have an up-
tempo number to express his excitement and his elation.” And we agreed.
So I went back to my hotel room, and there was a Gideon Bible. I began
to look for the idea. We already had the dialogue, and there were the lines
“It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle.” I thought that would be a good idea for a
song, so I looked in the Bible and checked for some miracles, wrote a lyric,
and gave it to Jerry Bock, and he set it.
As a matter of fact, this song was originally longer than it is now. And
when Jerry Robbins heard it, he said, “It’s wonderful, but there’s a section
in the middle that we don’t need.” So part of the song was cut.
That song rhythmically is simpler and more normal than some of the
ones you wrote to melody. When you would write a lyric first, would
you have a dummy tune in mind? How would you go about structuring
the lyric?
Yeah, I had a dummy tune in mind. I have to be careful not to get too
wedded to those dummy tunes because when I hear the tune the composer
likes, I might not like it as much as my dummy tune, and that causes a
problem.
Yeah.
So now I have a kind of nondescript dummy tune running through my
head, but it helps me establish the rhythmic patterns.

There’s such beautiful language in that song. “When Moses softened

Pharaoh’s heart, that was a miracle / When God made the waters of the
Red Sea part, that was a miracle too!”
That’s from the Gideon Bible. [Laughter]

But the Old Testament, right? Not the sequel. [Laughter]

Yeah.

The song “Tradition” is also wonderful. Was that one a melody first?
Yes. Amazingly. Even all the counterpoint parts—Jerry did all that first.

How about “To Life.”

That one, the lyric was there first. That was written once we knew what
the scene was with the butcher and Tevye. That was fun to write too. I am
pretty sure the lyric came first on that.

Talking about great couplets, that has “One day it’s honey and raisin
cake / Next day a stomach ache.” A perfect couplet. “Anatevka” is such
a beautiful song. A very beautiful melody.
That music, it came first.

How did “Matchmaker” come about?

That came about because we had a different song for those three
daughters. And it had a wider range. And when we went in to rehearsal we
discovered that one of our daughters was primarily an actress, not a singer.
One was primarily a dancer, not a singer, and only the third one was a real
singer. The song had ranges in it, and they couldn’t handle it. We learned
very quickly that they were not able to sing the song. And we realized, oh
my God, we are going to have to write a new song. And so we wrote
“Matchmaker” instead.
Jerry took the theme; I gave him a lyric. He took the theme. At the time
we had had a different opening number called “I’ve Never Missed a
Sabbath Yet,” which was Golda and the daughters trying to get the house
ready for the Sabbath. Jerry took one of the melodic themes from that and
turned it into “Matchmaker.”

So there were several other songs that you wrote for Fiddler that
weren’t in the original production?
Oh, a lot of them. Yeah, we wrote a lot. One of the ones that was hardest
to give up was a very funny song we wrote for the butcher called “The
Butcher’s Soul,” where he felt he had been insulted by Tevye, so he
defended himself. When we played it Jerry Robbins roared with laughter
and then said, “But we’re not going to use it.”
We said, “Why not?” He said because the scene is about Tevye, not the
butcher. And if we give it to the butcher, it just spoils the focus of the scene.
So the song was cut.
But there were a lot of songs and a lot of outtakes from Fiddler.

I understand there was one called “If I Were a Woman” that Jerome
Robbins loved but felt there wasn’t time for?
Yeah. We had used it; it was a very successful song. But after one of the
matinees he said, “We are going to cut that.” We asked why—because it
worked. He said, “I know it works, but the show is too long and I can
accomplish the same thing in thirty seconds of dance that this song
accomplishes in four minutes.” He said, “Look, if my dance doesn’t work,
we’ll go back to the song.”
So he did his dance, and of course the dance was charming and we lost
a song.

As a songwriter, does it feel that song is lost, or is there a feeling like it

could come back at some point? That it can work elsewhere or outside
of a show?
No. It’s lost. Jerry and I wrote songs that just were specifically designed
to certain shows, times, and places and certain characters, and they just
don’t seem to fit in other shows.

After that you did “Apple Tree,” which is a wonderful song and
musical—and revolutionary.
Yeah. Instead of one book, it was three one-act musicals. That was fun.

You wrote the musical Rex with Richard Rodgers.

Yes. And as a matter of fact, it was a failure. But the book writer was
Sherman Yellen, and we had revised it since then. We had a production in
Toronto, and it worked wonderfully. We did turn it into what I think is a
really lovely show.

What was that like writing with him? One of the great melodists of all
time. Would he give you a melody to write to?
Only once. Only once did he do that. He used to do that. But when we
worked together he had had so many illnesses and strokes, all kinds of
illnesses, that a doctor once explained to me stroke patients lose the ability
to think abstractly. Music is a very abstract art, so it’s not surprising that
Rodgers now needed to see a lyric before he can write music. And that’s
what happened. All the lyrics, except in one case, had to come first, which
was a challenge, but he met it. He did a lovely job.

But he was not healthy during that period?

He had cancer of the larynx. He had his larynx removed, and as soon as
he could, he went back to work. And he was able to do the score, but he
could no longer sing.

I’ve read that he was not generally a happy guy and didn’t seem to find
a lot of enjoyment in music. Is that accurate?
No. Not accurate at all. The first day of rehearsal I saw this man who
had been looking so ill after his operation, and when he was involved in
music he just came right back to life. He was rejuvenated. I think music was
his life.
Were you happy with the music for Rex?
I was, yeah. Yeah. [Laughs] I think that it was Noel Coward who said
Richard Rodgers pisses melody. [Laughter] It’s just endless.

Rex has the beautiful song “Away from You,” which Sarah Brightman
recorded.
That was one of [Andrew] Lloyd Webber’s favorites of all of Dick
Rodgers’s songs.

It’s a classic Rodgers melody too. A funny, interesting melody for

which, once again, you found an ideal lyric.
Well, I was trying to channel Oscar Hammerstein. I was thinking, what
would Hammerstein write here? And then I tried to do that, and I would
show it to Rodgers, and he would say always, “It is a Hammerstein lyric.
This is lovely. Beautiful song.”

You did the English translation of the opera Carmen [by Bizet]. Was
that experience similar to writing songs?
It was similar, because Carmen is like a musical. It’s not an opera that is
sung from beginning to end. The original Carmen was a collection of songs.
There would be a complex song, a long aria, but then there would be a
dialogue scene, just like a musical. And then there would be another
musical moment and then another scene. So it was structured like a musical.
Then at some point a student of Bizet’s took all of those dialogue scenes
and condensed them and then set them to music. They were much shorter so
the whole thing could be done musically. The job I was given was to do the
original version, which was songs and scenes, very much like a musical.

I love the show She Loves Me. I understand it’s coming back next year.
Is that correct?
Yes. It closed at first after only eight months, and we were so
disappointed. Because it’s maybe the most gratifying experience I’ve had
theatrically. When it closed we were all very depressed. Then about a year
later we had a production and then another production and more and more
productions. And since then it’s become a musical that’s produced a lot. It is
extremely gratifying.
You wrote the title song of the movie The Heartbreak Kid with Cy
Coleman?
I miss Cy a lot. You couldn’t be with Cy two minutes without finding
yourself laughing. He was a joyous person and a wonderful composer and
pianist.

Did you two work together at the same time?

No. He wrote the music first and he gave me the music.

Even with all the new technology and all the changes in our lives, songs
seem to matter as much as ever. They have not come up with anything
that’s important as a great song. Do you think songs will always matter,
and is there a need for new songs, do you think?
I do. I don’t know what it is that makes people want to express
themselves in song, but it’s very gratifying to sing, to whistle, to hear
melodies. I’d love to read a study on that. I never have. But there is
something innate in the human being that just seems to respond to music.

Do you still enjoy songwriting?

Oh yeah. Very much so. Jerry Bock left me a lot of music, but when I
wrote the lyrics I looked at all the music he had left and nothing fit. So I
had to write the music myself.

Had you written only “Sunrise, Sunset,” that would have been enough.
It is one of those miracle songs.
Thank you. You ask very good questions. It’s been fun answering them.
Speaking of that song, many years after we wrote it, Jerry called me in
great excitement. The country of Iceland used to honor a composer every
year, and they were honoring Jerry. So Jerry went to Iceland to be honored,
and when he got back I said, “How was it?” He said, “It was thrilling. A
symphony orchestra played some of my songs, some of yours and mine.”
He said, “The choirs all sang our songs, but they changed one of your
lyrics.”
I said, “What was the change?”
He said, “They sang ‘Sunrise, Sunrise.’” [Laughter]
OceanofPDF.com
Peter, Paul and Mary
 The Power of Song
Los Angeles, California 1996

An angel and two cellos playing guitars. That’s how Peter, Paul and Mary
were described in the liner notes of their self-titled debut album of 1962. It
was an apt description even then, encompassing both the earthy and angelic
qualities of the trio. You see it in that first famous photo of them on the first
album, against a wall of dark bricks. Both Peter and Paul are bearded and
warmly smiling—collegiate in suit and tie—but with guitars. And in
between them is the angel, and she’s radiant—Mary Travers—luminous and
joyful. And from these three figures came harmony remarkable, like three
voices from a shared soul, each voice distinct yet blending into a
remarkable whole, a sound both modern and also ancient and timeless.
This interview was conducted around a giant table in a record company
conference room in 1996. There were four of us there: Peter, Paul, Mary,
and me. It’s a funny sentence, admittedly, and a funny place to find myself.
Because I grew up not just loving Peter, Paul and Mary—I revered them.
They were heroes to us. They had number-one hits and were up there on the
pop charts and on our radios along with The Beatles.
But they belonged to us. They were connected directly to the heritage of
American folk music, the legacy of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and,
ultimately, Dylan and beyond. It was Peter, Paul and Mary who brought
many of Dylan’s most famous songs such as “Blowing in the Wind” to the
world in the biggest ways.
And their harmonies were phenomenal, as inventive and yet perfect as
the songs themselves. How I used to delight in their recording of Dylan’s
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” at the intricate way their three vocals
would intertwine on the melody and harmonies of the song. Each line, each
verse was always different and always viscerally linked to the meaning and
intention of each lyric. It was a kind of singing based on traditional folk
music but wedded with rock and expansive songwriting, unlike anything
before or since.
Even then, back in 1962, prior to the British invasion, prior to the
advent of the electronic, often mechanical music as we have come to know
it, Peter, Paul and Mary were significant for being real, for employing “no
gimmicks.” As the liner notes went on to say, “maybe mediocrity has had it.
One thing is for sure in any case, honesty is back. Tell your neighbor.”
Recognizing the inspirational power inherent in their vital mixture of
acoustic guitars and three-part harmony, they turned to the most vital music
they could find—folk music, both traditional and contemporary—and
breathed new life and passion into it. Whether starting with an old folk
song, such as “The Cruel War,” or a new folk song, such as Dylan’s
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” they merged their musical souls to solidify the
bridge between the old and the new. They carried on the traditions of Pete
and Woody, making many of Pete’s songs world famous, such as “If I Had a
Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Like The Weavers
before them, Peter, Paul and Mary showed the world that folk music not
only sounded good but could also sell records. As The Weavers took Woody
Guthrie songs and turned them into radio-friendly records without
sacrificing their substance, Peter, Paul and Mary did the same with the
songs of Pete and Woody as well as those of Dylan and other new writers.
It started in the clubs of Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco
and spread to all corners of the land. The new sound of folk generated a lot
of satellites, and Mary Travers was one of the brightest. A member of the
group The Song Swappers, who had recorded with Pete Seeger, she was
well known in the Village both for her great beauty and her beautiful voice.
Peter Yarrow came to the Village from Cornell University, where he
graduated with a degree in psychology. Noel Paul Stookey was always
referred to as Noel by all friends and family but took on Paul because it
sounded better with Peter and Mary. He started off as a stand-up comic,
coming to New York from Michigan State University mostly to pursue
comedy, a humorous proclivity that came to the surface not only on
“Paultalk,” a delightful comedy routine on the trio’s first concert album, but
also in the comic verses of songs such as “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” and
others.
Encouraged by Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, to team up, the
fledgling trio holed up in Mary’s three-flight walk-up apartment and
rehearsed for three solid months before making their public debut. When
they did—at the Bitter End in 1961—the audience was entranced and
thrilled. Soon the group was launched on a tour of folk clubs around
America. Within a year they released their first album, and, as Billboard
recognized at the time, it was an “instant classic,” remaining in the Top Ten
for some two years.
Singing the songs of Seeger, Dylan, and others inspired Peter, Paul and
Mary to write their own, and all three developed into fine songwriters. With
his friend Leonard Lipton, Peter wrote “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the first of
many famous songs written within the trio. Paul Stookey became
experimental in his writing and recording, influenced by the expansiveness
of The Beatles to record and write great songs like “Apologize” as well as
comic commentary in the aforementioned “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.”
Mary collaborated with friends to write lyrical songs with beautiful
melodies such as “Moments of Soft Persuasion,” ideal for her angelic voice.
At the same time, they continued to embrace the songs of new
songwriters and, in doing so, launched many careers. They had a number-
one hit with “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” written by John Denver, and also a
hit with “Early Morning Rain” by Gordon Lightfoot.
Peter, Paul and Mary disbanded a few times to pursue solo projects and
to walk their own paths. But they reunited often. In 1978 they came
together with a great reunion album called Reunion and tour and continued
together on and off. It was in 1996, soon after the release of their album
LifeLines, that I had this occasion to interview all three at the same time.
I’ll admit: I was both proud and somewhat amazed when, with much
laughter, they told me I knew more about them than anyone who had ever
interviewed them. Of course I came in knowing their famous songs on their
famous albums. But I also came in knowing—and truly loving—some of
the very obscure but remarkable songs on their solo albums. One was on
Paul’s first solo album, Paul And, called “Edgar,” a song both funny and
mysterious that had long perplexed me. “Nobody has ever asked about that
song,” he said with wonder. (It’s about the mystic Edgar Cayce, he said.)
Sadly, Mary Travers died in September of 2009. Peter and Paul have
done shows together since, but of course, she’s impossible to replace. But
go back to the records. There is her spirit as alive as ever, wonderfully
intertwined with the musical spirits of her two best friends into one of the
best things humans can achieve together: perfect harmony.

Peter Yarrow: When you inherit the tradition of the Pete Seeger point
of view, the songs are not pieces of entertainment. They are the
communication of a long tradition that has a particular meaning historically.
And if you’re singing something that you know, historically, has really
affected people, you’re not going to treat this as if it’s just entertainment
and doesn’t matter. It really matters.
For instance, Pete Seeger recently said something very wonderful about
us. We were doing a festival he was in too, and he called on us to sing “If I
Had a Hammer” with him. And as you know, we do a different chord
structure from his.

Your version has all those pretty minor passing chords between the
chords he plays.
Peter: That’s right. He talked about “Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?” as well, and there was a sense of his blessing in the changes that we
made. And for us that’s very, very important. Because that was more than a
song; that was a piece of shared feeling and ethos at the march in
Washington with Martin Luther King, where he gave his “I Have a Dream”
speech. So it really matters to us, and we really go head to head on the stuff.
Mary Travers: We fight about songs all the time. Not angry fighting,
but philosophical fights. Because we’ve always believed that we’d never
ask anybody to sing something they don’t like. I mean, what greater
punishment could you give somebody than to make them sing something
they don’t believe in?
Peter: And the premise is so one person can say no.
 Mary: There’s a great copyright story that we must tell. It’s the best
copyright story in the world.
Paul Stookey: The Reverend Gary Davis story.
Mary: Absolutely.
Paul: It was about the song “If I Had My Way,” which we recorded.
Peter: They weren’t sure if he wrote it or not, so they called him up at
the house—this is very important. Artie Mogull, our link at Warner
Brothers, called him up at the house and said, “Are you Reverend Gary
Davis?” And he said yes.
They said, “Did you write this song ‘If I Had My Way’? Because Peter,
Paul and Mary recorded it, and it’s gone gold.”
He said, “No, I didn’t write it.”
Artie said, “So who did?”
He said, “Nobody. It was revealed to me.”
That’s when Artie explained to him what royalties were, and even
though it was revealed to him, he got the royalties. He called his wife to the
phone and told them to start over and tell her. It was hard for him to believe.
Mary: When you’re dealing with some of those traditional songs—
when you’re dealing with the body of music from the 1920s and early
1900s—those songs really traveled from one black church to another. And
the essence of folk music has always been that each person that sings the
song, traditional or not, imprints it with their own feelings and sometimes
their own lyrics.

You famously recorded the song “If I Had a Hammer,” and you
changed the lyric from “all of my brothers” to “brothers and sisters.”
Peter: Well, Pete [Seeger] said Peter, Paul and Mary did not do that.
Indeed, he talked about a fight that he had—well, not a fight, a discussion—
with a cowriter who wanted to say “all of my brothers,” and Pete said he
insisted on it.

His cowriter being Lee Hays, of course.

Peter: That’s right. So although I know you think that we made that
change, according to Pete, that was his change.
I’ve noticed how well your voices blend together, and I realized that all
three of your voices make up the sound and that if you changed any
one of the voices it would alternate radically.
Mary: I’ve often thought that, like the decorating, it’s the weaknesses
that make the strength. If you have a house that is absolutely square, it’s
very difficult to make something creative happen. None of us have perfect
placement. Peter is sort of a tenor with baritone thrown in there, and Noel is
a baritone with a little bass thrown in there, although he’s got a pretty good
falsetto. And I’m an alto.
Paul: Contralto.
Mary: And contrary too. And getting lower all the time. But it’s
because they are not perfect that they make us have to deal with each piece
anew, taking into consideration those elements so you get a unique sound.

Do you have any recollection of the very first song you sang together?
Mary: [Laughs] Peter and I probably knew more folk songs than Noel
did. But we knew different versions of everything. Every song we tried, we
would sing differently, so we went through this for about twenty minutes,
trying to find a song that we could agree on. Finally we threw up our hands
and we said, “Oh, let’s just do ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ just to see what it
sounds like.” And that is what we did—that was the first song.
Paul: We each took turns singing the melody, and the other two people
took turns singing a third above, and it was nice, and it was so obvious that
we had sung in groups before. Because there’s a kind of giving, a kind of
bending. It’s not pitch, exactly. If you had sung in a group, you know the
same thing. You can either sing out or you sing out with an invisible
touching. That’s what we did, and simple as the song was, the three of us
obviously had a relational capability, and I guess that’s really what it is.
And now we even rejoice in it. We have this thing, this confluence, where
we decide we all go to bend the jet stream.
Mary: That’s the most exciting thing in the group, is that kind of ESP
you get. You’re listening so carefully that you hear the subtlety of
somebody who’s decided tonight to sing the song with a completely
different attitude.
You made the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan world famous.
Do you recall how you first heard it?
Peter: We heard it backstage at the Gate of Horn [in New York]. Albert
Grossman was managing him at the time, as well as Richie Havens, Gordon
Lightfoot, Joan Baez, The Band, Janis Joplin, and the list goes on and on.
And he played us the record, and on that record there were a couple of
songs that we hadn’t heard before. One of them was “Don’t Think Twice,
It’s All Right.” And the other one was “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And we felt
so strongly about it that it was the only song that I remember we ever
recorded as a single. We went in and recorded the song, and it was so, so
powerful. It was riveting.
Mary: Sometimes you need a translator. You don’t need a translator for
“Blowin’ in the Wind.” You just say, “Yes.”
When Dylan first arrived on the scene he had a unique voice. Not one
that was easily accessible, and one can, I think, say safely that the world fell
in love with Bob Dylan’s words before they fell in love with his voice.
After they’d fallen in love with his words, they began to find his uniqueness
in terms of vocal quality.
I remember with Dylan, I played him for everybody, including the
delivery boy that came to my house. Anybody. Stop and listen to those
words. I mean, this was a poet.

With “The Wedding Song,” Paul, you put that song immediately into
the public domain. Is that correct?
Paul: Well, yes, not into public domain actually but a public domain
fund, which I get to manipulate and administer. If you don’t specify,
somebody else will administer the funds, and those funds for “The Wedding
Song” would’ve gone to pay BMW car payments for some record executive
somewhere. So this way I can’t touch it, but I can spend it.
Mary: Why did you do that with “The Wedding Song”?
Paul: Because it was revealed to me. [Laughter] It’s another one of
those, isn’t it?

Was it written for Peter’s wedding?

Mary: Yes, written for Peter’s wedding.
 Paul: The song was revealed to me as an answer to an open prayer.
Because when Peter asked me to write a song that will bless his wedding, I
said, “Okay, I’m Christian. I know the source. I’ll go and I’ll pray. I’ll say,
‘Okay, well, how would you manifest yourself at Peter’s wedding?’”
And honest to goodness the words came: “I am now to be among you at
the calling of your hearts.” It was all in the first person. “Rest assured this
troubadour is acting on my part, the calling of your spirits here has caused
me to remain, for whenever two or more of you are gathered in my name,
there am I, there is love.”
Peter: This is interesting news! I didn’t know this.
Paul: This is the original lyric. We’re at the motel room at Wilbur,
Minnesota, and nobody’s ever heard the song before, not even my wife,
Betty. So I get out the twelve-string, and I start playing it, and she says,
“They’re not going to understand.” See, the sensitivity of the times was that
Noel was a Jesus freak. Which is true, to a certain extent—
Peter: I wouldn’t have used the term. You were more of a born-again
Christian who had the book burning a hole in his pocket.
Paul: Well, so Betty said that anybody who hears me sing that song is
going to say I had gone over the edge: He is now declaring himself as God
—who is now to be among you. They’re not going to be able to make the
transition.
And so I changed it from first person into third person: “He is now to be
among you” rather than “I am now . . .”
Well, the curious thing to it is that now in the struggle among the church
for gender righteousness, there’s a problem. By introducing “He is now to
be among you,” I deposited God, or the Spirit, into a place where it was
never meant to be. Isn’t that curious? Because it has no gender when it says
“I,” which is the way it came to me.

It’s such a beautiful song and story and interesting because it’s
ostensibly about the marriage but it’s really a song about the presence
of God.
Paul: Yes! About a larger marriage.

Did you find that most of your songs came that way?
 Paul: Personally, just as I divide concept, lyrics, and music up, I also
walk this walk, what I understand what’s inspired and what’s just
experiential. If I write a song that’s based on the experience of me, then I
thank God for the insight. But it is, after all, me describing my life. But if I
move into areas like “The Wedding Song,” I do still put songs in public
domain because I think they belong there.

Paul, the song “Sebastian” was written about a twelve-string guitar?

Paul: Yeah. It started off that way, and then it became a kitten, and then
it became a little boy.

How about your song “Edgar”?

Paul: Goodness gracious, you do know our songs. No one has ever
asked me about that song. Edgar was Edgar Cayce, who predicted that the
West Coast would fall into the Pacific sometime before the year 2000.

Peter, “Puff the Magic Dragon” seems like a traditional folk song now.
Do you remember writing that song?
Peter: I have to say that ultimately we had the strange reinterpretation
of the song by Newsweek, where they were writing about “Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and at the time, since poetry
was the nature of lyrics, it was much more involved in thinking and analysis
of what the lyrics really meant. But they never just have anything to do
about drugs.
Leonard Lipton wrote the original lyrics on a piece of paper at Cornell
University. I then added to the lyrics, so that I actually wrote at least as
many lines as he did even though the original concept was his. The music
was written at a later time. The fact of the matter is that the inspiration for it
was really an Ogden Nash–like point of view on Leonard Lipton’s part, and
that was the positive view. And on the flip side of that piece of paper he
wrote a very dark fragment, which was not grist for the songwriters mill.

Did all the drug interpretations of that song bother you?

Peter: No, but it did seem stupid and some people took it seriously. It’s
still forbidden in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Mary: Is there a last question that you must know the answer to?
Do you foresee the three of you staying together in the future and
continuing to record?
Mary: On canes and walkers. [Laughter]
Peter: As a matter fact, I suggest that ten years from now that might be
the perfect title of the album. Canes and Walkers. [Laughter]

OceanofPDF.com
Herbie Hancock
 On a Journey of Jazz
Beverly Hills, California 2010

Rare is the chance to talk to a genius, and even rarer when that genius is not
the troubled kind but one with great focus and inner peace. That is Herbie
Hancock, a genius of music, a living link to the revolutionary jazz of Miles
Davis. Miles was both Herbie’s mentor and boss, teaching him, mostly by
example, the meaning of space and silence in music and the unlimited
potential always inherent within the limitations of music. Miles also taught
him the power of metaphor to set musicians on the right track, as discussed
in these pages.
But Herbie also learned lessons Miles didn’t teach, lessons informed by
the wisdom of Buddhism, which has freed him from turmoil, chaos, and
self-obsession to focus on what matters the most and what lasts. Before our
interview he went to a nearby Buddhist center to chant for a full hour. “It
keeps me grounded and grateful,” he said softly with a smile. A multitude
of birds were singing in the trees, which he regarded with joy: “Dig it: it’s
several jam sessions at once!”
Two years prior we were both at the 2008 Grammy Awards, where
Herbie beat out Kanye West and other stars to take home the biggest prize
of the night, Album of the Year, for his beautiful tribute to Joni Mitchell,
River: The Joni Letters. For a jazz guy to beat out the immense mainstream
success of the other nominees was too difficult for many in the press to
bear, especially with a collection of songs by another artist they found
unworthy of their attention, Joni Mitchell. And so they literally screamed:
“Kanye got robbed! He got robbed!” It was only the second time in history
that a jazz artist won Best Album. (The first was Getz/Gilberto in 1964, by
Stan Getz and João Gilberto with Antônio Carlos Jobim.)
But although the press was enraged by this perceived travesty, music
lovers the world over—fans of jazz, Herbie, Miles, Joni, and all
combinations thereof—united in celebrating this rare mainstream
acknowledgment of classic songwriting mixed with jazz. All due to the
heart, mind, and prodigious musicality of this humble and gracious man.
In our ensuing discussion we touched on the creative courage necessary
to artists like himself, Joni, Miles, and more. Artists who necessarily
embraced artistic evolution and followed a singular vision even when
prominent voices urged them to play it safe. When Joni decided in 1979 to
write lyrics to the expansively exultant, complex jazz of Charles Mingus,
her audience mostly turned their backs. They didn’t want her to move
forward artistically or even to stagnate; they wanted her to go backwards
and make music like Blue again. She was the one, after all, who said
famously in concert, “Would people ask Van Gogh, ‘Hey, paint “Starry
Night” again’?” But Joni was on her own journey of jazz and bravely
brought together the world’s greatest jazz players. First she turned to her
friend, the beloved bassist Jaco Pastorius, who assembled the band and
brought in Wayne Shorter on sax. And Herbie. Joni’s vision of purity and
faithful allegiance to Mingus and his spirit delighted and impressed him, as
discussed here, especially when he learned she didn’t want him to play it
safe—she wanted him to “fly.” Those miracle flights are preserved forever
on the masterpiece of Mingus.
Born in Chicago on April 12, 1940, Herbie started playing music when
his folks bought him an upright piano for his seventh birthday. He studied
classical at first, which forever informed his music, and gradually turned to
blues and then jazz. The R&B trumpeter Donald Byrd gently ushered him
into the jazz world and taught him the fundaments of business and craft
both, as discussed in the following conversation.
His life changed profoundly when Miles Davis invited him to join his
quintet, teaming up with Wayne Shorter on sax, Ron Carter on bass, and
Tony Williams on drums to create one of the greatest groups in the history
of jazz. Herbie, like Miles, always welcomed musical evolution, and
although he became one of the true masters of the acoustic piano, he
lovingly embraced funk and electronica and the new sounds that
synthesizers afforded him. And with those tools he made magic.
Although his first song, as related herein, was a pop ditty written with
his brother and sister, he evolved into a gifted composer. His compositions
were always distinguished by the fusion of a hip groove with clear, shining
melodics. Asked what the single-most important ingredient of a melody is,
he said, without hesitation, “simplicity.” That love of singable tunes, even
against the most complex harmonies known to man, has always been at the
heart of his work. Great tunes abounded in all eras of his career, including
“Cantaloupe Island,” “Watermelon Man,” “Maiden Voyage,” “Chameleon,”
and “Rockit.”
Today wind chimes are ringing in the trees, ongoing birdsong jams are
mingling in the air, and an orange-blossom sweetness is singing on the
breeze from nearby trees in his hillside yard, ripe with fruit. Herbie’s sitting
on the patio of his Angeleno home, where he’s lived now for decades,
looking as if he hasn’t aged through any of them. His newest project at the
time of this interview was The Imagine Project, for which he assembled a
mighty international array of musicians and vocalists to record inspirational
songs such as Lennon’s “Imagine” and “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel.
When told of my desire to discuss composition, he laughed and said,
“Too bad I didn’t write any songs on this record.” Of course, he does have a
lifetime of compositions to discuss and a world of wisdom acquired both
from fellow geniuses and from the inner river from which all songs flow.
Munching a sandwich that he graciously offered to share, he took time to
seriously ponder each query and then generously shed ample light into the
joys and challenges of musical creation.

Among jazz artists, you are one of the few to always show such respect
for songwriters and their songs. Certainly songwriters of previous
generations but also current ones such as Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan—
and a whole album of Joni Mitchell songs. You’ve done the standards
but now have established these as new standards. A lot of people feel
songwriting itself has diminished since the Gershwin days. Do you feel
there are still great songs being written?
 Herbie Hancock: Yes. That was the idea for that record. There’s still
great songs being written. How can you deny songs by The Beatles being
great songs? On the same level as a Gershwin. I went to a Paul McCartney
concert at the [Hollywood] Bowl just a few weeks ago, and he started doing
all these songs, and wow. What a legacy these guys left.

Yes. Such a body of work and such a rapid evolution. Which is not
unlike your work, which encompasses so much music and such a
profound evolution. I have been immersed in your whole body of work,
and it is wonderful because a whole universe of music is there.
Thank you. I’ve been very fortunate to have great parents that
encouraged me to pursue whatever I wanted to pursue. They said,
“Whatever you decide to be, son, we’ll back you up all the way.”

They said that before you chose music?

Yes. I started playing music when I was seven. On my seventh birthday
my parents bought me an upright piano. We didn’t have one before. I took
lessons. I didn’t take lessons from day one—a few months later I started
taking lessons. My older brother, younger sister, and I—we all started
taking lessons.

Classical?
Yeah. But we were already exposed to classical music. My mother in
particular wanted us to listen to classical music. She said, “The other stuff
you’re gonna hear in the neighborhood. But you’re not gonna hear this.”

What was the music you were listening to then, apart from the classical
music you were playing?
I was listening to R&B. In the forties groups like The Midnighters, The
Five Thrills. A bunch of groups that were named for birds. [Laughs]

Right. The Penguins—

Yeah, The Penguins, Nightingales.

So you were drawn to popular songs before you were drawn to jazz—
Yeah. I listened to R&B. And they had a thing called the Hit Parade at
the time. It was kind of corny. Not as hip as pop music is today. Not as hip
as what had been popular music in the thirties. Which really was what’s
called jazz. At that time Frank Sinatra was a jazz singer.

Big bands were jazz bands.

Right.

Were you considering being a classical musician?

Yeah. As a matter of fact, when I was graduating from elementary
school we didn’t have a yearbook; we had this newsletter thing. It had a
picture of all the students. And he asked us what do we want to be when we
grew up. And I said, “Concert pianist.”

Did you share that with your family? Did they know that was your
goal?
Oh yeah, that was fine with them. They began to get more worried when
I got into jazz. [Laughs]

And that happened when you were still in the home?

Yeah, I was in high school when I first really started paying attention to
jazz. My folks both were jazz fans. They played Count Basie’s band and
Duke Ellington. People like that. They were big fans of Fats Waller. Though
I don’t remember them playing much Fats Waller.

When you got into jazz did you leave classical behind, or did you do
both?
I was doing both.

And classical, I would presume, helped to shape your style in jazz?

Yeah. I mean, I had to make that transition from being a classical
musician to being a jazz musician. And it helped in a lot of different ways
because I already had a choice of musical balance and flow. And on a
completely different level the correct body position, the correct way to hold
my hands so I wouldn’t do anything to injure myself. Or to get the most out
of controlling the instrument. I run into a lot of musicians who have
problems with their backs and shoulders. And I never had any of those
problems because of my classical training.
At what point did you begin writing your own music?
Right at the beginning. I remember my brother and sister and I wrote a
song called “Summer in the Country.” I must have been about ten years old.
And we wrote this song together. [Laughs] Sort of a corny song. It had
words. It was more like a pop song. [Sings to a sweetly melodic tune]
“Summer in the country / We’ll have a lot of fun . . .” [Laughs]

So your first song was a pop tune—

Right!

Even with that song I could hear a sax play that tune, and it would be a
great jazz tune. And it’s well known that your famous jazz songs are all
beautifully melodic. You can sing them.
Yeah. I guess that was something I was conscious of right away. A
melody, you know, is not just an extension of improvised lines—it is
something that can stand on its own, being something singable to one
degree or another. So constructing a melody with that in mind, there’s a
better chance of it being palatable to nonmusicians, to the average person.

Yeah. A lot of your famous songs, whether “Chameleon” or “Rockit,”

they’re singable. And people love melodies. And you’ve been a
champion of other great melodies in your work for decades. Do you
have any thoughts about what makes a melody strong?
Usually simplicity. Yeah. Usually it’s a simple idea. Something really
fundamental. Like something that you could reduce to either two or three
elements. And that’s what I try to employ on some of the songs that I wrote,
even instrumental ones. Like “Chameleon” is in patterns of two. [Sings
melody with two note passages] Then the answer to that phrase.

And it’s based around two chords as well—B flat minor and E flat.
Right, right! That too.

I was surprised, while analyzing your songs, by that simplicity. Your

harmonies and chords are often quite extended and complex, but your
melodies are often, like you said, single enough that somebody could
sing them.
 In order to explore harmonic variety, which I like to do, there’s got to be
some balance. So if that’s going to be complex and involved, the balance
would be a melody that is based off something more towards the simple
side.

When you compose melodies do you do it by generating them from

chords you play, or do you think in terms of a pure melody line, apart
from chords?
Well, in the beginning I used to do it in a tried-and-true way that a lot of
jazz musicians utilize, and that is to start with a bass line. Sometimes it’s a
bass pattern. Sometimes it’s a harmonic movement. That used to be kind of
the formula that I used.

I can hear that. Often the bass part is the foundation of the whole
thing. Like “Watermelon”—
Yeah. That particular piece, when I wrote it, I was actually thinking
about the real watermelon man in Chicago. You know they have alleys in
Chicago. Cobblestone. They used to be cobblestone when I was a kid. And
the watermelon man had a horse-drawn wagon. Now they have trucks, but
they still had horses then! And what I tried to capture with that bass line and
the harmonic pattern and that rhythmic element, I tried to simulate—I tried
to capture—the spirit of the wagon wheels going over the cobblestone, and
the horses’ movement, and their hooves hitting the cobblestones. And that’s
what [sings rhythm] came from.
I remember that the watermelon man, he used to have a little song that
he sang. And it was [sings], “Wat-y melon, red ripe watermelon.” He had a
little song that he sang. But that wasn’t so melodic in a traditional sense. It
was melodic germane to his job. That was their thing. And that’s not
something that other people can easily sing. So I thought, “What else is
happening?” I remember. We had back porches then leading to the back
alley. When we lived in an apartment building we still had back porches.
And women would yell for the watermelon man. They would yell,
“Heyyyyyyyy, Watermelon Man!” So I made the melody that. That’s what I
tried to capture with that melody.
It’s interesting that even when you write an instrumental like that, you
had such a clear subject and image. Is that something you normally
would have, a story attached to the tune?
Well, in this case it was for the first record that I did under my own
name—1962. I had already been told by the person who discovered me,
Donald Byrd, great trumpet player that brought me to New York. I became
his roommate for a couple of years. We shared an apartment in the Bronx in
New York. And he kind of raised me. And he’s the one who really
encouraged me to make my own record and help make that happen with the
record label.
He said, “Look, let me tell you how the music business works. As far as
jazz is concerned, half the record is for you, and half the record is for the
record company.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
He said, “Well, half the record can be your songs. But the other half will
be to help sell the record.” [Laughs] Of course, the obvious implication is
that my songs are not going to help sell the record because nobody knows
any of my songs and I have no track record or anything. What helps sell the
record is something that’s a blues or a cover of a standard or a Gershwin
tune or “If I Were a Bell” or “My Funny Valentine.” Or whatever. A Cole
Porter tune.
So I said, “Okay.” But then I started thinking about it, and I thought,
“Well, why don’t I try to write something that would help sell the record?
What would that entail?” So my first thought was Horace Silver because he
had records that were selling to the jazz public. And he became very
popular, and it went beyond the standard jazz sales. And what was it that he
had? His tunes were funky. I had already had a background listening to
rhythm and blues and funky stuff anyway, so why don’t I try to write
something funky like that? So I started to think, “I’m a jazz musician. I
wanted to be true to jazz, and I don’t want to write something commercial
just for the sake of it being commercial. If I write something, I want it to be
connected with something true, connected to me and my life.”
When you think of the word funky, that really comes from an African
American tradition. So what can I write that is ethnic? That I can relate to
with a song? I had heard songs about chain gangs and the South and
discrimination and things I hadn’t been consciously experiencing. But what
I could relate to was a watermelon man. That was definitely ethnic. Also,
the idea of watermelons had a big stigma attached to it. That was a negative
one among blacks. The pickaninny eating a watermelon, you know, with
big eyes. That kind of thing.
So black people—of course, we love watermelons! But in the hood, no
problem. But outside the hood it was something. We kept some kind of
distance from it because of that association, because of that connotation. So
I kept trying to avoid it. But it kept coming back so strongly. Inside. That
that’s what it has to be. And what really convinced me was that I started
thinking, “Is there anything really wrong with watermelons? No. Is there
anything wrong with the watermelon man? No. You either got to be a man
or a mouse. You either stand up for what you believe in or you’re a
coward.” I had to stand up for what I believe in. And it was funny because
when I told some other black musicians that I wrote a song called
“Watermelon Man” they said [in a hushed whisper], “You’re gonna call it
that?”
See, it sounds now like it wouldn’t be an issue. But back then it was.
’Cause this is before Martin Luther King; it’s before James Brown and “I’m
Black and I’m Proud” and all of that. And so a lot of things that were
associated with blackness, we kind of hid. We had a tendency to hide in a
lot of cases.

And Chicago was—and still is—a pretty segregated city.

Right. Exactly.

And I also remember, growing up in Chicago, the arrival of fresh fruit

—and watermelon—in spring. It was always momentous. We sure
didn’t get it all year. And the song has that happy springtime feeling to
it.
Yeah, right. I wanted to capture that. But who knew that it was going to
be such a big hit? I had no idea. So the funny thing was, when I went to
present the songs to the label—I was going to present three songs one day
and three songs on another day, to get their approval. So I brought my three
songs the first day, and “Watermelon Man” was one of them. I played those
songs for them, and I said, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you my blues piece and a
standard.” They said, “No, why don’t you write three more pieces?”
[Laughter] And that was highly unusual, to take a new artist and have all
the songs be originals—that was not something they normally did.

Yeah. They recognized what they had.

Yeah, I think they did.

Did you have enough of your own compositions to use, or did you write
new songs then?
No, I think I had started on a couple of things. I went back home, back
to the Bronx, and worked on them that night and brought them the next day.
And they said, “Great.”
Then they said, “Of course, you’re going to have to put them in our
publishing company.” All the record companies had their own publishing
companies. And I had already been warned about that from Donald Byrd.
He said, “They’re gonna tell you you’re gonna have to put your tunes in
their publishing company. Do not let them do that. No matter what they say,
tell them no.”
I said, “But supposing they say they won’t put out my record—”
He said, “Trust me. They’ll still record you.”
And it went exactly the way he said. They said, “Yeah, you need to put
your songs in our publishing company.” Meanwhile I was crossing my
fingers.
And I said, “Uh, no.”
They said, “Why not?”
I said, “I’ve already published them in my company.” It was a lie. I
hadn’t even set it up yet. [Laughs]
They said, “You did? Well, I guess we can’t record them.”
So I turned around and started to walk towards the door. And just before
I grabbed the doorknob they said, “Wait a minute. Okay, you can publish
them.”
I said, “Great.” And because of that, I’m the proprietor and publisher of
“Watermelon Man.” Solely. And all the songs on that record.

Byrd gave you great advice. Not only what was right but how to deal
with the guys.
 Oh, it went exactly the way that he said. [Laughs] I am eternally grateful
for his advice.

Almost all songwriters I’ve spoken to talk of those times when songs
are coming through and those other times when nothing comes. Are
you able to control when things come through? Is it there for you, or
something that only comes once in a while?
At this point in my life, as opposed to when I was in my twenties,
[laughs] it’s very difficult for me to write something. Stuff used to just flow
out of me all the time. Over time, as I got older, it became more and more
difficult for me to write. And it became more of a struggle. And it’s still a
struggle. But I do know one thing: it’s struggle that is a necessary ingredient
to overcome and win over. It’s winning over yourself. And that victory is an
element that stimulates creativity and growth.
I learned that I need a deadline [laughs] to actually do something.
Sometimes I don’t get anything done until the last minute. I don’t care what
it is. The first thing that comes out of my pencil is going on the paper. And
I’ll do that. And I’ll go, “This is a piece of crap.” But it leads to something.
And I keep working, and it leads to something else. And eventually I’ll
have a piece.

So even though your initial voice says it’s no good, you know to go
beyond that. Not let that guy stop you from going on.
Oh yeah. Right. I mean, I’ve had this ongoing struggle for half of my
career. For twenty-five years. Movie scores, same thing. Albums, same
thing. Most of the recent albums, the songs are not my compositions. But
the focus of the records is the concept and the direction. So my energy has
been placed in that and the development of the overview, which was never
really apparent to me in the beginning of my career—I used to just write
tunes.

And you’d record them all at one session, everything at once—

Yes, exactly. My more recent things, over the past few years, have been
concepts. As a matter of fact, starting back with probably the record called
Dis Is Da Drum, there were major concepts putting that record together. It
came out in 1995, but I started that record in 1991. And it took all of that
time to put it together. I originally wanted to have that record be a surround-
sound record—long before it was really possible. [Laughs] And I had a lot
of musicians that signed off on an album that believed in the project. Then
when I did The New Standard, that was also an answer to the question,
“Will the standards always be those songs written in the twenties and the
thirties? Or will there be some new standards?” So this was my reply to
that. Not that the songs I chose were standards. But what I did with that
record was the same thing we used to do with the old standards—which is
to turn them into jazz songs. [Laughter]

And by doing that with these new songs you establish them as
standards. It helped elevate them to that place.
I don’t know how much I had to do with that. [Laughs]

There does seem to be an elitism among some jazz artists that these
newer songs aren’t worthy and aren’t as harmonically interesting as
the standards of the previous generation.
At least maybe I helped dispel that myth. That is what I like doing.
What I can to expand the boundaries that we set up for ourselves. And to
promote the idea that our creativity is stifled by boundaries. That the human
being has infinite potential, infinite potential for creativity. I firmly believe
that. I believe that you have to be what you believe and be an example of
what you believe. At least strive towards that.

It’s why your work has always been so vital and exciting. Whereas
other musicians are content to be segregated always into separate
genres, it’s in the fusion of genres that the future of music lives. You’ve
been a pioneer in this.
Yeah, I like that goulash.

And that’s uncharted territory in a lot of ways.

Yeah, it is. Because it hasn’t really been encouraged by the business.
Certainly not by the pop business, which is very money oriented and the
stakes are really high. So there’s a tendency for pop artists to do the thing
that they’re known for. And in most cases what they’re capable of creating
—including their interests—go beyond that. But it’s kind of stifled. They
stay on that safe path.
But my training is from Miles Davis. He would fire you if you tried to
be safe! [Laughs] So I have to answer to that. As if Miles judges everything
I do. [Laughter]

To this day you think of his judgment?

Yeah! The whole spirit of that is really in me.

And there are certain artists, like you—or Miles, or Dylan, or Joni—
who bravely moved on even though your audiences might not have
wanted that change.
Yeah. Well, I never think of my audience as being a stagnant audience. I
always hoped for, for one thing, for the sake of the life of jazz, to continue
to grow a new audience. Because people die. [Laughs] If you don’t grow a
new audience, there won’t be an audience for the music. And then who will
you make music for? Yourself? Then you won’t be able to make a living.
And you won’t be able to be a contributor to the culture of the world. It’s
the culture of the individuals who make up the world.

Speaking of Miles, I have been watching films of you in his quartet with
Ron Carter and Tony Williams. There was so much freedom and yet
also precision. Would Miles talk to you about the music? Would he give
you verbal guidance about what he wanted, or was it beyond words?
He never talked about music. [Laughs]

He didn’t seem like a very talkative person—

No, he was talkative. He would tell us stories about him and Bird, or
him and his relationship with Dizzy [Gillespie]. Or the scene back in those
days. Funny stories. Miles was always funny. Or something that he saw on
the street. Even if we were working on a record, if there was something that
he wanted to transfer to us, he wouldn’t tell us what to play; he would find
some metaphor. Which really is the heart of what he wanted. ’Cause with a
metaphor you have to translate them into your own terms and figure out
how to describe in musical terms that metaphor. Because even if he had a
single idea—and this is something that I came to believe long after those
first experiences with Miles—and that is that the musical idea is one
example of the metaphor. [Laughs] And so the metaphor carries the heart of
what that is really about. So it can express itself in many different ways.
But if you tell a person what to play, first of all, it’s you, and you’re not
playing that instrument. [Miles] is a trumpet player. He’s not going to play
piano. He’s not playing drums or the bass. So he wanted each of us to create
our own parts and create our own avenue or our own character within the
performance. So the metaphor would give us a chance to ponder the spirit
of the idea he had and come up with an expression of it that we create. See,
that’s what a master teacher does: he doesn’t give you the answers; he tells
you a way to find the answers for yourself.

That was reflected in the music, that it was a journey of discovery for
each musician. Also he chose such astounding players, so that the level
of musicianship was extremely elevated.
Yeah, Miles was like that, he was a master at being able to do that. And
I had the great fortune of working with the best musicians around. [Laughs]
It doesn’t get better than that. To have Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams
on drums, Wayne Shorter on saxophone—you know? And Wayne not only
on saxophone but the great composer that he was and continues to be. I
mean you should hear what he’s writing now! He’s writing for a full
symphonic orchestra. The stuff is fantastic.

Really? Can’t wait to hear it.

Oh yeah. It’s new, fresh stuff. You can’t compare it to Wayne’s tunes.
It’s a much larger vision than that.

Would Miles ever tell you after a gig if he didn’t like something you
did?
[Pause] No. [Laughs] He never told us if he liked something either.
[Laughs] But the fact that we still had a gig—I had that gig for about five
and a half years—that meant he must have liked it. [Laughs] I could just tell
that Miles loved for us to create with a lot of question marks. That he would
have to maneuver through. To create music. He lived in that. If he knew
what we were going to play, he would be bored to tears. If we threw a curve
at him, he loved that. That’s what he could do. He could turn lemons into
lemonade every time.

When you said that composing is now a struggle, why do you think that
is? Is it that it requires energy that is easier to summon when younger?
Because your playing sounds as amazing as ever.
Thank you. [Pause] I don’t know exactly. I suspect that perhaps it’s a
combination of things. I can’t really pinpoint it. It’s easy to say age. Yet
Wayne Shorter hasn’t slowed down one bit of constantly writing and
composing songs. Chick Corea, too, hasn’t slowed down one bit. And
Wayne is a few years older than I am. Chick is a year younger than I am and
hasn’t slowed down. So age isn’t really the right answer.
For me, striking the balance between what was, for me, a new vision of
myself, which was a product of my Buddhist practice, and how to achieve a
balance is something I am continually trying to grow in that area of balance.
And that is, back in the day I didn’t pay attention to politics. I didn’t pay
attention to the news. I never read the newspapers to see what was going
on. I didn’t watch news shows if I watched TV. It’s a whole different ball
game now. I listen to talk radio. Not the music stations. I watch the news on
television. Sometimes I watch movies. I love playing with my computer.
That’s part of a special interest that I have that stems from my interest in
science. But the process—the change of being a musician to being a human
being—is a process of growth for me.
We usually define ourselves by what we do: I’m a writer. Or I’m a
doctor. Or I’m a dancer. Whatever it is. Or I do construction. That’s usually
how we define ourselves. There’s a big trip with all of that. If we take a
look at Christopher Reeve. He was an actor. Something happened in his life
to curtail his acting career. It could happen to anyone. So what did he do?
He stopped being limited by a concept of being an actor. He didn’t go into
deep depression. Well, I never knew him, so I don’t know. But the end
result is that he came out finding a position where he could use his being for
the advancement of humanity. So the end result is that he wound up
contributing more towards humanity and his legacy from being denied the
possibility of continuing his acting career. His life became greater with that
“handicap.”
Yes. Limitations can create possibilities. As Krishnamurti taught.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So Buddhism really promotes the truth and the
fact that the human being really has limitless possibilities. And that the core
of what we are is not that thing that we normally define ourselves as. The
core of what we are is a human being. And when we define ourselves as a
human being, it changes everything. So music now, I look at it from the
standpoint of being a human being and use that as the foundation. And then
I use what I do to translate what initiates from my humanity into musical
terms. That’s why I’m able to make every record be different from every
other record.

And that comes across. And I find with many of the greatest musicians
and songwriters there is a humble acceptance and a gratitude for
musical gifts received. Whereas some great musicians—maybe Miles
even—let their egos get too large and thought of themselves as more
than human beings.
Well, I never perceived of Miles as having a big ego. I know that his
reputation was that. If his ego were that big, why is it his ego was not big
enough to overcome his demons? So Miles was wrestling with a lot of
things. He was tormented by his demons. But what I saw in Miles,
fundamentally, was this person who sought the truth and tried to express the
truth in everything that he did. He was arguably successful at that. The
reason I say that is because I know some people—one, in particular—who
had a horrible physical experience with Miles. But in my opinion [Miles]
wasn’t himself. His demons came out in various ways. We all have our
demons. It’s a part of life. [Laughs]

Yet you seem to have transcended demons—

No, I haven’t! [Laughs] A bunch of them attacked me for this record.

But you’re seventy and you are young, healthy, vibrant—productive,

prolific—
Oh, thank you—

So many great people, including many you worked with, aren’t with us
anymore. Many died very young.
 [Softly] I know. A lot of them are gone.

Like Jaco [Pastorius], for example. Sometimes it seems people with that
much talent burn out quickly. Too much current for the conductor.
Hendrix too. And you’ve sustained it for a long time.
I’m really fortunate I was able to discover Buddhism. It helped me
develop a clearer idea of my relationship with the environment. My
personal relationship with everything that’s outside of my personal self.
Which includes the people and circumstances that manifest themselves
externally. Buddhism really helps you to understand what that is. And in
doing so, you have a much better chance. If you recognize something, you
stand a fighting chance of dealing with it in a more positive way. It’s when
something blindsides you and you don’t see it coming, then you can be
knocked over and defeated. So I continue to chant. That is where I went this
morning. I went and chanted for an hour at a center that’s near here. In
Buddhism we practice and we chant every day.
The other thing I was going to say is that seventy is the new forty.
[Laughs]

Do you feel musicians hear music differently than nonmusicians do?

Yes. [Pause] Well, let me qualify that because I can’t speak for every
musician. Because my training and my expertise, if you will, is in jazz,
there’s a tendency for jazz musicians to hear the harmonies and the textures
and those things and are basically interested in examining those and finding
out what they are if something is interesting to them. Whereas the average
listener might like a certain texture, but there’s no avenue for them to even
question examining it. It becomes part of the vessel. And people evidently
[laughs], judging from what the public supports, there is a tendency for
people today to be more cognizant of vocals than they are of instrumentals.
As a matter of fact, some people—and I’ve heard this expressed, it’s
pretty weird—that when they hear an instrumental it sounds like a partial
piece of music because the vocal isn’t there. [Laughs] Which is weird to
me.

Do you think of musical keys as having their own colors or character?

 Yeah. They do. There are some musicians who might think more in
terms of color. I don’t think more in terms of that, but I recognize it if
someone uses that as a description.

But do you see specific colors attached to keys yourself?

Sometimes for me the keys that have sharps in them seem to have a
brightness to them. A lift, maybe. And the keys that have more flats in
them, I love them. [Laughs] G sharp can be A flat. There’s usually a darker,
not necessarily somber, but mellower character to it.

I’ve been just astonished listening to your accompaniments on piano

and keyboards—whether with Miles, or on Joni’s beautiful Mingus
album or on Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” which is so beautiful.
Your choices are always revelatory—often sparse but magical and
unexpected. I was wondering: Are you equally fluid and conversant in
every key on the piano, or are there certain places where you are more
comfortable?
[Laughter] Unfortunately there are places where I’m more comfortable.

Really? Where would that be?

F. [Laughs] From the standpoint of piano I have more of a tendency to
be more comfortable in F than anything.

It’s a good piano key.

Yeah. [Laughs] F sharp is more of a challenge.

Irving Berlin played exclusively in F sharp.

That’s what I’ve heard.

It seems when I listen to your accompaniment that you know every

chord. Is there still music on the piano or the keyboard that you
haven’t reached or are still trying to discover? Or have you
encompassed it?
No. I’m always [laughs] discovering, certainly for myself, new sounds
and approaches. But what I’m trying to do now is get away from being
motivated from the standard chord structure and think more in terms of a
landscape. Objects in a landscape. Textures. Colors. Shapes. Degrees of
emotions. Degrees of tension and release. And other characteristics that are
nonmusical terms.

Your version of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” is a great example of

that. The melody, sung by John Legend, is quite close to the original.
But your accompaniment is a whole other landscape, adding a different
depth and texture to the thing but without pulling it into another place.
The song still comes through. It is amazing and hard to conceive how
you would achieve that.
Well, fortunately [producer] Larry Klein continues to push me that way.
He and I really see eye to eye. And he knows I’m capable of utilizing space
and textures and other devices than just placement of chords. So he
encourages that.

When you approach a song like this, do you think of what you are
going to do in advance, or are you following the emotion of where the
song leads you?
I try not to think. I try to react. And find a space that is cognizant of the
meaning of the lyrics and the emotion that I am experiencing moment to
moment. And let myself respond to that.

You chose inspirational songs for this album, such as “Imagine,”

“Don’t Give Up,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” What draws
you to a specific song?
For this project, because the purpose of this record is about peace
through local participation, because of that I was looking for songs that
would fit into that general concept. But by peace I didn’t confine it to world
peace. There is inner peace. The peace inside an individual. “Don’t Give
Up” is about that. And it translates itself to all the various levels of what
peace can be. That is what I wanted to do. And all the pieces relate to the
struggle against adversity and the hope for a peaceful solution.

A song like “Imagine” and also “The Times They Are A-Changin’” are
both pretty simple harmonically. Diatonic. How do you come to
something like that? Does it seem restrictive to play within that kind of
harmonic framework?
 I learned many years ago that if something, at the onset, seems to be
confining, it’s only confining because of my lack of perception. To perceive
how to remove the barriers. Of incarceration. [Laughs] Because if
something is confining, it’s like you’re in jail. But I am developing the
experience now of trusting that there is a way of looking at a piece of music
where what might normally be perceived as confining walls, the walls are
removed. So if my first reaction is from hearing a way a song was done
before or when it was written by the composer it was written a certain way.
If my first reaction is that it can be confining, then I know there must be a
different way of looking at it.
So there are two ways of trying to approach that. One of them is to
reharmonize things. And in many ways that’s the coward’s way out. That’s
easy. It’s much more valuable to still keep the essence of the simplicity of
the original song. And within that, create an external framework that’s more
open. But it’s not just external—it’s internal too.
What I find is that if a piece, on the onset, seems to be confining, I look
to myself, to free myself internally from that feeling of being confined. I
mean, look how many things I have to work with! Space. [Laughs] It’s easy
to forget about space.

Yes. Your music shows that. The use of silence.

Yes. But you have to use it wisely. That’s something I was learning from
Miles. He’s a master at that. And also you have to trust what’s in your heart
and develop the ability to trust what’s in your heart and not be swayed by
external forces. ’Cause it’s easy to be swayed by external forces.

It seems some musicians, certainly certain pioneers you have worked

with, are impervious to that.
Yeah, exactly. A lot of pioneers, the reason they appear to be impervious
to it is that they have the courage to fight for what they believe in. And to
stand up for what they believe in. And they demonstrate their vision in what
they do, and they don’t back down from it.

Yes. Like Joni doing the Mingus album was very brave. And a lot of her
fans, to this day, don’t like it. Yet it’s one of the most amazing albums
of all time.
 Oh yes. Let me tell you, I never expected Joni to be like that.

What a band on it too. You and Jaco and Wayne Shorter. Wow. Beyond
words.
Yeah. [Laughs] I was sitting at home in my living room, and I got this
call from Jaco Pastorius. Jaco says, “Herbie, come over here.”
I said, “What?”
He said, “We’re making an album with Joni.”
“Joni?”
“Joni Mitchell. You know, you got to come over. We’re trying to put this
thing together. And the piece that’s missing is you.”
I said, “With Joni Mitchell? Who else is on it?”
He said, “Wayne.”
I said, “I’ll be right there.” [Laughs]
But when I got there I thought I would have to hold back things.
Simplify things. In the traditional musical words. Simplify. And Joni didn’t
want that at all. She wanted us to fly. Of course, the roads that we had to
construct had to include her in it. [Laughs] We couldn’t just traipse off with
our instrumental stuff and play all over the place.

Were you guys leading the sessions?

Uh, no. [Pause] It was her and Jaco.

His horn charts on that album are remarkable.

Yeah. Jaco was doing a lot of the talking because he had been working
with Joni and he understood what she was looking for. I didn’t ask her what
to play; I asked him. I said, “How do you think she wants this?” He said,
“Man, just go ahead. She wants you to just go ahead and fly.”

Were there charts of the songs?

Yeah, there were charts. She didn’t want us to just play what was
written. I remember Jaco saying, “She wants you to paint. That’s something
you can do, Herbie. Paint.”
I said, “Okay, here we go.” And she just ate it up.
Because Joni has such a big heart, she is always saying yes to charity
things. She called me up and asked me to do things. And I always say,
“Sure, Joni.” I did that for a couple of years on and off. Once she gave me a
watch. A Corum watch. A very expensive watch. On the back of it, it said,
“He played real good for free.” [Laughs]

Did the jazz community respect that project, the Mingus album?
Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember hearing anything negative about it.

OceanofPDF.com
John Stewart
 Daydream Believing
Malibu, California 1991

When John Stewart was a junior in high school he had his first real run-in
with rock and roll, an experience so profound, he never forgot it. “I saw
Elvis on TV, and a light went off in my head,” he said. “It was like the
monkeys touching the obelisk in 2001. I saw my destiny.”
He purchased his first guitar, a Sears Stella, learned a handful of chords
to get started, and began playing Elvis songs such as “Hound Dog” and
“Jailhouse Rock,” both written by Leiber and Stoller (see page 26), and
writing songs at the same time. His father was a horse trainer, so the family
moved all around Southern California, from Pasadena to San Diego to
Riverside and on. He started a band called The Furies while still in high
school, composed of himself, two more guitarists, and a drummer. But this
band was different from all others at the time because they wrote their own
songs.
Songwriting from the beginning was a means of expression close to
John Stewart’s soul. Though it’s not the only one for which he had a natural
gift: he was also a fine artist who showed me many of his recent paintings
and works in progress. I went with our mutual pal Henry Diltz, legendary
musician-photographer, to John’s Malibu home, which was in the hills
overlooking the big blue Pacific. We spoke over coffee and cake in his
sunny kitchen, his own paintings all around. We flew through a history that
stretches from his time with the Kingston Trio, performing for and
befriending the Kennedys, through his work as a solo artist, writing hits
such as “Daydream Believer” for the Monkees and Anne Murray and songs
like “Gold,” which was a hit for himself.
The first song he wrote was called “Before the Night Is Over,” which
was intended for high school dances. “At these dances all the girls sat on
one side of the room, and all the boys sat on the other. It was the trauma of
the acne age,” said Stewart. At first it was Elvis and Buddy Holly who
provided his primary inspiration, but when rock was infiltrated by Frankie
Avalon and Pat Boone, it lost all of its appeal for him. “It didn’t have any
soul, so I gravitated toward folk music and started writing folk songs.”
He organized a folk group called The Wanderers and eventually landed
a record deal, at which time he became wise about the industry. “I
discovered how much money was in publishing, so I realized I should be
working on my songwriting.”
He wrote to Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio and invited him to a gig
his band was giving at Shrine Auditorium. Guard came to the gig and told
John afterward that he didn’t think the band was ready for the big time. He
did like some of the songs, though, and suggested John send him some.
Stewart took him at his word. “Every time he was in town, I was backstage
playing songs for him,” John remembered. Finally Dave liked two of them,
“Molly Dee” and “Green Grasses,” which they recorded. That album was a
hit, and John Stewart, who was in college at the time and living at home,
suddenly became a successful songwriter.
His story, below, tells about how the official version of “Daydream
Believer” altered one word, substituting “happy” for “funky.” Of course, the
distance between happy and funky is a vast one, and it shows you, in a
song, just how important one word is.

Do you remember the day you wrote “Daydream Believer”?

John Stewart: Very clearly. For some reason I was writing songs all
day, every day. It was part of a trilogy, a suburban trilogy. I remember going
to bed that night thinking, “What a wasted day—all I’ve done is daydream.”
And from there I wrote the whole song.
I never thought it was one of my best songs. Not at all. And then when I
heard The Monkees do it, I said, “My God. The line was supposed to be
‘You once thought of me as a white knight on his steed / Now you know
how funky life can be.” You know, after the wedding how things can get
funky?
And then Davy [Jones] sings, “Now you know how happy I could be.”
The record company wouldn’t let them say “funky.” Within three months it
was number one around the world. Then Anne Murray did it, ten years later
—another version.
Henry Diltz: And she’s singing “happy” because she learned it from
The Monkees.
John Stewart: It is “happy.” It’ll always be “happy.”
I lived off that song totally for more than a year. And then Anne Murray
recorded it, and it came up again. It was just a song I wrote in a few
minutes, and I have written many other songs like “Runaway Train” and
others just as fast.

How do you do that?

Clear your mind.

How do you do that?

Write early in the morning when you first wake up—take your guitar to
bed. That’s before the critical voice kicks in. That doesn’t kick in until
about a half hour later. At five in the morning you can be pretty clear. And
do some sort of breathing and meditation to learn how to turn off that
monkey-conscious mind. It just gets in the way. Monkey-conscious mind—
like a little wild monkey that goes to all these things. That’s what a critic is,
and that’s the one that tells you that you can’t and then tries to get cute and
clever.
I like to write while I’m watching TV. ’Cause it’s just interesting
enough to keep my mind occupied and just boring enough to let it wander.
Ideas sort of frees the bird. And driving in the car is great.
Sometimes I’ll put two radios on at the same time—and the audio chaos
short-circuits your brain, and you can focus on what you have to write. It
actually works.

Is it true you wrote “Gold” while you were driving?

 Yeah. I was on RSO Records, and Al Coury said I had to have a Top
Ten record or I was off the label. I was hanging out with Lindsey
Buckingham at the time, who would just sit there and write songs that were
making millions of dollars. And so I wrote this song about people who get
hits and the guy at the gas station trying to get a hit, and I wrote that whole
song driving over to see Lindsey.
It’s an okay song. It’s catchy, but it didn’t dig deep in the thing. Artists
that I love, they really dig deep. Francis Bacon goes too far. No, you can’t
go too far, but Russian artists, they go for this essence beyond the essence
and really dig deep for their subject matter. And then there’s painters who
just paint nice pictures—they’re nice; they never dig deep. And I felt that
song was just a nice song and just because a lot of people like it, it doesn’t
mean it’s a good song.
That’s why Paul Simon and people who are about art rather than about
their income, not about being a star, people who really dig deep to give us
great songs—that’s why they matter so much.

Others besides Simon who matter that much?

I like John Hiatt and Springsteen and Chris Whitley. Also Jesse
Winchester and Peter Gabriel. Sting manages to dig deep. Very
philosophical.
And look at The Beatles: they wrote these great songs that everybody
got. I just don’t have the knack for a hook like they did. I mean you don’t
get any better than “Imagine” and “Walrus” and “Let It Be.”

Do you have any idea where ideas come from?

They come from the consciousness that is not the real day-to-day,
walking-around consciousness. It’s the collective consciousness. Several
people can get the same idea at the same time. It’s the consciousness that
elected presidents and makes hit records. That consciousness that is the link
of all of us. All of us are that consciousness. It makes things work. And a
writer’s above that. But I think it’s from that consciousness that is, not to be
too philosophical, but if this was a big Halloween party with all kinds of
costumes, if we took off all the costumes, we’d all be the same person. It’s
that consciousness, where it all comes from.
 When you try to get your ego in there, try to get your own licks into it,
you smell it, and it’s kind of repelling. And something that’s really honest,
someone making an honest statement, people gravitate to that. Those who
surrender to that consciousness write the best songs.
There are some who are just given it. They don’t even work at it. But
that’s where I feel the songs come from. They can come from the ego mind,
but I just feel those are ego songs. Very Vegas. I won’t mention any names.
But we all know who writes those songs.

Any advice you can give us on how to tap into that consciousness?
I think just realizing it’s there and surrendering to it. And all I have to
do is be invited and get out of my way. Constant practice—there’s nothing
better than you out there doing it. I think surrender is the ultimate trick. You
have to hear it without trying to.

OceanofPDF.com
John Sebastian
 A Loving Spoonful
New York, New York 1998

He grew up in the very belly of the blues, with living legends like Lightning
Hopkins, Leadbelly, and Mississippi John Hurt coming by the family
apartment in Greenwich Village, showing him around both the guitar and
harmonica. His world was a world of music, art, and showbiz.
Born John Benson Sebastian in New York City on March 17, 1944, he
grew up both in Greenwich Village and in Italy. His father, also named John
Sebastian, was a classical harmonica player, and his mother wrote for radio
shows. Vivian Vance, famous for being Ethel on TV’s I Love Lucy, was his
godmother.
A gifted singer who also played autoharp, he got his start playing on
others’ albums, including those by Billy Faier, Fred Neil, and Tom Rush. A
trusted pal of Bob Dylan, he played bass on several tracks of what became
Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, although those parts were unused.
Invited by the gone-electric Dylan to join his touring band, he elected
instead to stay in New York and start his own band. He became one of the
members of The Mugwumps, which included guitarist Zal Yanovsky as
well as both Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty, who became one half of The
Mamas and the Papas with John and Michelle Phillips.
He wrote his first music in high school, an extended suite. “In and
around those last years of high school,” he recalled, “I started to write a
piece that would work within a Shakespeare play. It was called something
like ‘The Rain It Raineth Every Day.’” The reason given for starting to
write normal songs: “desperation.” The Spoonful had run out of covers and
needed some material. Up to then they were playing what he called a “rock
and roll smorgasbord,” which included revamped jug band music, songs by
Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, and some “unlikely blues and country
things.”
The band took its name from the song “Coffee Blues” by Mississippi
John Hurt, which carries the line, “I left my baby by the loving spoonful.”
Sebastian, who was on vocals, guitar, harmonica, and autoharp, was the
heart of the Spoonful, joined by fellow Mugwump Zal Yanovsky on guitar,
Steve Butler on drums, and Steve Boone on bass.
He evolved into a serious songwriter and wrote many of the band’s hits,
including exultant anthems such as “Do You Believe in Magic” and
“Summer in the City.”
We met at his studio in Greenwich Village to discuss these and other
songs. Surrounded by a beautiful collection of guitars, both electric and
acoustic, he fell into the story of how he learned to play guitar and how that
changed his life and the world he knew.

John Sebastian: I think there was a unique thing happening with guitar
playing at the time that I was learning, which was that there were so many
of my contemporaries learning, to different degrees of proficiency, that you
could get on and off the train. You could learn all the chords and then say
that’s all I need, I’m just strumming and learning “Tom Dooley.” And then
maybe someone like Lightning would come along, and you say, “I want to
dig a little bit. Be able to play in that polyrhythmic way.” And that would
take you to the next step. That was the process. It was social. Summer camp
was a way. There were always six or eight people learning.
By the time I was eighteen I had actually been able to learn from people
like Lightning. By then he knew me so long that I carried his guitar for a
year and a half while he was doing gigs. Whenever he came to New York to
do gigs he stayed at my house. I’d carry his guitar. So I learned that way. He
was not an instructive person. John Hurt, who I later accompanied on
harmonica, really was. A real teacher. So John Hurt was somebody who
really did show me the rudiments of thumb-picking and that style.
I would think both of them played in open tunings. Am I wrong?
Yes—you are wrong. Lightning was playing often in a standard tuning,
sometime down a half step or so. John played a lot in both standard—and
standard with a drop D. He had a sliding Delta he used to do in a G tuning.

That was mostly for my curiosity. I just wanted to know.

[Laughs] That’s fine. Hell, we’ll stuff them with a little bit of
unexpected knowledge.

You wrote your first songs, you said, out of desperation?

Yes. We had found all the cover songs that we could do, and there were
a couple of tempos that we were missing. We needed a big shuffle to create
more of an exciting dance floor. It didn’t amount to much more than that.
We just wanted to get the people up and moving. You have to remember we
were playing for the most dour of audiences in Greenwich Village. As much
as I love my hometown, the audiences were all the beatnik audiences, so
nonverbal and noncommunicative—the folk music audience, which was
very complicated and sort of snobbish to their own particular likes and
dislikes, so if you were a little vocal trio that was imitating the Kingston
Trio, you were out with them. Or you would be out with the commercial
crowd if you played blues. It was segregated. I hated it.

So it was out of the need for different songs that caused you to write
your own?
That’s really what it came from.

Do you remember the first one?

I wrote two songs pretty much in the same two days. The first was
called “Don’t Bank on It, Baby,” and the other was called “Good Time
Music.” They both ended up on an Elektra compilation album that included
four cuts from The Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, four from The
Butterfield Blues Band. It was called What’s Shakin’.

Were those blues songs your first ones?

They were bluesy, not too ambitious chordally. But they fit the bill.

When you started writing songs, did it come easy to you?

 It was fairly easy. I had had enough failure to make it work fairly easily.
You do it a couple of times, and then it starts to roll.

Then did you start to write a lot?

The demand has so much to do with songwriting. And part of my
continuing life is to create situations where I have a demand. I really don’t
believe in writing a song just for the sake of writing a song. If I could leave
with two and a half minutes of silence, that suits me really fine. I need the
pull of whatever demand there is.
As a matter of fact, Sammy Cahn was the guy who said, when asked
what comes first, the music or the lyrics, he said, “First comes the phone
call.” That applies to me too.

Sammy was proud of his ability to write songs fast, soon as he got an
assignment. Could you do that?
I was in a few of those kind of dramatic ensemble works—animated
film projects, movie projects. It does have to have a certain momentum, and
I function well in those circumstances. I did find I could do it when it was
called for.

When you started writing songs for the Spoonful, would you go to it in
a disciplined way or wait for inspiration?
Yes, it was more of an undisciplined way. But it was writing all the
time. Because there was just too much material needed. As fast as I could
write it, it was coming out. Everything we did we put out.

Do you write songs on guitar?

More so than other things. But I sometimes like the strangeness of
writing on a keyboard, because it’s not my instrument. I am pretty primitive
on a keyboard. I’ll make mistakes, and that is where you will sometimes
find fertile areas.

To preserve those mistakes, do you tape yourself while doing it?

Yeah. I usually get a Dictaphone running or something.

And so you work just on music, without lyrical ideas?

 Yes, very often. I was listening to a stub of me coming up with
“Welcome Back” the other day. Kind of in preparation of this. And the
thing that made me laugh the hardest is that I started at the beginning of the
A-side of this tape. Which really takes the whole tape to get anywhere close
to “Welcome Back.”
On side one I’m playing a kind of country and western thing—nowhere
near it. Then I’m playing this kind of shuffle thing on the piano. And I’m
going “Welcome back . . .” But nothing. Then somewhere about halfway
through the tape I abandon the whole idea and then start again. And then by
the second side of the tape it’s starting to make sense [laughs] and starting
to actually fall into place. And that’s the way songwriting can be
sometimes. In that particular instance I did have somewhat of an agenda. I
knew what had to be spoken about. I knew there had to be a certain mood
that was the mood of these underachieving students, shall we say? And you
had to be in that vernacular; you had to have the right attitude. By the
second side of the tape I’m starting to get into the right attitude. And that’s
what wrote that song.

On keyboard you wrote that?

I worked on keyboard right up till I began to play it with other people.

That song was an exception among TV theme songs in that it was a

theme song people loved but it also became a hit and a song people love.
It transcended the TV show. Did you feel that, when writing, that it was
a great song as well as a good theme?
Yeah, I won’t do any false modesty. I was about three-quarters of the
way through the aforementioned tape, and I felt I’ve got a hit song here.
And I know that doesn’t fit the normal course of events with television
shows. They have a little visibility because of the show. Even though I
didn’t have the power to put it out right then. It was actually a two-and-a-
half-minute thing for a TV show first. And then it got write-ins. And phone-
ins. People were calling their record shops and saying, “How do I get this?”
Nothing makes a record company react like this. I had no idea. I found
myself in a studio all of a sudden trying desperately to make an album that
they all of a sudden had green-lighted after not really paying attention to me
for a number of years. It was a pleasant accident. And I was enjoying it,
certainly.

When you went into the studio did you expand the song?
Once these requests came in, I realized if this thing was gonna go out as
a single, it had to be longer. So I said, “Look, I’ll take one of the verses and
copy it, and then stick it in the middle and play a harmonica solo over it.”
So what you hear is the heart of that original demo with an additional verse.
Then you go back to the beginning and play some extra parts. A few
electric guitar parts that I put on that gave it more of a sequential nature. So
it wasn’t just a repeat when you came to what would be the third verse.

Seemed wise, from a songwriting perspective, that you kept it a

universal song. You used the phrase “Welcome back” but kept it
general enough and not so specific that it could apply only to the TV
show.
I did ask them not to make me write something called “Kotter.” There’s
“otter” and not much else.

“Potter.”
[Laughs] It was a tough rhyme, and I didn’t feel like it. I got this ten-
page synopsis, and here are these guys just trying to schlog their way
through school, and here’s this guy—Kotter—who found his way all of a
sudden. Somewhere along the way he must have gotten inspired because he
became a teacher. So now he’s coming back, and these guys have to tease
him. That’s what has to happen. So it was sarcasm that was sort of the key
to it.

That song, like many of your songs, is upbeat. It makes you feel good
when you hear it. Not a lot of songwriters can write good, happy songs
without being trite. You’ve done it in so many of your songs. Does that
come naturally to you?
[Laughs] It does feel a little strange to have so many people relate to me
as this songwriter of happy songs. I’m really glad that they came out that
way. But there are songs like “Summer in the City” that, when I wrote
them, I was not having a good time. I did not think I was creating a song
just to have fun with. This is one of those benefits you kind of have to sit
back and say, “Well, great.” I would much rather be a writer of happier
songs than sadder songs. But I wouldn’t want to have just one flavor.

A lot of songwriters don’t enjoy the process of songwriting. Do you?

No, I hate it. [Laughs] Yeah, it’s very hard to do it because there’s so
many other things that are more fun than staring at a page. And they’re all
in my house. It comes down to a reason. You need a reason. An idea can be
a reason; a project can be a reason. Or it can be a group.

You mentioned “Summer in the City.” Do you remember writing that

one?
Oh yeah. [Laughs] In point of fact, the original core of the song, the
chorus, is written by my brother Mark Sebastian. He came to me with this
song that was most of the way written, and it had this “But at night it’s a
different world.” This chorus that really struck me as so resonant. I felt if
the verse was different, then it would really hit you like a ton of bricks. So I
tried to write this angular thing in a minor key that then opens up like a
Jewish folk song by going to the subdominant chord in a major way. Like
“Exodus.” [Sings] And “Evening of Roses”—from which it was stolen. So
the idea was to start with something that has that minor mode and then
move into the major for the chorus.
And it worked. Then we had the verse and the chorus. And in the
process of recording it Steven Boone, the bassist for the Spoonful, had a
fragment that he played constantly in rehearsals. And I thought this could
be the bridge. And it was also in a different time signature, so it did a thing
that was almost classical in really taking you from one mood to another.
And between that and just a nice accident, then it started to sound like
Gershwin, like “American in Paris” to me. [Sings section of “American in
Paris”] And in that he was imitating traffic. So let’s imitate traffic. Let’s get
some traffic! So we hired this old radio sound man who came in and helped
us find traffic and particular car horns. And then we ended it up with that
pneumatic hammer.

I also love your song “She’s a Lady.” Such a pretty song.

 As a matter of fact, it was at a very difficult time. I was splitting up with
somebody. It was sort of trying to take the sadness of the situation but not
the difficulties of the situation. A little idealization works good in songs.

Do you remember writing “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your

Mind”?
Yes. I had spent five summers as a camp counselor. And in this
community of counselors, there were two different pairs of sisters that were
my age. We were all falling in love with each other. Basically fifteen-year-
old stuff. Nothing was ever consummated or anything. It was kid’s stuff.
But though nothing worked out in actuality, it gave me the basis for the
song.

You wrote it then?

No, I wrote it later. I wrote it in a cab on the way to a session, when I
needed a song.

Was that unusual for you, to be able to write something in a cab?

No. I’d say it does happen. It’s happened more than once. But it ain’t
the way I like to work all the time.

I think of your song “Do You Believe in Magic” as a great example of

one of our happy songs.
That was really the first visible song that I ever wrote. It has a special
memory for me. At that time the Spoonful was playing in a little club that
really hadn’t had a teenage audience yet. We really hadn’t found our
audience. On this particular night we looked out into the audience, and
there was a young girl dancing. This was in a setting where most of the
other people were beatnik types sitting around playing chess. And so this
really made a difference. It was like seeing the beginning. We knew that if
she was there, she would tell her friends next week. Suddenly we were
gonna have an audience. We were cocky enough to think that. It’s a good
thing we turned out to be right. But that is what the song was all about.

How about “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”?

 The core of that also came from Steve Boone. He wrote the music for
that, and he said, “How about if it’s called ‘You Didn’t Have to Be So
Nice’?” And it was so easy to come up with lyrics after that. That song was
written very fast. That’s a collaboration between he and I.

Did a lot of your songs come fast?

Oh yeah. I’ve written songs—no hits, but a few that I am proud of—that
took all summer. A song called “Face of Appalachia,” I kept tinkering with
it for most of three or four months.
Sometimes they just slide through faster than others. That’s all you can
say.

How about “Daydream”?

“Daydream,” I think, came out so different than it was intended. The
Spoonful was traveling with the Supremes. On a bus, about 1965. Down
south for a summer tour. And they had “Baby Love” out there. Also known
as “Where Did Our Love Go?” There was something about the groove in
that song. We called it, in those days, a straight eight. Because it didn’t have
any inflection on the two or four or the one and three. Like a lot of music
stresses one or the other. The way they got it was by getting people to
stomp on a big choir stand. And part of the sound on that record, when the
band cuts out and there’s just this whock whock whock, it’s people on a
choir stand.
So I tried to write something that was in that groove. And I thought,
“Wait till we play this. It’s gonna be our baddest thing.” [Laughs] And
instead it comes off as a croony jug band thing. I don’t know what it was!
But it wasn’t what we thought we were copying so well.

OceanofPDF.com
Gene Clark
 Still The Byrds
Hollywood, California 1991

“You look like you got some sleep,” Gene Clark sleepily said as he sat at a
table in Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, Musso & Frank Grill. From his
weary tone and half-opened eyes I concluded that he hadn’t gotten much
sleep, if any, the night before.
He didn’t look too good. Painfully gaunt, his weathered face had been
badly battered in a recent car crash, a few front teeth were missing, and his
left ear was bandaged à la Van Gogh. Even so, his spirits were high; he
seemed happy about embarking on a concert tour that was to begin with a
five-night stint at Hollywood’s Cinegrill, just down the street from here. He
had been gone for a while, but Gene Clark was ready to come back.
“I’m going to record a new solo album,” he said. “And I’ve got about
four dozen beautiful unrecorded songs.” He smiled happily. “It’s going to
be a good year for me.”
We talked about his past before, after, and during his time as a founding
member of The Byrds along with bandmates Roger McGuinn, David
Crosby, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman. We spoke about the famous
songs he wrote for the band, such as “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” (also
recorded by Tom Petty) and “Eight Miles High,” and the famous people
he’s known, including his fellow Byrds as well as Jim Morrison, John
Lennon, and Bob Dylan.
 But he never got to go on tour or to record all those unrecorded songs.
Sadly, just weeks after our talk he was found dead in his Sherman Oaks
home. The day he died, May 24, 1991, was Bob Dylan’s fiftieth birthday.
Gene was forty-six.
Because the sound of Roger McGuinn’s voice and electric twelve-string
guitar is so closely associated with the greatness of The Byrds, McGuinn is
often thought of as the sole guiding force behind the band. In truth both
Gene and Roger led the band, with both usually singing dual lead vocals, as
Paul and John did in The Beatles. It was Gene who insisted, over Roger’s
objections, to make an arrogant but angelic-voiced singer named David
Crosby a member of the band. And it was Gene who wrote the majority of
the band’s first songs—until the other Byrds caught on to the fact that his
royalty checks were bigger than theirs and started writing more.
During our lunch he drank a lot of coffee and ate some pounded steak
with gravy, saying he wanted to gain back some of the weight he lost in a
recent stomach operation. His countenance was not unlike that of a prize
fighter the day after a big fight. He seemed battered physically and
emotionally but not defeated. Despite sickness, despite problems with
drugs, a generous spirit and a soul of sweetness shone through.
About halfway through our talk he got a serious coughing attack that he
wasn’t able to suppress, so we decided to continue our talk over breakfast
days later.
On the morning of our meeting the stomach flu arrived in my home and
refused to leave, so I had to cancel our breakfast, leaving a message on his
answering machine, explaining my absence. We spoke the next day on the
phone, but before I had a chance to apologize for missing our meeting, he
apologized to me, saying it was he who got the stomach flu and marveling
at how sudden and severe it was. This was confusing, to say the least, but I
took it as part of the conundrum that was Gene Clark. We concluded the
interview a few days later, after both of us had recovered completely.
He was born on November 17, 1944, and raised the second oldest of
thirteen kids in Tipton, Missouri, near the Ozark Mountains. All his
brothers were natural musicians, as was his father. “My dad was one of
those guys who could pick up any instrument and make it sound good,” he
remembered. “We always had instruments around the house—cellos and
violins and guitars. My favorite was the guitar, and one of my earliest
memories was sitting in front of my dad and watching him play guitar and
asking him, ‘How do you do that?’ And he taught me.”
His father was a farmer, and besides the bluegrass music he provided,
all of the food the family ate came from the earth. But Gene turned to other
places for his music as well, and the radio linked him up to early idols such
as Elvis Presley and The Everly Brothers, inspiring him to want to be a
musician. “I wanted to be a singing star from the time I could think,” he
said.
His first band was called The Sharks, with whom he recorded a single.
He then returned to folk music and abruptly was discovered and enlisted by
the Christie Minstrels, an extremely popular folk group at the time. The
instant notoriety he gained was a shock to his eighteen-year-old system
almost as strong as the one he felt when his next group, The Byrds, became
world famous in a matter of months.
I was among those at his final show at the Cinegrill, which was the
nightclub in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It was more than a concert; it
was a party. Gene bought drinks for the entire audience. “It’s on me,
tonight,” he said. The place wasn’t full, but those who were there were the
devotees, the ones who had been there since the start, when The Byrds
played the Whisky just up Sunset from here.
Wearing a white tuxedo with tails and strumming a dark Washburn
acoustic, he played some great old Byrds classics as well as some Beatles
songs—“Don’t Let Me Down” was a highpoint of his set—and songs by
Bob Dylan. His final song was Dylan’s masterpiece “I Shall Be Released”:
“I see my light come shining / From the west unto the east / Any day now,
any day now / I shall be released.”

Do you remember how old you were when you wrote your first song?
Gene Clark: I was about five years old when I wrote my first song. I
wrote tons of songs. From there I started getting around folk music, singing
lots of harmony with banjos and guitars, like Peter, Paul and Mary.

When did you meet Roger McGuinn?

Met him at the Troubadour [in Los Angeles]. He wasn’t performing
there; he was just hanging out and sitting in a corner, playing a Beatles
song. I said, “Wow, man, you got the right idea.”
 And then David Crosby joined in, so there were the three of us. And
then we saw Michael Clarke walking down the street, and he just looked the
part, and we said, “Hey, can you play drums, man?” He said, “Yeah, I play
drums.” So I said, “Why don’t you join us?”

Did he really play drums?

No, but he could fake it. And he faked it good, man, until he learned.
When we started out, we couldn’t even afford drums, so we got some
cardboard boxes with a tambourine on one side and a cymbal on the other
one, and that’s what he played. But you’d be surprised how good the
recording sounded.

Were you playing electric guitars?

We were playing our acoustics through an amp with pick-ups on. We all
had acoustic twelve-strings—me, Crosby, and McGuinn. We were all
twelve-string players.

When did you switch to electric instruments?

Well, we got somebody to back us a little bit and give us enough money
to go and buy them. We had to buy a set of drums and electric guitars.

When you started the band, were you thinking of it as a rock group or
a folk group?
We didn’t have any particular concept. We just wanted to have a group.
The Beatles were rather folk-rock themselves because they used a lot of
really melodic melodies and a lot of harmonies and minor chords.
And so when I first started to hear The Beatles I said, “These guys are
hot! I mean, they’re wonderful, you know?” And immediately with
McGuinn and Crosby, when people heard us sing, man, we were an instant
success. Instant.
Everybody had us play at their parties. I remember Ian and Sylvia and
us were all staying at the Tropicana Motel, and the two of them were
flipping out. Hoyt Axton too. They all thought we really had something
happening. Everybody else was putting us down, but Hoyt Axton and Ian
and Sylvia, they loved us. They said, “Man, if you guys catch on, this could
be really big.”
Were you doing your own songs at first?
We started right out with our favorite Beatles songs, and then originals
because we already had original stuff in that vein.

Did you and Roger switch off singing lead vocals?

On most of the records it’s really him and I singing together in one
voice.

In unison?
Yeah, in unison, exactly. And a lot of people don’t know that. And
David would sing harmony. Roger and I sang lead together; that’s why the
voice was so big on the early records.
On “Eight Miles High” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” that’s all McGuinn and
myself singing dual leads. Because by himself, he has kind of a thin voice.
And by myself, I have a very broad voice, right? You put the two together,
right? If you check out some of those early Beatles records, Paul and John
are singing in unison. Both harmony and unison.

I heard you say that Crosby was arrogant for someone with such an
angelic voice.
Well, Roger and I went to watch him at the Monday night hootenanny at
the Troubador, and this guy came onstage who I thought was a total jerk.
Because he had such an arrogant, uppity attitude. But then when I heard
him singing, it blew my mind.
I said to Roger, “There is our high voice. That’s like our McCartney,
right there,” and Roger said, “I don’t know, man. I’ve tried to work with
him before.” [Laughter] But David actually literally begged us to let him
sing with us—that’s no shit.
He literally begged us, and I said, “Yeah, let’s do this,” and Roger said,
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” and I said, “Come on, man, come on. You got
to try. This is too good . . .”
And we’d go in the stairwell of the Troubadour, where there was an
echo, and we would sing in there. People would hear us and just go nuts.
They’d come in and say, “Wow, where are you guys at?”

Who came up with the name of the band?

 McGuinn and I. At the Troubadour. And he added the Y. I came up with
Birds, B-I-R-D-S, because of flying, you know, very high, evolved
creatures. And then he said, “No, let’s call it The Byrds, B-Y-R-D-S, like
the A in Beatles.”

Speaking of flying, do you recall writing “Eight Miles High”?

It really started when Roger and I were sitting on an airplane together.
And I asked him, I said, “How high do you think we’re going?”
He said, “Well, about forty thousand feet or so.”
I said, “Well, how high is that?”
He said, “Maybe six miles high?”
And I said, “What a neat name for a song—‘Six Miles High.’”
And he said, “No, six doesn’t sound right. It’s got to be eight miles
high.” [Laughs] That’s how it started.
And then me and Brian Jones worked on it. Brian, he never wanted
credit for it. But then he and I picked it up later down the line, the idea, and
we groomed it for months. We presented it back to Crosby and McGuinn,
and they liked it so much that they really went really deep into it. So it
ended up all three of us writing it, with Brian Jones uncredited.

Did you and Brian work here in Los Angeles?

No, in St. Louis, Missouri. To Pennsylvania. [Laughs]

You wrote the words?

I wrote all the words except for one line that David wrote, and then
Roger arranged it, basically. So I had to part with something with those
guys. I decided that I wasn’t going to get a single out of this deal because
I’d already written so many songs with this group that they were going to
grab up the singles for their own stuff, and so I split it with them so I could
get a single.

The Byrds, famously, had a big hit with “Mr. Tambourine Man” by
Dylan. And that sound pretty much defined folk-rock.
Roger and I knew it was a hit. We were the only two who did. We were
the only two people who did. Roger and I knew it was a hit; we knew we
had a big record. Nobody else would believe it.
 I loved the Dylan version. But, you know, we put it out before Dylan
did. We sent him a letter asking him for permission to record a song that he
hadn’t recorded yet. So Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, and Bob sent
us back “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was so long that we had to cut it down to
one verse and two choruses in order to keep the record under three minutes.

That was one of the most important records of my childhood—both the

song itself and the sound: your harmonies and the guitars.
It was for a lot of people. You’d be surprised by how many people come
up to me and say, “Hey, the first time I heard ‘Feels a Whole Lot Better’ I
was laying in the mud in Vietnam getting shot at. Some guy had a little
pocket radio. That song gave us faith, man.” Guys would really say that.

Did you write that one yourself?

Yes, and Tom Petty gave me a great favor by recording it last year [on
Full Moon Fever]. It sold 4 million copies. Their version is almost exactly
the same as mine.

Do you remember writing that song?

It wasn’t really about anything. It just kind of came along. It was just a
feeling that came along. I wrote it in about twenty minutes, which is
unusual. “Eight Miles High,” as I said, took months.

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” was a huge hit for The Byrds, a song Pete Seeger
adapted from the Bible. Whose idea was it to record that song?
McGuinn’s wife at the time suggested doing that. He adapted it to an
arrangement, which I worked on with him. I remember coming up with the
intro lick and all that kind of stuff. Most of the really great things we did
were mostly collaborations.

Pete Seeger said that he loved your version of the song, with all those
jangly guitars and all.
That’s cool. I would imagine he would like it. [Laughs] At first I didn’t
know if we should do it. But when I heard what McGuinn had in mind, how
to execute the actual arrangement of it, then I realized we had something
great there.
Did you want The Byrds to break up?
[Loud sustained whisper] No, no, certainly not. I think it was just that
everybody was not ready for that kind of success. All at once we are thrown
into being international and gigantic, international gurus. Nobody was
really prepared for it. The management wasn’t; the guys ourselves weren’t.
It was a mob scene on the street in daily life. What could you do? How
could you handle it? Everybody sort of had a nervous breakdown. I know I
did. And that’s what really caused the breakup.
It had nothing to do with fear of flying or any of that stuff that the
rumors said. It was just that none of us were really prepared to handle that
kind of impact.

Would you like to have a reunion?

Sure, but I don’t know if it will happen. It’s hard to say.
Well, unlike The Beatles or The Stones or The Doors, everybody in The
Byrds are still alive, so it could happen.
Yeah. I just don’t see it happening for some reason.

Do you still spend a lot of time writing songs?

Yeah, that’s why I am so tired today. Once I get going, I get this great
streak going, and I can’t stop. I write all the time. I write constantly. I have
so much material that I have never recorded.
Writing is total sacrifice. People ask me what it takes to have the kind of
reputation I have. I tell them total sacrifice. It’s like being a ballet dancer. If
you want to do it, you do it 100 percent. If you don’t do it that way, you’ll
never get there. You have to give up a lot.
Being a good songwriter has to do with being a visionary, but what can
you envision? I have maybe four dozen unpublished beautiful songs. I can’t
wait to get some of the new stuff I’ve written out. Some of it is very bouncy
and up, and I’m very excited about it.
So I started a solo album next month. This is going to be a good year all
the way around for me.

OceanofPDF.com
Stephen Stills
 The One You’re With
Beverly Hills, California 2007

When he was a kid, just a few years after learning to walk, he learned to tap
dance. One of his clearest memories is being three and sitting on a chair
with tap shoes on and tapping rhythms onto a metal board. Rhythm is in his
blood. The first instrument he mastered was not guitar but drums. “Rhythm
is my thing,” he said.
Today this same man is in his sixties and looks relaxed and happy as he
sits in his location of choice, the legendary Polo Lounge at the Beverly
Hills Hotel. It’s a place one might more likely meet Liza Minelli than
Stephen Stills, but I soon discover, upon his arrival, that he’s quite at home
here. He’s got his own table under the sun-streamed windows, and the
waiters all know him. He’s got on sunglasses and a blue floral shirt and
looks rested and healthy.
Not only is he forever famous for writing a profusion of classic songs,
including “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “Love the One You’re With,” and “For
What It’s Worth,” he was also the architect of the Crosby, Stills & Nash
sound. His voice was one-third of their miraculous vocal blend, and his soul
was thoroughly injected into all their records—in his passionate acoustic
and electric guitar playing and also in his arrangements of their famous
songs.
 In fact, when bandmates Crosby and Nash were out at parties
socializing and spreading this miracle news of a superband—Crosby from
The Byrds, Nash from The Hollies, and Stills from Buffalo Springfield,
united in song—Stills preferred to stay in the studio and work on the music.
“Stills played almost everything on the first album,” said the late Dallas
Taylor, who was their drummer. “Except for the drums, which I played, he
played almost all the guitars—acoustic and electric—organ, piano, bass. He
put it all together. He doesn’t get that credit much, but Stills is a genius at
production.”
A great example is Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children,” which
started as a gentle and wispy ballad before Stills gave it a groove and
transformed it into the country-tinged masterpiece we know. He scrutinized
David Crosby’s abstractly ingenious chords, figured them out (usually), and
created a solid foundation for Crosby’s asymmetrical musings. And when
Neil Young joined the band, not only did Stills have a new sparring partner
on guitar, he also had more songs in which he could infuse fire.
With a Groucho-esque glint in his eyes, he expresses admiration for the
many long-legged women who pass by and peppers the conversations with
a variety of funny non sequiturs, such as “I don’t know about you, but I am
so over tattoos.” Asked if he’s been writing any new songs lately, he says
no and explains, “It’s busy stuff with little kids.” He has two kids at home
right now, one three and one eleven, which he refers to as “the last litter.”
Asked how many he has altogether, he pauses and says, soberly, “Seven. So
I’d better write some more songs,” and then he laughs.
“This is all too complicated,” he says to the waiter about the elaborate
lunch menu we are offered, featuring dishes like osso buco that seem
especially heavy and convoluted at eleven in the morning. “Can I get a
breakfast menu, please?” he asks, and the waiter says, “Sure, you can have
anything you want, Mr. Stills. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know that,” he says knowingly to me. He smiles ’cause it’s
true. He can have anything he wants—not just in terms of this morning
meal, but in life. And he’s earned it. The man has been in the trenches and
emerged triumphant, a real guitar hero whose chops only get better as time
goes on and a man who has succeeded in fusing expansive lyricism with
visceral music better than just about anyone this side of Bob Dylan. “I’d
like a bacon sandwich, or something like that.” Soon he orders eggs
Benedict, apologetically explaining, “It’s bad for me, but I’m gonna do it
anyways. I love it.” It’s the same apologetic tone he adopts when, later,
waiting for cars at the valet, his giant Mercedes is brought to him. “I’ll get a
Prius one of these days, I promise.”
Not only is he a great songwriter and singer, but as his fans know well,
he is also a real guitar hero. He was pals with Jimi Hendrix back in the day,
and there are recordings of them together, each matching the other’s
intensity and soul. Though the man, like Neil Young, can play the part of a
folkie quite convincingly, at his heart he is a rocker—and a great one.
Last time I saw him perform with CSN was in Orange Beach, Alabama,
also known as the Riviera of the South, in 2010, while working with Henry
Diltz on a documentary about CSN and their pals and peers called Legends
of the Canyon. [To make the tour work best, each member of CSN had their
own bus.] The singing of CSN was as beautiful as ever. But Stills’s electric
guitar playing was simply transcendent. He was on fire. He’s always a fine
lead player, but on this night he seemed to reach a whole other realm.
After the show, I told him how amazing the guitar playing was. “It
should be,” he said with a laugh. “I have been doing it for more than forty
years. You would think I would get better!” I mentioned that he’s also been
writing songs for that long—so did that get better too? “No,” he said flatly.
“No, that just gets harder.”
Born on January 3, 1945, in Dallas, Texas, he was raised in a military
family that was always on the move. His childhood included time in
Florida, Louisiana, Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador—a mixture of
cultures that shaped his musical soul. His music was all over the map,
literally and figuratively, from joining the rock band The Continentals early
on to joining the folkies onstage solo at Gerde’s in Greenwich Village,
where Dylan started. With Richie Furay he became part of the Au Go-Go
Singers before the two of them ultimately teamed up with a Canadian
named Neil Young to form Buffalo Springfield. Their biggest hit, “For
What It’s Worth,” was written by Stills, discussed in the following
interview.
His genius for writing songs then—and a lot of powerful ones—is
reflected now in a remarkable recording just released prior to this
conversation, Just Roll Tape, an album he made in a couple of hours in
April of 1968 after his girlfriend Judy Collins wrapped up recording for the
day and he wanted to preserve some of his new songs. Successive
masterpieces came rolling out: the expansive, amazing “Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes,” in which he expanded the song form into a suite in a way nobody—
save those Liverpool lads on their Abbey Road medley—had done quite the
same way. Also “Helplessly Hoping,” “Change Partners,” “Wooden Ships,”
and more. Even delightful and mysterious fragments that could have been
expanded into full songs or more but were never developed are there, such
as “Dreaming of Snakes,” which has all the makings of a Stills classic.
Hearing him play and sing these famous songs is a revelation—the
confidence and power he exudes even solo in the studio is stunning, and for
the first time we discover which part was the actual melody. “We were very
clever boys,” he says coyly about the intricate harmony arrangements he
cooked up with CSN.
No sign of the notorious Stills temperament surfaces except for the
occasional slightly irritated “obviously” offered as an answer to questions
he doesn’t feel need to be posed. But mostly he seems quite happy in his
life, in his world, and he kindly subjugates himself to a gentle interrogation.

You seem happy. Can you write when you are happy?
Stephen Stills: Sometimes. I have these little starts of songs, and then I
have to think hard if I have already written that. [Laughs]

Do you need turmoil or melancholy in your life to write good songs?

Yeah. Or they come out sounding like Lawrence Welk. [Laughs] Go to
work for Disney when you feel like that. [Laughter] Some songs are hard to
write when you’re happy.

I Love the Just Roll Tape album—

Yeah, my briefcase was such a mess, I had to get those down on tape
before I forgot them. [Laughs]

Many of those songs, such as “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and “Wooden
Ships,” became famous with CSN. But did you write those before you
guys got together?
Yeah. I think I’d just come from Miami and David’s boat. “Wooden
Ships” was brand new. Of course, timelines back then. You know the old
saying, “If you remember the sixties, you probably weren’t there.”

Right. Though Graham Nash seems to remember a lot.

Not everything, though. [Laughs]

“Wooden Ships” is credited to you, Crosby, and Paul Kantner.

Yes. They were on the boat when I arrived. Crosby had a little bit of the
first part and Kantner had a little bit of the second part. And then it kept
drifting around. So I went down below deck and finished it off. Everyone
else was up watching the stars or whatever, and I polished it off. And then I
came back and said, “How do you like your song?” [Laughter] And you
could sort of hear that in that rendition.

Did you three discuss what it was about, or did you write it
instinctually?
Dude, there’s no telling what we discussed that evening. [Laughter] It
was one of those overwrought hippie things. I don’t know—it’s hard to say
now what we were talking about. The boat was humming, if you will.

It’s interesting that back at this time all your peers were writing songs
of the conventional length, and then you wrote “Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes,” this expansive and amazing suite, which expanded the song form
in a way nobody had considered. How did that happen?
It started out as little bits, and all of a sudden I realized that they fit
together, and one thing led to another, but nothing was finished. I actually
liked the way that I did it on Just Roll Tape, but I realized that with other
people involved it would be hard for them to pick up. Because only half of
it is half-time. Three-quarters of it is in the same tempo as the first part, and
then it changes. It’s a little more legato.

On this version you stop and change the tuning.

Maybe. Maybe. I’ll tell you the truth about that. I figured that if I stayed
hands-off I would have a better chance of getting it in pure form. So when I
listened to everything [on that tape] I only listened once and made notes and
just said that we’re keeping everything in the same order. Just put it out that
way. So I know there were noises in it, and I said, “No, leave that in,” and
there was talking.
I had a little chart that said, “The good, the bad, and the ugly, and
conclusions.” There were only three things that I knew would never see the
light of day. There was some babbling. Some people liked that, but it wasn’t
even musical babbling.

It’s cool to hear you tuning, in that everyone nowadays uses tuners to
tune, but you tuned very fast between tunings, and there’s a confidence
there.
[Laughs] That’s cool. If you notice, at Woodstock, in the film, at the
beginning when we first start. A warm, wet wind had just hit the guitars. So
there were a few seconds of tuning the guitar and then we walked out. But
if you notice on the film, we start “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” it was
horrifyingly out of tune. And luckily I was the only one at Woodstock who
was straight. There were too many people, and I didn’t want to relinquish
any control whatsoever. At least until after I played. [Laughs]

When you were putting “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” together, did you think
that a song shouldn’t be that long?
No, no, no. I’d been to school and had played lots of overtures and
things like that. I grew up on “Rhapsody in Blue” and things like that. So
this was just doing the same thing with words. I certainly never worried
about it. And it wasn’t that long anyway; it was only seven minutes. But
they still wouldn’t put it out as a single. And I said, “You guys are nuts,”
and then, sure enough, it wasn’t eighteen months until somebody put out
something just as long. And how long is “Stairway to Heaven”?
Part of the reason we had gone to Atlantic was because they were
adventurous. I mean, Ahmet [Ertegün] loved it. But he wouldn’t put it out.
So I said, “Do what you did with Ray Charles. Put out half of it.” I didn’t
care.

On Just Roll Tape you don’t have the ending of “Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes,” the “doo doo doo doo doo” part. Did that come later?
That was an afterthought that seemed fun. Basically what happened is
that we sang that whole album in people’s living rooms ad nauseum. So
things had time to develop. It was almost like road testing it. Which is what
I like to do before I make records now. Teach it to the band and play them
in the show and see how people react.

The vocal blend of CSN was miraculous—

That’s your word, miraculous.

Yes, it is. But when the three of you would sit down and sing, were
people blown away? What kind of reaction would you get?
I guess they were blown away. Crosby thought so. [Laughs]

You were at such a creative peak at the time of Just Roll Tape. What
happened to allow so many great songs to come then?
I don’t know. The Manassas album ended up being a double album
because I had so many songs. I don’t know if they were all so good. There
was a period there when I was writing lots and couldn’t keep up. But I
could never be like Neil [Young] and basically write an album and record it
in a week. You know, fuck him. There are people who can do that—

Not many.
No, not many. Who can do that? I take them as they come. And right
now I’m waiting. Or gestating. I don’t know which.

Some songwriters feel they are receivers, and songs come through them
from beyond. Others feel it’s a conscious process and comes from them.
How do you feel about it?
Both. [Laughs] When you’re compelled to write, as I am sometimes,
when you are writing social commentary, it comes through you. It’s
conscious and unconscious. Sometimes you feel I have to say something
about this. But there are a lot of them that are the result of a lot of good
craftsmanship.
A lot of them come from just keeping yourself open. I mean, where
could “Eleanor Rigby” have come from other than taking a walk and seeing
this little church. I mean, what a great story. A couple of my friends,
actually, when they have got to write some songs, they can write on
assignment a lot better than I can. They go for a walk. New York City is
better for that than LA.
But these songs, I didn’t write them all at one time. This was just the
first crack at a tape recorder I had. There were some other demos. Judy
[Collins] wanted me to play guitar, and then I took the studio after she was
finished. The last thing she said was, “Don’t stay all night, ’cause I need
you fresh tomorrow.” And I didn’t. I stayed just as long as it took to record
all those songs one time. Just Roll Tape was my way of keeping my word to
Judy.

She left?
Yeah, I couldn’t have done it with her there.

“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was written for her?

Yeah, of course. She called me up and said, “Gosh, it was like getting a
love letter after all these years.”

Yet it has mixed emotion in it. You say, “You make it hard.”
Yeah. But she does. She did. It was so long ago. And that’s another
charm of it. It was so long ago.

As you said, your songs are both consciously and unconsciously

created. There’s that expansive poetic feeling but also a conscious focus
on craft elements, such as the alliteration in “Helplessly Hoping.”
A lot of alliteration for a cautious cowboy. [Laughs] When I did the first
few lines like that, I thought, “How long can I keep this going?” [Laughs]
It’s basically a country song, and it sings like that. It really wants the
brushes on the drums. That’s what we intended it to be, and we still do it in
the same key. It was meant to be sung like that. It’s in G, though it starts on
an A minor.

It’s fascinating to hear, on Just Roll Tape, songs like “Helplessly

Hoping” and “Suite,” because it was never obvious, from hearing the
CSN versions, which part was the melody, and now we hear it.
Yeah. In some cases, being the one with the highest falsetto, I was the
one who ended up with the castrato part. And basically when I do it myself,
I’m happy to be back on the melody.

I always thought Graham had the highest parts—

Graham doesn’t have a falsetto. He just sings really high. When we sing
“Suite,” for example, I’m way on top.

Is that how you would always do the vocals for CSN—with you on top?
Well, we were very clever boys. And we changed it all the time. For no
reason at all. It’s kind of like “stump the band.”

Graham told me CSN was born when you and David were singing your
song “You Don’t Have to Cry,” and he heard it, listened a couple of
times, and then added the third part.
Right. It was at Cass Elliot’s house in the dining room. Some people
said it was at Joni’s house, but they’re wrong and I’m right.

You are so self-contained. You could have easily done a solo thing then
instead of getting into another band—
Yeah, but I’m a band guy. Back in the day, when I was in New York
City doing the solo coffeehouse circuit, I was miserable. Yeah, ’cause I
played drums in school. I’m a band guy, I really am. I love the camaraderie
and stuff. I must say, my more recent tours, we do “Helplessly Hoping”
with the band, and then I do an hour solo set, telling stories and singing, and
I love that. But I love when the band then comes back and I get to play rock
and roll. I’m in a really good spot now—I can do both.

You’re one of the few who is a great acoustic guitarist, but you’ve
always been a burning electric player too.
I want to keep flaming while I can.

And you’re playing better than ever lately—

The longer you do it, the better you get.

Is that true with songwriting as well?

No. Those first passionate ones are really special. And later in life you
might get deeper and more resonant and more crafted, but they’re not as
free as those first ones. That’s kind of logical, isn’t it? Sometimes you end
up out-crafting yourself. Which is why I admire Bob Dylan so much. He’s
managed not to do that.

What do you mean by out-crafting?

You get too cute. Losing the point. Getting contrived.

James Taylor told us he was able to write his first songs like “Fire and
Rain” because he felt no one was listening. Yet with these songs you
were already famous, having been in Buffalo Springfield.
True. But it took a while for my craft to develop. And you have to
remember, James is a really shy guy. I know that because I am too. Though
there’s this ham in me.

Your song “For What It’s Worth” is a classic and reflective of a chapter
in American history. How was that born?
I had a house in Topanga. Me and a friend of mine drove the 101 and
went over Laurel Canyon, figuring to go clubbing. We were young and
bored. We come down to the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset. On one
side of the street was that silly little bar, and on the other side was this
whole troop of cops, this battalion. Full Macedonian battle array. I thought,
“What the . . .?”
I had been working on this song about guys in Vietnam. And of course,
we did consider turning around. But we got out of the car to see what was
happening, and they said there was this funeral going on for [the club]
Pandora’s Box, and the cops all showed up, ’cause it was spilling out onto
the street. But the cops were really testy. They just went nuts.
So I said to my friend, “Get me back to my guitar.” I wrote it in about
fifteen minutes. Everyone heard the song and loved it, and Ahmet [Ertegün]
said, “You have to record it.” We had a record in the pipeline, and he said,
“Stop the presses,” and we had it out in seven days. Which is a trick that
people have been trying to replicate ever since.

Such inspired, powerful writing. “Paranoia strikes deep, into your life
it will creep”—
That’s an example of it just flowing.
You said you needed to get back to your guitar to write. Do you always
write at the guitar?
No. Sometimes I write them in my head. And I’m very shocked when it
comes out like I thought it would. Sometimes I write at the piano.
Sometimes at the typewriter, and then work on the music. Get a little hook
line. But those can turn into real torture. I recorded one of Dylan’s songs.
For phrasing sake, I changed a lot of words, mostly adjectives and
pronouns. Graham freaks out! He said [in British accent], “You changed
seventeen Bob Dylan words!” [Laughter] I got Bobby on the phone, and he
said, “Does it still mean the same?” I said, “Sure it does.” He said, “Well,
send it to me. I’m sure it will be fine. I never know how they go until I sing
them.” [Laughs] He said, “I wrote too many words, and getting them out is
tough.”

In CSN not only did you write amazing songs, but you also powerfully
guided the shape of others. Graham played me the original demo of
“Teach Your Children,” and it was kind of a lilting English folk ballad.
You created that great track—with Dallas Taylor on drums—and made
it groove.
That’s part of the fun of being in a band. Graham saved me from a
couple of disasters too. Mainly I have the whole line, but I was missing a
payoff. And we really wanted to cut it. And Graham is really great at
coming up with a missing line. And it was like, “Of course!” ’Cause I’d
been all around the park, trying to come up with something. And that’s part
of being in a band.

But when it would come to the groove of a song—

You don’t argue with me. I’m the groove guy.

Yeah, it seems like that. ’Cause your songs are so rhythmic—

I played drums first. And basically the first thing I did artistically, when
I was about three, I took tap dancing lessons. So rhythm is my thing.

You have the rep for being the guiding spirit in the studio of CSN, like
the Brian Wilson of the band. Accurate?
 Considering how many hits Graham Nash had, it was pretty cheeky of
me. But Graham was my biggest fan. He would egg me on.

To get the CSN vocal blend in the studio, would you all sing at the same
time?
Yes. And we’d all sing on one mic. Then we got lazy and were
impatient. I’m a little slower in learning parts that are odd. And in some of
those intricate ones I would be slower and Crosby would get frustrated, so
we ended up singing them one at a time. Which I thought was a big
mistake. But that was later on.
At first we always sang them gathered around a big mic. If you have a
beautiful Neumann 87 in front of you, it sounded so good. Back when I
started singing with ensemble singing groups, the mic would be at least
three feet away. And you’d stand back from it, and the mic would capture
the blend. And then when we started playing electric, everybody had to get
really close, so the sound engineer said we had to be real close to the mic.
Well, no, you need to put a wall of foam in front of the band. I still think at
least six inches away from the mic. My voice sounds too heavy if it’s miked
too close. Where you stand from the mic is everything. Miking is all. You
can learn what everything does, but what separates the men from the boys is
where you place the mic. With relationship from the band or the voice or
the strings. Often it would sound almost right and the engineer would say,
“Okay, Crosby, take one step backward,” or “Graham, take one giant step
backward.”

With a song like “Suite” did you do the entire song from start to end?
Yes.

Would it take many takes?

Yes.

On Just Roll Tape you have the song “Dreaming of Snakes,” which is
great.
I hardly remember it. It was probably after some nightmare. And I woke
up and made myself write that right away.
It’s great, but it seems unfinished.
Someone ought to finish it. And it would be great for strings. And it
moves at the tempo that a snake does.

I also like the song “Bumblebee.”

Yeah, it’s great, had a great groove. But it’s fast. It sounded like the
Chipmunks playing B. B. King. [Laughter]

Did you ever want to do more with that song?

A lot of those lines ended up in different songs.

Yeah, it’s the first mention of a “love gangster,” which became an entire
song.
Yeah. Poaching. Like cannibalizing a car for parts. I would do that song
a lot slower. A lot slower. I would do it like a Tex-Mex shuffle, like Stevie
Ray Vaughan.

Dylan said one of the saddest things about songwriting is trying to

reconnect with an idea you had before and didn’t finish.
He’s absolutely right about that. That happens to me when writing
prose. You start digressing and think, “Shit, I got to get back to that.”

“49 Bye-Byes” was another one which was a suite, with many sections
and tempo shifts. Did you also write that one in separate parts?
No, that one I planned that way, because it worked so well the first time.
[Laughter] There’s a version out there in which I play everything. It’s when
I realized I totally lost all my drum chops. [Laughs]

When we, as your fans, first heard the sound of CSN singing together, it
sounded so amazing. How did it sound to you?
Obviously it was the same for us. But it ceased to be so miraculous after
the first temper tantrum. [Laughter]

Were all three of you having those?

I could be temperamental back then. But I got over it. It was a deal I
made with my wife. I don’t like yelling. I heard enough of it from my
father.
Your songs have a folk-rock feel, but there’s so much soul in your
singing. “Carry On” is a good example of that—
Well, when I was a kid I would listen to the Wolfman Jack show, and I
got that. And also there was a black station that played all the soul groups.
All of what would have been called race records had it not been for Ahmet
Ertegün. I loved that stuff. Old blues. Me and my best friend, Mike, who is
still one of my best friends, we would think nothing of driving two hundred
miles to go to an old record store and sift through old 78s looking for blues
records on Arhoolie and Brunswick or whatever.

This album has a great blues, “Treetop Flyer,” in which you really jam
on the blues, but solo, like a great old bluesman. You play lead and
rhythm at the same time.
Yeah, that’s why they call me Captain. [Laughs] That’s one of the first
times that it was performed. And I’d just taken delivery of a dobro made of
brass, and that’s why it sounds like two guitars, ’cause I was just
fingerpicking it and it had so much resonance. I was fingerpicking and
using a bottle neck. And that is pure, that track. There’s no overdubbing on
it, no electrics. It’s an acoustic album.

I understood you brought Neil Young into CSN because you wanted
another guitarist with whom to spar.
I definitely wanted another musician. And first we wanted John
Sebastian. But he had his own plan. I was thinking a keyboard player. But
Ahmet brought it up, getting Neil. But it was odd, because he [Neil] had
already walked out on me once, in Buffalo Springfield. At a pretty critical
time. It turned out to be a pretty good match. There was always a bond
between us from the very beginning.

You are an accomplished and prolific songwriter. Was it tough to have

to share songwriting with the others and only have a few songs on an
album?
Sometimes. But that turned into solo careers. Neil quickly discovered
that’s where you get all the money. [Laughs] It got crowded. But that’s
okay. Life gives you the curves it does.
When you would write a song for the group, would you think of the
harmonies, or would they come up with them?
Both. Sometimes I would have it all planned, and they would pretty
much expect that. And David was really good at finding the really cool,
weird part.

Is he usually the middle part?

We really wanted you guys to be just as confused as you obviously are.
So I’m not telling. [Laughs]

Those parts cross and overlap, so it’s impossible to figure it out.

Exactly. One of the secrets of singing ensemble is imitating each other.

Would it take intense rehearsal to get the phrasing so perfect?

No, we were very lazy. But it was so much fun to hear ourselves that
they were easy.

What was it like in CSN or CSNY when someone would have a new
song?
The torturous time was when you would go, “Huh? Okay.” [Laughs]
And then you wouldn’t know exactly how to put it. “I don’t know what to
do on this one, so I’ll just be quiet for a while, and maybe something will
occur to me.” [Laughs] When Crosby got more and more into unusual
tunings, so that I couldn’t play along, I had to go through hell. A lot of
those chords wouldn’t have a root. The bottom note on the guitar was not
necessarily the root, so I had to go find them for him. And then he would
say, “That’s the wrong chord.” I’d think about it and play it again and say,
“No, it isn’t.” [Laughs] I had enough training so that I was usually right.
And then there were chords that escaped me for years. Then I’d finally
figure out one little thing. And I’d say, “Oh, I’ve been playing this wrong.
Like for ten years. [Laughs] I’m so sorry!”

Were the arrangements for all the songs usually something you did?
As time has gone by, everybody says no, but actually, yes. [Laughter]

Did you cut things live with drums and bass?

 Because of the way we wanted to do vocals, we had to do them
separately, which we got used to. But now I have learned how to sing the
lead vocal live while playing with the band, usually by having a long guitar
chord and getting in an iso booth.

Would you sing a scratch vocal back then when laying down the
rhythm track?
Yes.

“Love the One You’re With” is another classic you wrote, and it’s one
people respond to—
Actually I was sitting with Mac Davis. He wrote a whole bunch of
songs for Elvis. And there was a civil war back then between Elvis people
and Beatle people. And Elvis lost me at “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He lost
me when he took on Colonel Tom. Who wrapped him in a Confederate flag.
There’s a song Mac wrote for Elvis about “a little less conversation, a
little more action.” He and I have written the two most sexist songs alive,
between those two, if you take “Love the One You’re With” on the surface
level. But it has a lot of other meanings. It’s multilayered. But it can be
called a paean to promiscuity, if you will. A lot of people said, “Yeah, I got
laid to that song.” [Laughs] Which I used to consider my job. It was the
seventies, you know?

Was there somebody you were with when you wrote it?
Not really. It was basically what was going on with everybody at that
time. I was in London at the time, and everybody was changing partners.
There was a lot of that going around. Being on the road. It evolved.

Did you write “Change Partners” then too?

No. I wrote that earlier. That was about being in high school and the tea
cotillion parties then. Being a teenager in the late fifties, early sixties, that
was what life was like.

The song “4 + 20” is a mythical song. Did it come from the old nursery
rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds”?
A miracle of free association.
The line that always got me was “I embrace the many-colored beast / I
grow weary of the torment, can there be no peace?”
Hey, when you get that deep into depression you feel that.

Did that come out of deep depression?

Obviously. I mean, listen to the song. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

But many songwriters only write about deep depression after they’ve
come out of it, not when they’re in it.
That ended it. I wrote that song, and the minute I sang that last line I
knew the depression was over.

Do you have favorite keys to play in?

There are easy keys to play in as a guitar player. That’s why people use
capos. But capos are a trap. I hate them. If you want to play in B flat, I’ll
figure it out. But for songwriters who play with a band, it can get you into
trouble.

So you never use a capo to write a song?

No.

Do you feel each key has its own color or feeling?

Of course. It’s a sonic thing.

I know you use E minor a lot. You like that one?

Yeah. And I like B minor. I like B flat too. It’s a horn key.

“Carry On” is a joyful song.

We needed an opener for an album. A lot of songs would come that
way. We would need a song. And I would figure out a song to fill the hole.
And it would be a race between me and Graham to figure out a song to fit.
I’d say, “I know what we need. I’ll be back tomorrow.” And I’d go home
and get the majority of the song. “Carry On” was one of those. And putting
it with the song “Questions” was a studio afterthought.

Was there always a competition among you, like as to whose song

would be the opener?
 A friendly competition. At least in the first years. It was like puppies.
Like little kittens.

And then by Four-Way Street there was a sense that you were each
going your own way—
Yeah. That turned into a difficult time. As he will readily admit, some of
that was Neil’s doing, because the man has control issues. [Laughs] As he
will freely admit.

Did you want to leave the group at that time?

Yeah. I was overburdened with songs. And rather than jamming the
songs, I wanted to get back to more organized stuff. That whole San
Francisco Grateful Dead, just play whatever you want, it will all be great—
sorry, it was lost on me.

When you were with the group did you envision that it would go on for
a long time, or did you always intend there just to be a few albums?
We have said this at least a million times in interviews: the whole
reason for using our names was so we could do that. Like Merrill Lynch.
We found a way to sound mellifluous. Rather than some animal name or the
Electric Prunes. Or some ridiculous thing that would come out of Crosby’s
imagination.

Who devised the order of the names?

It just sounded best that way. And I said to David, considering your
personality, how could you not be first? [Laughs] But Neil and I,
unfortunately it was taken, during the 2000 rehearsal we came up with the
name SYNC. [Laughs] Stills, Young, Nash, and Crosby. [Laughs]

You said you and Graham would go home and compete as to who got
the opening song. Was David outside of that equation?
No, he just wasn’t that fast, and he’d be the first one to admit it. He said,
“I can’t do that.”

Were there songs that got rejected?

Yeah. We’d say, “That’s not ready yet.” It was friendly.
Do you recall writing “Dark Star”?
Yeah. Actually, the version that got recorded—and I think it was a drug-
induced mistake—we didn’t remember how to stay in the same key, and we
ended up with a key change. The way I do it now has no key change. I
remember people saying, “What are the changes?” and I came up with
them, and they were wrong. The way it is on the live album is how it should
be.

Did drugs ever help you write songs, or did they get in the way?
Getting in the way was not an option. People would come in and finish
off lines. That’s part of being in a band. But there were manners involved.
People might have thought that I got in the way, but that was only later.
Way later. In the eighties. I hated the eighties. Bad drugs, bad music, bad
everything.

With you guys, Dylan, and The Beatles, music changed so much. And it
never really got better than that. Did you feel that, that it would change
more?
I thought more new than this. There’s a throwback every now and then
to something great. But the rap has had a terrible influence. They squash too
many syllables into every sentence. But it’s not like Dylan. It’s like running
off at the mouth. Like recording your coke rap. [Laughs] I can’t stand it.
There are some profound things in hip-hop, but for the most part I don’t get
it. Are you a poet or a musician? I just don’t want to be yelled at.

Are you surprised that the music you made and that was made by your
peers has as much meaning today as it does?
Well, when I was a kid, the music of World War II was still just as
meaningful. I think our music will last about the same amount of time.
There’s always a resurgence of the old stuff. Look at Tony Bennett. He
hasn’t changed his style. It’s adorable. It’s wonderful. It’s everything it’s
supposed to be. It’s good to refer back to that kind of stuff, even before us
and The Beatles and the Stones.
I love the Rolling Stones just as much as The Beatles. Keith still
inspires the fuck out of me. And watching Mick Jagger do forty-yard wind-
sprints at the age of sixty-five is devastatingly annoying.
With you guys, it wasn’t only the music; it was the image. I know
Henry Diltz well, and his photos of you just showed what seemed to me
like the coolest guys alive, like on the first CSN album.
Well, that whole concept was born in England, because of the light in
England. The Beatles looked like really interesting cats in all those photos,
but when you actually got next to them, they were pretty homely looking.
Except for Paul. But the light was really gray—for that whole decade—
from the mid-fifties on. Somebody pointed out to me, I think it was Billy J.
Kramer—that it rained in England from 1957 to 1959. Virtually 365 days a
year. So everybody was inside all the time. And that’s when everybody got
good because they were always inside listening to music and playing music.
Because they weren’t adept at playing football or any sport, and even
cricket was very hard in the mud. But they also created that wonderful
covered light, which was great for black and white photos. So you guys did
need a visual aid? [Laughs]

Well, those photos were great. Henry said that first CSN cover was
taken at an old house on Palm in West Hollywood.
Yeah. It was torn down the next day.

“I Give, You Give Blind.” Where did that one come from?
I don’t remember. It came quickly. It needed strings. And it needed
slowing down. It was recorded too fast. Too quickly for what it was. It
needed to be just a little bit slower. It was a little rushed. And if it had real
strings doing that line, it would have been better.

Were you a kid when you wrote your first song?

I was nineteen, I think. I was already out of the house. Already been in
and out of college.

A lot of your friends felt that they would stop playing music at thirty-
five or so.
Not me. I always knew I’d keep doing it. Everything else seemed like a
crushing bore. Sportswriter, maybe.

Are you optimistic about your future, where you’re going musically?
 No one in their sixties is optimistic about their future. [Laughs] Except
politicians. You remember back in the day when nothing hurt and you had a
thirty-inch waist.

OceanofPDF.com
Paul Simon
 Love and Hard Times
Beverly Hills, California 2011

“It’s all I do,” he said more than once in regard to writing songs and making
records. Which, to students of songwriting, is tantamount to Picasso saying,
“All I do is paint.” Yeah, true, but those paintings, Pablo, you know, they’re
pretty good.
Of course, Picasso did more than paint—he also sculpted and wrote
poetry and danced and loved. And Paul Simon, who, weeks away from his
seventieth birthday and seeming more than ever like the Picasso of popular
song, does do more than write songs, of course. He also turns those songs
into records, an art and science perhaps more tricky and elusive even than
songwriting itself—and one that, he says in the following, he prefers to
writing songs.
He’s also, of course, one of the planet’s most beloved and familiar
vocalists; the sound of his singing, like that of his friends James Taylor and
Paul McCartney, is one of the most consistently compelling ingredients of
popular music through the past several decades. Also, like both McCartney
and Taylor, he’s a seriously gifted musician, a guitarist who has consistently
found new ways to express himself on this instrument he’s been playing
since he was a kid.
“Nothing I do on guitar is very difficult,” he said. Which might be
technically true, but what he does is ingenious, using the range and tuning
of the guitar to find chords and harmonic passages that, though simple for
him to execute, sound anything but simple. He’s done it since the start—the
cascading introduction to “Scarborough Fair” is a good example.
To show an example, he took out his acoustic Martin and played me the
haunting chord that starts “Questions for the Angels” (B minor-add 2/D). It
sang like an extended jazz chord but with the guitaristic sweetness of open
strings resounding. He also showed off a nifty transition from an Eb/Bb to
an Em7/B that he said he’d used several times and that sounds very Simon:
both simple and complex at once—and elegant.
It’s not the first time over the years that, in place of words, he’s shown
me passages on guitar that he discovered and that served as the foundations
of certain songs. (And being a Simon devotee, admittedly, I always have
practiced and learned them. To me, it’s like being given baseball tips from
DiMaggio.) It’s always been revelatory to recognize that something both
musical and momentous—a Paul Simon song—is built on humble origins,
these inspired guitar progressions he shows off with a gentle, parental pride.
After his work on Graceland he did the same thing, happily showing the
partial chords in different registers he learned from African musicians and
that—although simple to play—aren’t in the usual American bag of tricks.
He’s a guy who collects this stuff and keeps it all close at hand, like a
painter with many brushes.
“Songwriting is like you’re wandering down a path,” he said, sitting in
the soft morning sunlight that sings of Southern California, “and you don’t
know what the destination is. Somewhere toward the end you can sort of
see what the destination is and you can understand what the journey is
about.” It’s that mystery that distinguishes songwriting from more
conventional human pursuits, the fact that, unlike most professions, in
songwriting there’s no repeatable method of accomplishment. Even
someone as dedicated, brilliant, and studied as Simon still essentially
reaches into the darkness, uncertain of what will be received. It’s about a
conscious reach into the unconscious, a knowing venture into the unknown,
the destination forever unknown until you find yourself there. It takes a
certain kind of creative bravado—chutzpah, if you will—to even want to go
there.
Even Herbie Hancock, who surely knows the piano keyboard better than
almost all other humans, told me that there’s always new musical ground to
be discovered right there on the same keys he’s been playing forever. “It’s
endless,” he said.
When I told Paul this, he laughed and said it’s endless for him as well.
“If it’s endless for Herbie,” he said, “you can be sure it’s endless for me
too.”
Unless, of course, you’re content repeating yourself. But Paul Simon,
more dramatically than most of his peers, has gone to great lengths,
literally, not to repeat himself. He’s gone around the globe—to Jamaica for
the track that became the first reggae-tinged hit ever in America, “Mother
and Child Reunion,” to New Orleans for “Loves Me Like a Rock,” to
Africa for the tracks that became the landmark Graceland, to Brazil for The
Rhythm of the Saints.
This interview was set up to coincide with the release of his album So
Beautiful or So What, for which, instead of traveling to distant lands, he
journeyed into the past. Lovingly looped on several tracks are great
recordings from the dawn of recorded music. “Love Is Eternal Sacred
Light” boasts a great locomotive-charged harmonica exhortation by none
other than Sonny Terry, sampled from his 1938 “Train Whistle Blues,”
while “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” is woven tenderly around
samples of a 1941 sermon delivered with much fire and brimstone by the
Reverend J. M. Gates and his congregation. Rather than ignore the potential
of digital innovations such as loops and samples, Simon embraces them: not
only is the potential for discovering new music endless, so is the sonic
potential of any record, now more than ever.
Graceland was the start of a radical new approach to writing songs for
Simon, which was creating the record first—the musical track—and then
writing the song to fit the track. It led to some of the most exultant and
dimensional music of his career. And so he continued using this method for
the next many albums, concocting compelling music tracks, editing them
into a song form, and then writing words and melodies to fit.
But for his latest album, evidently ripe to walk a fresh musical avenue,
he returned after more than a decade away to the simple dynamic of
acoustic guitar and voice. Asked how he felt doing it, he said, “Awkward at
first.”
The first song he created this way was “Amulet,” which he then felt was
too complex for lyrics, and so he kept it as an instrumental on the record.
But the next one that came was also a composition of much complexity but
with a melody that led him to one of his most poignant lyrics, “Love and
Hard Times.” In a narrative that crosscuts remarkably from a funny earthly
visitation from God and Jesus to a remarkably intimate glimpse of a
marriage, in language both literary and domestic, with the home so quiet
that you hear it breathing in “clicks and clacks,” comes the ultimate
conclusion, the one we reach in that still middle of the night, gratitude for
real love.
Today he’s staying at the grand pink lady of Beverly Hills, the Beverly
Hills Hotel, where movie stars have stayed and played for many decades.
It’s the day after three sold-out concerts in Hollywood. Rather than play
large arenas, as he has often done in Los Angeles, he’s playing some old,
intimate theaters, like the Henry Fonda Theatre. His concerts, weaving
together as they do so many decades of beloved songs, are inspirational and
euphoric.
A friend worried aloud that Donald Trump is making waves, and Paul
dismissed it like a bad joke. “Nobody’s listening,” he said. He’s more
interested in what Ben Witherington, a seminary professor at Asbury
Theological Seminary, wrote about him in Christian Today: although the
previous album was entitled Surprise, this one is the surprise, as its message
throughout is spiritual. “I think Paul is being made God’s music even now,”
wrote Witherington. “He just isn’t fully aware of it.”
Asked if he felt this was accurate, true to his nature, Simon wasn’t sure.
“Generally I feel it’s just a lot of good luck. Or the harder you work, the
luckier you get. But I look on it as luck.”
He’s seems happy, relaxed, and very much in love with his wife of
many years, Edie Brickell, and their kids. It’s a sense of spiritual harmony
that permeates all of So Beautiful or So What, the only album he created in
his own home. This native New Yorker, long one of Manhattan’s most
famous faces, has actually left New York—but not too far—and moved
with his family to rural Connecticut, and it’s there, in a little house next to
his big one, he created a studio to record this album.
It’s also a warmly familial lifestyle change and speaks to the depth of
his love for his wife and kids. As opposed to the isolated soul “stranded in a
limousine” whose life slip-slides away as depicted in earlier songs, he’s
happily working on lyrics in his head while picking up the kids from school
or coaching Little League. “You know that motion you make with your
arms to call the runner on third to run home?” he said. “I do that a lot now,
even when I’m not coaching.”

Last time we spoke you told me you were more interested in what you
discover than what you invent. Is that still the case?
Paul Simon: Yeah. It’s like you’re wandering down a path or a road,
and you don’t know what the destination is. Somewhere toward the end you
can sort of see what the destination is and you can understand what the
journey is about. At which point, if I want, I can go alter some of the things
that occurred to set it up. But usually I don’t. It usually just goes along as a
story that I’m telling, and I’m a listener, and at a certain point I say, “Oh!
That’s what it’s about.”

You said you can intuit meaning when lines start emerging. Do you give
a lot of thought to the meaning while writing?
No, I’m not giving a lot of thought to it. The only thought that I give to
it is “Is that something that I really believe?” It doesn’t have to be insightful
or anything. It just has to be not a lie. I can’t say, “I’m setting out to write a
really deep, philosophical song.” I would never say that. I have no idea.
And most of the time, most of the songs have jokes in them or almost
little sarcastic things or purposely kitsch or something. So that’s going
along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of
stuff and laughing at stuff that’s serious. And sometimes it’s a good idea to
put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s all right
just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them.

“Love and Hard Times” is so rich melodically, and the tune is, as you
said, quite complex. But I find that complexity gives it more strength
and richness.
Well, thank you. You know, it’s more literary as an idea than I usually
write. Meaning that it started a theme, it wandered away from the theme,
and then came back at the end to refer to the theme again, but from a
different angle and in a different way, which made for a complete cycle
lyrically—that was interesting. Because it started with God and God leaving
and then it ended with “Thank God I found you.” That was really the payoff
to the whole thing. Because He left.

We generally think of songs as confessional, about the songwriter, or a

story song. Yet this is both: it starts with the story of God and his only
son visiting Earth, and then makes the transition to “I loved her the
first time I saw her,” which is very much—
Edie.

Yeah. That’s different. We don’t get that in songs much. It’s like a
cinematic shift from one scene to another.
Yeah, that’s right. You could say that. That it shifts. Because once the
first two verses were over and I’d finished that part of the story, I realized
that the rest of the song was going to be a straight-ahead love song. There
was enough cynicism in the first two verses, and now I didn’t really need to
go any further, and now the rest had to be pure love song. So in a sense it is
cinematic in that it now changes to another story. As if you did a flash
ahead in time or something. Or a flashback. But it’s two different places.
But the thing about it that’s interesting is that they do connect up. At the
end. So that’s why I mean it’s more of a literary device than a song device.

In the past we’ve spoken about how you can combine enriched, poetic
language in lyrics with colloquial language. In this song you do that
musically as well. Lines like “Well, we’d better get going” sound
melodically conversational, whereas “there are galaxies yet to be born”
is enriched and poetic.
That’s right. And also it sort of changes key and shifts into a Jimmy
Reed shuffle for a couple of bars—when I sing “can’t describe it any other
way,” it slips into a blues, a shuffle.
Well, that’s one of the advantages of writing a song with no drums, just
guitar. You can change on a dime.

That’s the only song on the album we heard prior to the album release
because you performed it at a bookstore in New York when you were
writing it. And it’s on YouTube.
 Right. I started to do it live. After I finished it. To see what the reaction
would be to it and whether people would understand what I’m talking
about.

It was amazing to me, having gotten to know that live version well, that
on the album version you changed the melody and harmony at the end
of one of the bridges. That melody is so complex, and yet you were still
working on it. And your change was better.
Did I? I don’t know what that might have been—maybe the first quarter
bridge where it went from a major chord with a seventh to a minor chord
with a seventh. I changed that. I don’t know what it was really.
But yeah, as long as the process is going along, the opportunity for
change is there. At a certain point you close it down, and you’re finished.
And you try to finish the record. Unless there’s something that’s really
irritating about it. In which case I’ll go back.
When I originally recorded “Love and Hard Times” it was just with the
guitar and the voice. And then I did the string session with Gil Goldstein.
And when it was finished I said, “Gee, I had hoped this was going to be
more.” And that’s when I decided I was going to take Philip Glass’s advice
and put a piano on it. He also said it was a piano song. And I said, “Oh,
well, I just worked out this guitar part, and I hate to give it up.” And he
said, “Well, you can do both, you know. You can have both on it.” And
that’s when Mick Rossi came in and did the overdub. And that’s when we
met, and now he’s in the band, which I’m thrilled about.

He’s a wonderful player. That song seems very much like a guitar-first
song—
It is. It’s the second song I wrote for the album; “Amulet” was the first.

“Amulet” is a beautiful guitar instrumental. Had you considered

writing words for it?
No. I was thinking of it as a song, and then it was too complicated for
me to figure out how to write a song over it. So I just left it. I sort of
abandoned it, actually. Then Luciana Souza, who is a really wonderful jazz
singer from Brazil, she heard it a couple years ago at BAM when they did a
month of my music and she was singing some of the songs. I played that for
her, and she said, “I’d like to record that.” And I said, “It’s not even a song.
It doesn’t have words.” She said, “I like songs without words.”

Did that song emerge from just experimenting on the guitar?

Yeah. All of the ballads were the first things I wrote. They were all just
sitting with the guitar and play.

Which hasn’t been your process for a long time.

No. That’s why I decided to do it.

How did it feel to go back to that?

A little bit awkward at first. And then, you know, I was a little bit
apprehensive about whether I could do it. “Amulet,” which was my first
attempt, was much too complicated. So I said I’ll have to think more like a
song. Not so much like whatever my fingers do. I have to try to put it into a
structure that can be made into a song. Although “Love and Hard Times” is
a pretty complex structure for a song. It has different parts and changes key
several times. But nevertheless, it is a symmetrical structure. And then I
realized, well, of course I can do this. And it’s just a question of patience.
So those were the first three songs I wrote, and the fourth one that I
wrote was “Rewrite.”

You wrote that one on guitar?

I just tapped the guitar and made a loop. Which is still in there. It
sounds kind of like a drum, but it’s just me tapping at the wood of the
guitar. And then I made up that guitar thing. [Sings fast line]
I played with a kora player at this show at BAM. And I liked the idea of
the kora and the guitar. So I just added a kora. And that’s really all there
was essentially, other than the percussion sounds. And there are a lot of nice
colors in there.
For the percussion I would send the tracks off to Paris to Steve Shehan,
who worked with me on You’re the One. But I would never send the vocal. I
just would say, “Here, put anything and everything that you want on this.” I
didn’t want him to hear the vocal. I didn’t want him to accompany me. I
wanted to hear things that you didn’t expect. And then I’d take out all the
things I didn’t like and keep what I wanted.
Why did you call it “Amulet”?
[Laughs] I don’t know. Didn’t have any title. I don’t know. I might have
been reading something and saw the word and said, “Oh, there’s a good
title.”

With “Amulet” you said you wrote all the music before you even
considered words. And then decided it wouldn’t have any. In the past
you’ve come up with words and music at the same time. How was
“Love and Hard Times” born?
I think I had the opening line, “God and His only son,” which I thought,
“That’s got to be a good opening line for me. What am I gonna do with
that?” It’s pretty far away from home for me. But otherwise, I didn’t have
the story or anything.
That part of the process, I really can’t explain it. I don’t really know
why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden an idea comes to me, and then
I understand now, because it’s all I’ve ever done, really. So from experience
I can now intuit what something’s going to mean when an interesting line
pops up. Or at least I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I
can try a couple of different choices and see which one feels right and then
continue the song to see where it goes.

You once said that the mind, while writing songs, will always pick up on
what’s true, even if it’s not the truth you want to face at that time.
Besides the humor, one of the constants in these songs is God and
spirituality. Why do you think that’s coming out now?
Well, I don’t know. But there was just some big piece in [the Christian
Times], and the writer [Ben Witherington] said, “Paul is writing God’s
music. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing now. I don’t think he’s aware
that he’s a vessel for this.”
So I found that very intriguing because I would never say, “Yeah, I’m
doing this—”

Is it accurate?
You know, I really don’t know. I really don’t know what exactly all the
songs mean. Sometimes other people have meanings, and when I hear them
I think, “That’s really a better meaning than I thought, and perfectly valid,
given the words that exist.”
So part of what makes a song really good is that people take in different
meanings, and they apply them, and they might be more powerful than the
ones I’m thinking.

You’ve always done that.

I think it’s just a natural thing. I’m not being purposely vague, but that
seems to be true. Not just of me, but of a lot of songs, where they turn out to
mean something really powerful that wasn’t meant to be. Like “Born in the
U.S.A.” It’s a powerful song, but it’s not what Bruce [Springsteen] was
writing about.

“Mother and Child Reunion” is that.

Yeah, “Mother and Child Reunion” is ambiguous enough that you could
think a lot of different things with that.

And you intentionally leave mysteries in your songs, such as “what the
mama saw” [in “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”], so that
enables us to bring our own thoughts to it. When I mention that line to
friends, everyone has their own idea what the mama saw. Some think it
was definitely that she saw them smoking pot.
Right. Yeah.

And you’ve always had a lot of questions in songs, but these songs seem
to have more questions than ever.
You think?

Yeah. “Questions for the Angels,” for example, is about questions.

Questions for God, or for angels.
Well, really, it seems to be that. But the last question is almost a
rhetorical question, really. The last question is the question: If there were no
human beings on the planet, would any other living creature really care?
Would the planet be suffering in any way? I mean, that’s really like a
rhetorical question, because, I mean, obviously the answer is no, not at all.

But you don’t say that in the song. To me that’s not obvious.
 Well, do you think a zebra would really have any suffering if there were
no human beings left?

Probably not—
Definitely not. What did we ever do for zebras?

[Laughs] You’re right, except wipe out their habitat—

Exactly.

But when I hear that, I think more about the character asking the
question, and the choice of words, the zebra and zebra’s tears.
Well, the zebras, I think, were in my mind because the whole family
took a trip to East Africa a couple of years ago and saw the great migration
of animals that takes place every August. And there’s thousands and
thousands of wildebeest and zebras crossing the river from Kenya into
Tanzania. So it was a really powerful memory. I think that’s where the
zebras come from. There’s a lot of zebras there. There’s more wildebeests
than zebras, but a lot of zebras.

Do you recall where the opening lines came from?

Well, that’s one of those first lines that just popped into my head—“A
pilgrim on a pilgrimage / Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.” I have no
idea why that came to me or what I was thinking about or anything.
Nothing, as far as I remember.
But if a song begins with somebody setting out on a journey, that’s a
perfect metaphor for what the song is trying to do anyway. So that’s fine.
I’ve written quite a few traveling songs. People are going from one place to
another.
So that’s what that one was, and the questions that he asks, they sort of
get deeper as he goes along: Who am I? Where will I sleep? Things like
that. And then they get a little bit more deeper in the next one: If you make
a bad choice in love, do you have to pay for it, or can you not pay for it?
And if you get called to a certain destiny, do you have to choose it, or can
you avoid it? Those are bigger questions, but they’re all adding up to the
last question, which is, what defense does the human race have for its
behavior?
Musically, it’s really nice. I love the shift in the chorus to that chord on
“questions.” And the shift into the three-quarter time bridge is nice.
Yeah, that’s the guitar. Where your hands go on the guitar. It’s, let’s see
what I have. B minor. I’m in B minor and then I go to a G and a C. Yeah, B
minor, so it’s like D, and then I go to C minor, so it’s sort of like the key of
E flat. But that’s basically what’s happening. And then that bridge in three-
quarter time goes to B major.

When you say “your hands on the guitar,” does that mean you are
actively trying to find music on the guitar you don’t know?
I’ll show you. [Gets guitar out]

I asked Herbie Hancock if, when he’s playing, if there are still places on
the piano he’s never gone, and he said, “Yes, it’s endless.” You feel that
as well?
Of course, it’s endless, yeah. If it’s endless for Herbie, you can be sure
it’s endless for me. [Laughter]
It is endless, of course. [Begins to play]
So I’m playing this. [Plays] It’s a Bm with a D in the bass. This is
making it a Bm9. [Plays more chords] See what I mean? With me on these
guitar things, they’re always really pretty simple. Because I’m really a
pretty simple player.

Yet it doesn’t sound simple.

No, it doesn’t sound simple. It’s nice voice-leading.

Does that come just from experimenting?

Yeah, just sitting there. [Plays more] So there I am, that’s in D. Then I
go over here to B minor, C minor, G, E flat, B flat, B—I use this in a couple
songs. This is in “Love and Hard Times.” And I’m back here, but when I go
to the bridge I have the minor third in the bass and move it—

Now it’s B major.

Right. It’s not that hard to play, really. But the mind has to say you
should go somewhere now. You should go to B major. But sometimes I go
into a place and it’s no good, and I say, “No, that’s not it.”
 I use this chord a lot. [Sings with it] I use that as a way of navigating
between C and A flat and B flat. It’s very guitaristic. And useful. If you’re
in that key.
I compensate for what I can’t do on guitar by finding interesting things
that I can do. But they’re not hard to play. I usually don’t play it when I’m
onstage. I usually give the guitar parts to Mark [Stewart] or Vincent
[Nguini]. Because there’s too much for me to sing about to play some
counter-line and singing. I can do it, but I won’t play it accurately all the
time.

Yet you did “Wartime Prayers” solo, which is quite complex on the
guitar.
Yeah, that was complex. And I did “Love and Hard Times,” which is
complex. And I still do that. But for the most part I give the parts over to
Mark or Vincent, and then I play something really simple, or nothing. But
when I’m making them up, they’re fun, and I can just keep playing them
until I get a good take, and then that’s the take that sits there.

With “Questions for the Angels,” the bridge about seeing Jay Z is nice,
not only that it’s an unusually modern reference for you but that it
sings so beautifully: Jay Z is a lovely name, and singability matters.
Yeah, that’s very important. But as it happens, that’s a true image. I was
doing this month at the Brooklyn Academy a couple of years ago, and every
time I would come over the Brooklyn Bridge, I would see this big billboard
of Jay Z. So it’s real. It was a real image.

So Beautiful or So What is such an inspired album. It’s clear that you

are aiming as high as ever—and getting there—whereas it seems many
songwriters peaked long ago—
Well, I don’t know. Can’t really address that. Although I must say
Leonard Cohen’s doing pretty well at seventy. And Randy Newman’s last
album—Harps and Angels? Fabulous. Really great work. So he’s definitely,
definitely at the peak of his powers.
I don’t know on the others. The creative impulse is varied. Paul
McCartney’s writing a ballet. Neil Young is very involved in film. Bob
[Dylan] paints. He makes these incredible gates, iron gates. Really
beautiful, where he welds things together. So they’re very creative.
You know, there’s not too many songwriters that I’ve actually had a
really sort of forthright conversation about songwriting with. Not too much.
Yeah, I have spoken with other songwriters, but I haven’t spoken to my
generation of guys. I never had a conversation with Bob [Dylan], barely had
a conversation with Paul [McCartney] about it. We had some conversations
about composition.

I know Bob is very interested in you. A friend of mine who dated him
said he knew “Boy in the Bubble” perfectly. He could sing and play it.
Well, I don’t get to talk to him much. But when we did tour together, we
chatted and chatted about lots of things, but we never talked about that.

I saw your tour with him when you played the Hollywood Bowl. It was
really cool to see you two together, but so different from what you
normally do, to sing with him. How was that for you—to sing with
him?
Fun. [Laughs] And funny.

Funny?
Yeah. He doesn’t sing the same thing twice, you know? So if my job is
to sing harmony, I don’t know where he’s going to be.

A challenge others have had. Like Joan Baez.

Yeah. But I think it’s just sort of fun that the both of us were standing up
there singing together.

Do you think that the changes in the industry have discouraged some
great artists from doing new work?
Maybe. This is just pure speculation, so I don’t know. But because the
record business changed so much and kind of imploded and evaporated, it
might be that there’s not so much of incentive to go and make a record.
Even the record companies don’t seem incentivized. They all seem afraid.
Well, not this company [Concord] that I’m with. I’m very happy to be with
them.
They’re doing a good job.
They are, yeah, and they were very enthusiastic.
But in an environment that doesn’t seem to value the album form as
much as it does the single download, that might have some effect. But it’s
pure speculation. Because none of those people that we’re talking about,
they’ve never said anything to me, so I don’t know how they feel.
But as far as I’m concerned, I feel like it doesn’t really matter what
happens with the record business because I’m just following the path that I
set out on in the sixties. And I’m just curious to see where it leads. And I
don’t expect it, really, to lead into big commercial success. But I am very
curious to see where it will take me.
And I’m not particularly creative in any other field. [Laughs] You know,
I can’t paint or make gates or make ballets or films or any of that.

But you are very talented not only in the writing but in the record
making. More so than most songwriters.
I like the record making more than I like any other part of the process.

You recorded this new album in your own home studio in Connecticut?
Yes. I did one track, “Christmas Day,” in a studio. Because my place is
a little small. It’s a tiny little house that I use for a studio, and I didn’t think
I could fit drums in. But I can. I can just about fit drums in. So then I started
to record drums in there too.

That’s a very different process, being in your own place—

It’s very comfortable. Very comfortable. And [producer] Phil Ramone
lives fifteen minutes away. So it’s easy for him too. We don’t have to drive
into the city for an hour and then park and then at the end of the day be
exhausted and then drive back home on the Merritt Parkway when you’re
tired. It’s very comfortable to do that.
Also, I have so many choices of instruments there. I have all my guitars
there. So if I decide that I want to choose a particular guitar that I wouldn’t
normally carry to a studio with me, for example, if I say, “Oh, let’s try a
Dobro on this sound, or let’s try a requinto, or maybe I should try that
Country Gentleman.” I have, whatever it is, twenty, thirty guitars that are
there. So I have a pretty big palette to choose from in terms of guitar.
 Also, I’ve started to collect a lot of percussion sounds. Especially bells.
There are a lot of bells on this album. Overtones of bells used in different
ways to create echo sounds.

That kind of thing, using bell overtones for echo, reflects the level of
comfort you feel there—
Well, I am comfortable. With all this time available to me and no
particular pressure—like I don’t have just two days in a studio or something
—I have a lot more time for trial and error. And the trial-and-error aspects
of this record were significant. Because a lot of things didn’t work, so
they’re not in there.

Really?
Yeah, I mean I’m playing different bell sounds or overdub sounds. Or,
the example before, let’s try a Dobro. You take it out and spend an hour
figuring out the part and playing it, and then you say, “You know? It’s not
that great, actually. So let’s go back to the Strat or something like that.”
There’s a lot of trial and error.

I was impressed with how much electric guitar—lead lines—you

played, that I don’t normally associate with you.
I can play leads. But I have to do it a bunch of times. [Laughs]

That’s how George Harrison did it. He’d work out his parts.
Yeah. They sound like that, kind of composed lines. But, you know,
that’s fun for me. To make up all the different parts.

Would you work in the studio all around the clock—

No, no. No. We’d work from eleven to six. Something like that. Eleven
thirty to six. Or five. Or maybe six thirty. Depending upon whether I had to
go pick up the kids at school or if Edie was going to. It was kind of loose,
but those are roughly the hours. That’s about it for intense concentration for
me.

Given your full vision and love of recording, I wonder what Phil’s job
is. Does he come up with ideas, or is he there to get your ideas down?
 He does have some ideas, but he’s more a facilitator for what I want.
And more than that, he’s somebody whose opinion I trust. So I don’t have
to be an editor of my work constantly. I can throw out ideas, and if he says,
“That one’s the best,” I don’t have to say, “Well, can you play them all back
so I can check and listen?” Same with vocals. I do my vocal tracks. And I’ll
do a lot of passes on a vocal.

Then do we hear the whole vocal, or are you punching in lines?

Because your vocals always sound very natural.
Yeah, they are natural. This is my typical thing: I’ll do four takes,
combine them into one, do another four takes, combine that into one, and
take the two combined takes and make that into a master, and whatever I
don’t like after that I’ll usually just go specifically for what I didn’t get. And
I could come back two weeks later and say I don’t really like this vocal; I’m
gonna do it again. And end up keeping one line from an earlier one.
It’s the same thing. I’ll just stay with it till I like it. Or I could get it in a
take or two. It’s the same principle, really. The ear goes to the irritant. And
if you don’t like it, eventually it has to go away. And if you like it and you
capture something, then you keep it.

That’s interesting. “The ear goes to the irritant.” That applies also to
your lyrics in that the language is also so beautifully smooth and
polished. There are no irritants. And I’ve found that since your first
songs.
Well, thank you. I don’t have a clear picture in my mind of how that
works. I have a very clear picture about how I do the music. The words
come. [Pause] Usually it’s a long time before they come. And then when
they start to come, it doesn’t take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long
time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
Sometimes I’ll be stuck on a verse or some aspect of a song. Could be
for a long time.

Really?
Yeah. “Love and Hard Times” took a long time.
On the album liner notes you thank Philip Glass for helping you get out
of “harmonic tangles” you would somehow “miscreate.” Was that
about “Love and Hard Times”?
It could have been about “Love and Hard Times.” Sometimes I’ll just
ask him about a modulation and how to think about that, what notes I might
want to have to solve the problem of it. Eventually I’d figure it out. But
with Philip, he’s like Google. [Laughter] You ask Philip, you pretty much
get a quick answer. Unless he decides it would be better for me to just work
it out. In which case he says, “Hmmm, I don’t know.” He knows. [Laughs]

And you use his answers when he has them?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, often his suggestions are absolutely appropriate.

Is “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” a track-first song—

Track first, yeah. Well, the guitars and all that first. Then I said, “Let’s
put that sermon on and see if that sermon works.” I didn’t have the idea of
using that sermon in anything. Till I made that track.

I assumed it was the other way around, that you made the track to fit
that sermon.
I did hear the sermon before making the track, but I didn’t have
anything but a liking for that sermon.

Seems you even chose the key, A major, to match his voice. It seems
perfect there—
Yeah, it does. Yeah. There was a lot of good luck on this album.

Do you think it’s just luck?

Yeah, that was luck. That his voice fits perfectly and seems to be right
in the right key and the right tempo.

I think many, including the Christian writer who wrote that you’re
doing God’s work, would ascribe it to more than luck, to God or
Providence—
You could, you know. Or the harder you work, the luckier you get. But I
look at it as luck.
You took the sermon and chopped it up to fit it in rhythmically?
Yep. It sort of laid right in. The tricky part there was to write a song that
went around the sermon.

It’s something you haven’t done in your records—using a sample of a

spoken voice—since “7 O’Clock News / Silent Night” in 1964.
Oh, that’s right, yeah. “7 O’Clock News / Silent Night” wasn’t even a
sample. That was something that was written, and then we gave it to an
announcer. And he read it. We hired a radio announcer.

But that combination of spoken word with your track, when you
thought of that with “Christmas Day,” were you confident it would
work?
Oh no, no. That’s why I said there’s a lot of luck in it. I just said, “Put
that up there. Let’s see.”
As soon as it was there, it was really compelling. If I were just a
producer, I would have said, “Just leave that—with that track and that
sermon. That’s fine. No need to do anything else.” But as a songwriter
who’s making a record, I have to figure out how to get me into the track.
[Laughs]

It’s a cool groove—

Yeah, it’s a good groove.

The guitar has a great sound. What is that?

It’s got a really good tremolo on it with a dotted eighth note attached to
the click and a foot stomp.

Acoustic guitar?
It’s both. It’s an acoustic-electric guitar that is miked acoustically and at
the amp. And the acoustic is treated differently than the amp.

Did you do that in “Amulet” as well, where there are two different
guitar images?
Yeah, but there I just overdubbed myself. There I’m playing acoustic
guitar. I did that on “Questions of the Angels” and “Amulet.”
 Sometimes I’ll just double a thing, and I’ll keep whatever little thread
seems to enhance the guitar. I’ll throw away 95 percent of the double and
just keep 5 percent, and it seems to work. Again, the ear goes to the irritant
and you throw out all the irritant, and what is left is nice.

So many of your peers have no interest in any of the new digital

recording technology, whereas you have embraced sampling and loops
on this album in a big and amazing way. Was that an easy
understanding for you?
Andy. Andy Smith. He’s very good. He’s been my engineer now for
about twenty years. He’s really good with the technology.

I love how you use a sample of Sonny Terry’s harmonica [in “Love Is
Eternal Sacred Light”]. Sounds like he’s in the studio with you.
Yeah, it does. It’s fabulous.

Now you played that harmonica part yourself live, right?

Yeah. Part of it. I’m playing along with him, and then they take that
sample out and then I play the end of it.

The title song, “So Beautiful or So What,” is built on a great guitar riff.
Is that a loop?
No. Well, it might be a really long loop. It might be sixteen, twenty bars
or something like that.

It’s similar to the “Mrs. Robinson” riff.

Yeah, it has the same kind of right-hand move to “Mrs. Robinson.” I do
that a lot too. I use things that I made up before. Change them around a
little bit. Licks that I made up.

That song has a verse about the shooting of Martin Luther King. Such
a provocative verse—“Dr. King has just been shot,” and this very vivid
picture of the three men on the balcony. And yet the song isn’t just
about MLK.
No, but he’s the embodiment of that choice—so beautiful or so what?
He was a person who clearly said we have the potential to be living in a
paradise, or we have a potential to live in hell.
When that verse emerged, did you feel it should be removed or that it
distracted?
No, just the opposite. I thought that the song was a little bit unfocused
until that came about.

Again, that’s very cinematic to cut to Dr. King, and the way you show
us that famous image.
Right. That’s an iconic photo.

The sequencing of the album is interesting—you put the title song last.
That was the last one I wrote.

A songwriter friend of mine said, “He put his hit last.” She considered
it the hit.
Oh yeah? I’m not sure that there’s any hits in there. Or what the hit is.
You know what seems to be the hit in concert? “Rewrite.” “Rewrite” gets a
lot of response. Which is sort of interesting. And a lot of people who have
had the album for a long time have said that “Rewrite” has emerged as their
favorite song.
Maybe people like them when they’re simple. When they’re really
simple. Eventually. They don’t get on your nerves.

The lyric of “Rewrite” was published in the New Yorker as a poem.

Yes. Paul Muldoon, who is the poetry editor, asked if he could use one
of the songs from this album in the New Yorker, and he chose “Rewrite.”
That felt good. Though I didn’t think of it as a poem; I think of it as a lyric.
But yeah, it did. It was nice.

Patti Smith, who writes poems and songs, told me she writes poems for
herself, but songs are for the whole world, and for that reason
songwriting is harder than poetry. Do you feel that, that when you
write a song, the whole world could hear it for years?
I don’t think that way, but I don’t write poems. No, I don’t think this is
something that the whole world will hear for years. And I don’t think I ever
did. Most of the time when I had hits, as a soloist—maybe not so much with
Simon & Garfunkel—but most of the time when I had hits as a soloist, I
was surprised they were hits. I didn’t know what the hits were.
I never thought that “Loves Me Like a Rock” was going to be a hit, or
“Mother and Child Reunion” was going to be a hit.

“Kodachrome”?
“Kodachrome” I thought was a hit. It sounds like a pop song. All the
other ones sound odd. “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” They didn’t sound
like what the hits sounded like at the time. Radio was more open to things
that weren’t exactly what every other hit was.

Definitely. And hearing those songs in that context was always

wonderful. We loved it.
Yeah, that’s right. People liked it then. That’s sort of gone away. It’s too
bad.

It is too bad.

Your previous album, Surprise, was a collaboration with Brian Eno,

and quite an amazing album.
Some people didn’t like Surprise. They didn’t like the combination of
me and Brian. Not personally. They didn’t like the combination of our
sounds. But I did.

I know a lot of people who loved and have imitated that sound.
Acoustic instruments with techno. It influenced a lot of people.
Oh well, that’s nice. That’s nice.
This album is more simple than Surprise was. Every time I finish a
record I say, “Now what was it about that record that I really liked? And
what about it could I just leave and not repeat?”
I think what I took out of Surprise was that I don’t need to have
complicated, polyrhythmic drumming, which I happen to like. But I also
like that really straight 4/4 rock and roll, like fifties rock and roll and
African. Really just 4/4. Not even a backbeat.
“Christmas Day,” no backbeat. So is “So Beautiful or So What.” And so
is “The Afterlife.” And I’ve said this many times, that my two favorite
records, my two favorite records are “Mystery Train” and “Bo Diddley,”
and neither of those had backbeats either. If you think of a bunch of my
songs—“Me and Julio” doesn’t have a backbeat.

I guess that’s right. But such a cool rhythm.

Yes, it has a good rhythm. It’s not that I don’t like backbeats, I do. But I
really like it when it’s not. And I guess there were a bunch of fifties things
that had that. Especially the foot-stomping records.

“How Can You Live in the Northeast?” from Surprise is an astounding

song.
“How Can You Live in the Northeast?” was a good song. And a good
question . . .

The ending quatrain about three generations off the boat, wearing your
father’s old coat, reflects an American experience so few songs have
ever touched, that so many of us are so recently off the boat.
Yes, that’s true. It was not my father but his father who came off the
boat. My parents were born in New York. But yes, three generations. It’s
true, it’s a big leap in three generations. In a hundred years, it’s a long way.
That’s the American story.

“The Boy in the Bubble” is just amazing in concert, and it’s such a
special song.
Yeah, “Boy in the Bubble” is Sutu rhythm. That might have been my
favorite of the South African grooves, the Sutu.

That lyric is just phenomenal, so interesting with all those modern and
mysterious images, like the lasers in the jungle and the bomb in the
baby carriage.
Thanks. That’s a song that I wrote—I completely wrote it—and didn’t
like it at all and threw the whole thing out and said, “That’s awful.” And
then I rewrote it as “Boy in the Bubble.”

A whole other lyric?

Yeah.
Do you remember what it was?
No, I don’t. It would be interesting to see. I just said, “You know, this is
a great track and this lyric, but I don’t believe it. I don’t really believe it. I
don’t believe that. Sounds like I’m trying to say something.” Instead of it
naturally coming out of me, it sounded like I was already saying something
that I knew.
I can’t remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90
percent of it out and kept a line or two. I don’t even remember. That’s
happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times.
Very aggravating when it does happen.
“Love Is Eternal Sacred Light” is like that. That song was called “Brand
New Pre-Owned Automobile.” Like the last verse. And when I sang it, I
said, “Nah, I don’t believe it.” And as I said to Phil, “You know, I don’t like
it. I’m not gonna do this,” some voice in me said, “This should be called
‘Love Is Eternal Sacred Light,’” which, actually, I didn’t even like as a title.
But you tend to give credence to these voices that come from within. Not
always a good idea, but we tend to do that.

That’s interesting, because it didn’t strike me as your kind of phrase. I

can see why that writer felt you were preaching God’s songs here.
Yeah. I was surprised. I was surprised that all of these God references
had come up. Five out of the first six songs. I noticed it, but it was
unintentional.

And you listened to that voice and trusted that was the right title, even
though you didn’t like it at first—
Well, you know, it has that title, and then you can see me take another
angle at the title by the time you get to the middle of the song.

Very much so—

So I wasn’t totally committed to that title. Or to that thought. I let the
thought play out, and then I came at it from another direction.

“Love Is Eternal” has that remarkable section of short lines starting

“Earth becomes a farm / Farmer takes a wife.” You’re describing the
origins of mankind on Earth.
 Right. “Farmer takes a wife” is from a children’s song, “Farmer in the
Dell.”

It has that kind of nursery-rhyme rhythm—

Right.

But with the fast passage to man becoming machine, “oil runs down his
face,” it’s very quick—
Yeah, very quick description of evolution.

It goes into a section about the Big Bang being just a joke. Is that the
voice of God?
I think so, yeah. Or somebody.

It’s got that poignant line, “I love all my children, it tears me up when I
leave.”
It’s the second song where He left.

Also, being a native Chicagoan, I like that the song is placed in the
Midwest and you mention Lake Michigan. Which is rare in your songs.
Why did you place it there?
Well, when it came it just felt like it was really fresh. And the song felt
like it was a Midwest song, that end part about driving along, all that stuff.
It’s sort of vaguely Chuck Berry–ish. Rock and roll-y.

And you kept in the line about the “brand-new, pre-owned ’96 Ford”—
you knew it was a good line but not a title.
Yeah. I liked “brand-new, pre-owned.” It’s just a bullshit line that
salespeople use. Brand-new, pre-owned.

Years ago you told me you found the structure of “Slip Slidin’ Away”
boring because it doesn’t have a bridge, a third section, and you said
the normal song structure seemed a bit restrictive. In this album and
others in the past years you’ve exploded the song structure—you have
C sections which aren’t just bridges you hear once, they are whole
other places you go to.
 Yeah. That’s been going on for quite a while now. “Darling Lorraine”
has five different sections. But both ways are good. Other songs really
never change their structure, like “Christmas Day.” It’s the same chord
pattern through the whole song, and then there are different structures laid
over it, but it’s the exact same chord pattern. Same with “The Afterlife” and
same with “So Beautiful or So What.” Same with “Rewrite.” Same chords.
Never changes chords, never changes key.

And that’s a great sound—when a melody moves over a repeating riff

like that. The words to “So Beautiful” start with the image of making
chicken gumbo—and then you step back and say, “Life is what you
make of it / So beautiful or so what”—
I had that title very early. Way before, years before, I had that song. I
had written down a sentence: “Everything is either so beautiful or so what.”
So again, that is what I mean: there was a lot of luck in this album. I come
up to the last song, and this phrase which I like, it fits, I can call it that, and
then I thought that’s a good title for the album. It does sum up the album,
and the cover, with the DNA on it, same question. Same things as
“Questions for the Angels.”

Have you done that before, taken lines from the past and used them in
new songs?
No, I don’t use the lines from the past. Actually I probably should, but
once I finish, I put the stuff away, put the box somewhere, and I don’t go
back to it. But I keep a notebook, and I use lines or thoughts from the
notebook when they’re appropriate for the song. There’s still a bunch of
stuff that’s not used, that just didn’t fit in anywhere, or I lost interest in it, or
you know, I did like it, but I just couldn’t find a place for it.

What was your writing process like for this album? Did you work on
songs every day?
Well, in a way I was. But it’s not like I go and sit down at my desk and
do that. In fact, I don’t really like to write at a desk. I like to write when
driving in a car.

With the track going?

 Yeah. Which is why I am one of the guys you want to avoid when
you’re on the road. [Laughter] I’m more listening to the track than I am
paying attention to driving.

So do you mean you finish a track for every song before you write the
words?
Quite often. Not always. On the guitar songs, that’s why I did have to sit
in the room and play. And it makes me restless to sit in the room and play.

Does it?
Yeah. I like the car. Because you’re passive; stuff is passing. You know
you can look, and things are going on. You get bored and you turn it off and
you turn on a baseball game or something.

I’ve had good ideas come to me when I’m away from work, like in the
car or something.
Yeah. Once you’re working on it, you’re working on it all the time, and
sometimes stuff’ll come in the middle of the night, in a dream or
something. Your mind is working on it all the time.

“The Afterlife” is a funny song about death. How did that come to be?
I think it’s another one of those songs that had a first line.

“After I died and the makeup had dried—”

Yeah, “I went back to my place.” I didn’t know what that song would be
about. I thought it was a pretty good first line, not really good. It was a little
too complicated for a really good first line. The first time you hear that, it’s
not like you really grasp, what? “After I died . . .” Because it’s a concept
and it has a little bit of a joke in it, all that stuff, all coming in that line. But
anyway, I didn’t find anything else, so I stuck with that. I like that track a
lot.

People pick up on your lines in a way they don’t with most songs, it
seems. I hear people already saying, “Well, we’d better get going . . .
these people are slobs here . . .”
I really put the lyrics up front. I don’t really get it why people bury their
lyrics. Especially if they have something to say. A lot of indie bands. Or
Radiohead, I can’t hear the lyrics when I first put the record on. I think if
these guys have something to say, why stick it there in the track where I’m
kind of straining to hear? But everybody has a different aesthetic. I put mine
way out front. And that’s sort of part of my sound.

And your lyrics are meant to be heard. Interesting you say they are
songs and not poems. They are meant to be sung, not spoken.
Yeah. Sometimes they have elements that could be shared with poetry.
But they’re not poems. They’re lyrics. They’re meant to be sung. They
come out of the rhythm of the music, as opposed to creating your own
rhythm of the words.
Also, there’s much more use of cliché in songwriting than there is in
poetry, because a song is going at a certain tempo and it’s going fast, and if
you miss a line, you missed it. But when you’re reading poetry, you read it
at a much slower pace. So the lines can be much more dense. And have
words which are not usually in a speaking vocabulary and which carry
multiple meanings. Because you can slow it down so you can get it.
But in a song, it’s clocking along, and if you missed it, it’s gone. And if
you miss enough of it, well, the song is gone, and you sort of lose interest.

You’ve told me you’ve read poetry a lot, and the influence of poetry on
your work is especially evident in some songs—I think of “Cool, Cool
River”: “moves like a fist through traffic”—the language is quite
charged and poetic—
Thanks. Yeah, there are poets who have definitely influenced what I
write. There are poets who write in a way that is good for songs. For simple
kind of songs, straight ahead, Robert Frost is very touching and simple.
Who I like, especially if it’s an American kind of song, maybe if it’s set in
the woods or the country or something like that.
There are other poets who influenced me. I learned a lot from Derek
Walcott when we wrote The Capeman.

Speaking of him, I remember back when you were working on songs

for The Rhythm of the Saints you had a line about your head “resting
on a rented pillow” for the song that became “Thelma.” You said Derek
Walcott told you not to use the alliteration because alliteration is easy.
 Yes. I enjoyed the collaboration. I thought when we really did mix the
two of our styles it created an interesting song. Lyrically. But even if the
song was mostly Derek’s, which a couple of them are, they still had my
melodies, and I would still say, “No, you can’t do that. I need this,” and he
would change it around. And a bunch of those songs are all me too.
But the ones that are combined, they have a quality to them that’s sort of
a mix of pop and poetry that I think is very interesting, like “Can I Forgive
Him.”

Well, all your work has that quality—since the start, they’re all poetic
songs.
But with the Derek work, it sounds like his poetry a lot.

I loved those songs you wrote for The Capeman. And I loved the show,
which I was lucky to see on Broadway.
The Capeman is, I think, coming back. It played last summer in Central
Park. It was very well received. I think The Capeman was, perhaps, ahead
of its time. Well, it was also a flawed piece of work. But it was an
interesting piece of work. And it got unusually beat up. More beat up,
actually, than it deserved.
So I think now there is a willingness—it took ten years—I think there
was a willingness to take a listen to it again. And it was treated much more
kindly. It came back twice, once at BAM and once last summer in Central
Park. It was fabulous in Central Park, outdoors. Right in the middle of the
world I was talking about.

It’s not unlike Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which was attacked brutally
at first and then became accepted like a classic.
Yeah, Porgy and Bess was ripped apart too.

I love the song “The Vampires,” and your version of it is great—the

timing of the dialogue is great.
Yeah, I like that rhythm too. I think it’s a guajira.

And then it explodes into a great horn section and solo.

 That’s Oscar Hernández. He’s great, Oscar. His album just won a
Grammy this year. His band is called the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Really
good. I just saw him the other night; he came the other night, lives out here
[in Los Angeles].

In “Love and Blessings” you have a wonderful verse: “If the summer
kept a secret / It was heaven’s lack of rain . . .” Which to me seems to
be about global warming—
Yes.

Interesting how you touch on that but obliquely, as in “Can’t Run,

But,” when you discuss the cooling system that burned out in the
Ukraine—
Chernobyl.

Yeah. But you don’t do it too overtly.

Yeah. You know, I don’t want to be preachy. I don’t think anybody
really needs to be preached to. And people resent it if they think that you
are preaching to them, and I think I would resent it. I don’t need to be told
things that I know, or lectured, or any of that stuff.
So it’s just a comment on what’s going on. It’s not saying anything. It
doesn’t tell you a moral judgment. It assumes that you have already taken
the issue into account and you have an opinion. That’s all. And just move
on.

With “So Beautiful or So What,” the song, and like many of the songs
on this album, the rhyming is playful and fun. And in that song you
rhyme to the title—rhyming the “what” word with different words
each time. How do you make something like that, which needs to be
contrived to work, sounds so natural and noncontrived?
[Pause] I don’t know the answer to that. As I say, there’s a significant
part of writing songs that I have no logical explanation for. Just seems to be
something that comes from me. And I sort of recognize it, as opposed to
shaping it. Oh, that’s a good idea, that’s a good line. I wonder where I can
use that.
But with rhymes, you have to be conscious to make rhymes work, don’t
you?
Yeah. But you know, when you get into a rhyme group like “not,” you
got a lot of rhymes; you got a lot of choices. Whereas if you get into
“climb,” for example—

“Time,” “crime,” “lime”—

And “I’m.” And you’re pretty much gonna go for “time.”

“Love” doesn’t have many rhymes.

Yeah, you got “of,” “above,” “dove,” and “glove.”

Yet one of the great things you’ve always done is use rhymes in a way
that doesn’t call attention to them, that one is there as a setup. It just
seems inevitable, and that, to me, seems like the greatness of great
songs.
Well, the more you do it, as I say, the better you get. I really never had
any other job since I was fifteen. I made my first record at fifteen. It’s really
all I ever did. I went to school, but all I’ve ever done is write songs and
make records. Now it’s a long time, and I’ve had a lot of experience at it.

You’ve gotten pretty good at it.

[Laughs] Thanks. But a lot of it is just, you know, good luck.

OceanofPDF.com
Ringo Starr
 The Beatles and Beyond
West Hollywood, California 2014

Once on the BBC soon after the release of their film A Hard Day’s Night,
John Lennon was talking about how great Ringo was in the film. The host
says to him, “A lot of people are saying Ringo is like a young Chaplin,” to
which Lennon replies, “No, he’s like an old one.”
Today Ringo is no longer a youngster but is still as spry and
Chaplinesque as ever, in great shape, and exultant about his life making
music. Rather than rest on his prodigious laurels, he continues to write
songs, make records, and tour, almost every year, with his remarkable All-
Starr Band, a superband of great proportions in which countless legends
have appeared, including Edgar Winter, Todd Rundgren, Steve Lukather,
Richard Page, Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Dr. John, Billy Preston, Rick
Danko, Levon Helm, Clarence Clemons, Felix Cavaliere, Eric Burdon,
Ginger Baker, and many more.
As anyone who has seen these shows knows, the spirit of Ringo reigns.
Rather than be the star in the spotlight the whole show, as he’s happily done
his whole career, he shares the stage with famous friends. He gladly
celebrates the greatness of others with a quiet generosity he’s always
possessed. But when he comes out front to perform, he doesn’t hold back.
Unlike the other three Beatles, he’s the only one who always dances when
he sings. And it’s a dance of joy.
 “Inspired?” he said with a laugh when I used that word to describe the
joy that infuses all the songs he wrote for his newest album, Postcards from
Paradise. “We need to have you around more often!”
Seemed like a great idea. His band The Beatles, as the universe knows,
was the greatest ever, and the love they brought the world through their
short but miraculous reign continues to permeate every day. With John,
Paul, and George, he came together to churn out miracle songs from 1963
to 1969 almost nonstop, forever evolving and changing the art of
songwriting as we know it.
He was born Richard Starkey (of course) in Liverpool (of course) in
1940, the same year as John Lennon’s birth. Before joining The Beatles and
supplanting Pete Best in 1962, he was the drummer for Rory Storm and the
Hurricanes, about whom he wrote a song on his newest album, discussed
herein.
It was Ringo, of course, who often came up with The Beatles’ titles and
phrases (“A Hard Day’s Night,” he confirmed, was his, though “Eight Days
a Week,” often attributed to him, he said, was not) and also discovered
distinctive drum parts as extraordinary and right as the songs themselves. A
songwriter’s dream drummer, he always crafted soulful parts that served the
very essence of each song. Even his fills are legend: all soulful grace and
visceral power without ever overwhelming the song.
But in addition to all that—the man is a great songwriter. Besides
“Octopus’s Garden,” written for The Beatles, he wrote “Photograph” and
“It Don’t Come Easy” soon after the big break. He’s since written many
albums of great songs. Sure, he had some seriously great teachers. In the
movie Let It Be we see him writing “Octopus’s Garden” on the piano, in C
major, trying to discern where its verse would end. Fortunately for him,
George Harrison was there and suggested the famous return to tonic, back
to the I, C major.
With direct education as well as osmosis by proximity to authentic
geniuses of songwriting, he swiftly became a great songwriter. “Octopus’s
Garden” was as magically surreal, whimsical, and beautiful as any Beatles
song. Like George, who established himself in leaps and bounds as an equal
of Lennon and McCartney, here came Ringo—the comic Beatle—with
some serious songwriting. In 1970, after The Beatles, he immediately wrote
and sang two great songs, “Photograph” and “It Don’t Come Easy.” He also
had a hit with “You’re Sixteen,” written by the Sherman Brothers of Disney
song fame (see page 65).
Now, well versed in the knowledge that collaboration with gifted friends
leads to greatness, he’s made a brand-new masterpiece of inspired
songwriting. Postcards from Paradise, all new cowritten originals, includes
the magical, Beatles-detailed title song written with Todd Rundgren; the
New Orleans gumbo of “Bamboula,” written with Van Dyke Parks; and the
opening song, “Rory and the Hurricanes,” about his famous pre-Beatles
band and life, written with fellow northerner Dave Stewart.
Lest one assume that this artist took unwarranted songwriting credit,
both Stewart and Parks confirmed that Ringo led the collaboration, coming
in with substantial musical and lyrical ideas. For “Bamboula” Ringo had a
whole drum track, inspired by the Afro rhythms of 1820 New Orleans. Van
Dyke, a scholar of musical history, delved into that time and spirit to inform
the lyrics. “The collaboration was swift and projectile,” said Van Dyke, “as
was the recording. And it seemed like another great way to confirm Ringo’s
adaptability to his adopted home. He is, after all, as all-American as he is
royal loyal.”
Decades past, when Paul and John wrote about their early years in
“Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” Ringo now shared this early chapter
in “Rory and the Hurricanes,” written with Dave Stewart.
“Ringo and I are both from the same part of England,” said Stewart.
“And we have the same passions and the same sense of humor. So when it
was time to write about our mutual past, that was fun, and it was easy. And
Ringo always comes in with ideas, both musical and lyrical. He’s quite the
brilliant songwriter and, as you might know, a very good drummer as well.”
That he’s still making music at this stage of his life is testament to his
lifelong passion for music. “Ringo’s vitality,” said Van Dyke, “his interest
in others and athletic approach to making this a better world—with peace
and love his signature—is totally uncommon. He needn’t prove anything.
He already has. This makes him a role model. When most guys as seasoned
as he is are resting on their laurels, he’s creating new works, with emphasis
on mutual empowerment.”
That Ringo, like his late great friend Harry Nilsson, is famous not only
as a musician but as a friend is understandable the moment you’re in his
sphere. He’s always been kind of adorable, in a way both funny and sweet.
His delivery of lines, any lines, always was delightfully funny, often more
for the way he said the words than the words themselves. That each of his
bandmates was a genius was pretty clear early on, and Ringo always
provided them a foundation—both rhythmic and human—they could fall
back on. In an early radio appearance in 1963 Paul and John do all the
talking while George laughed and Ringo was in the other studio, adjusting
his drums. But although he was separate, the others constantly referred to
him lovingly, like a musician repeating a pedal tone, holding down a song.
“We brought you the flowers, Ring!” said Lennon affectionately. “And the
grapes.”
Short pause, and then in the distance the drummer intones laconically:
“Oh, I like grapes!” And everyone folds inward with laughter. Despite the
madness and chaos that swirled around the ceaseless phenomenon that
being The Beatles was, Ringo was the comic constant, the endearing spirit
that gently but soulfully kept everything in place.

I always think of you in the movie Let It Be, working on “Octopus’s

Garden” on the piano, and you ask George where you should go. He
shows you to go back to the I, the C major. You had some kind of good
teachers around for songwriting.
Ringo Starr: There’s also a bit before that where I’m playing. [Sings]
“I’d like to be . . .” And he’s lying on a settee? Is that in the movie? I don’t
think so. And he’s going, “G!” [Laughter] You might as well shout
“asparagus” to me. I can’t play G. I play everything in C on piano. “F flat!”
Yeah. [Laughs]
Yes, they were all helpful. George was more helpful in the end because
he produced “It Don’t Come Easy” and “Photograph.” He really produced
it, and then Richard Perry redid it. But it was sort of George’s arrangement.
I’d have a couple of verses. I’d always have a chorus. And I wasn’t
good at ending in those days. I actually have a song that is like twenty-
seven verses. And I gave it to Harry Nilsson and it was still too long.

I loved Harry.
Yeah, I loved Harry too. He was my friend. So George came out and
produced the record, and he really helped me.
Did you write “Photograph” together?
We never wrote anything together. I came to him with “It Don’t Come
Easy,” and I came to him with “Photograph.” Because I’d written
“Photograph” in Spain, and I had it. “Every time I see your face it reminds
me of the places we used to go. And all I’ve got is a photograph, and I
realize you’re not coming back anymore . . .” I had all of that. Now I see
some publishers are saying it’s a Harrison song.

Yes.
No, I promise you, I’m not trying to build myself up. It was Starkey-
Harrison when it started. And George was trying to put Krishna into it. And
I said, “No, no!” Then he put God. And I said, “No, no!” In those days I
wouldn’t sing about God or Krishna. Now I’ll sing about God or Krishna,
but not then. That was a battle we had. But we have peace and love.
It’s Starkey-Harrison, no matter what anybody wants to say.

It’s an unusual song, in that it’s so sad, especially now that George is
gone. But musically it sounds happy. I never really thought of it as sad
until now.
Sure. Well, I do it every night onstage, and people think it’s for George.

And you’ve said that.

Well, no. Well, you can check me and call me a liar whenever you’re
ready. [Laughter] I might have said it one night. It’s not something I would
say every night, it’s just . . . understood.

How was “Octopus’s Garden” born?

I had left The Beatles. It was mad, it was just one of those mad periods,
and went to Sardinia with Maureen and my two kids at the time. And Peter
Sellers had a boat down there. And they gave us octopus and chips.
[Laughs] And I said, “What the hell is this?” [Laughs]
These were the days of marijuana days. I was sort of hanging out, and
the captain was there. I said, “Man, octopus—you got no fish?” And
somehow we got into a conversation that octopuses build gardens. They go
around the sea bed and pick up shiny objects and put them in front of the
cave they’re hiding in. I thought, “How great is that?” And I had the guitar
and picked it up and played in E. Because I only play E on guitar, C on
piano. Though I have threatened for so many years to take lessons.
And I had the line, “I’d like to be under the sea.” It started there.
We were all a bit mental in that period. If you need the lead-up, I went
knocking on John’s door. He was in an apartment with Yoko. And I said,
“I’m not playing good, and you three are so close.”
He said, “I thought it was you! You three!”
So, okay, I went to Paul’s door, knock knock. I said, “I’m not playing
good, and I think you three are really close.”
He said, “I thought it was you three!”
So I thought, “Fuck it, I’m off. I’m off! It’s too mad now.”
Anyway I went away. They sent me faxes. Telegrams! And then I got
“Come on back. Come on, we love you.” And George had the whole place
filled with flowers.

They missed you.

They did! We were really good pals. We were all good pals.

“Octopus’s Garden” was only your second song after “Don’t Pass Me
By.” Yet it’s as magical as any Beatles song.
I was shocked with that. Yeah. I’ve just done [a tour of] South America
again. And I do “Don’t Pass Me By.” And they all sing the words. To
“Don’t Pass Me By”! Not “Yellow Submarine”—they do sing that. I mean,
you expect it. But [sings] “I listen for your footsteps . . .”

This new album is phenomenal. The songwriting is great—“Postcards

from Paradise,” written with Todd Rundgren, and “Rory” and
“Bamboula,” which you wrote with our friend the great Van Dyke
Parks.
Well, you know the story with “Bamboula.” I always do the basic track
on a synth, just to get rhythm patterns. It’s in E. In fact, I do it all in C. And
I just then drummed to this. There’s no song or nothing. I just drummed.
And I sort of got this idea in my head that I was in New Orleans drumming.
And so it’s a Liverpool–New Orleans sound. [Laughs] And I thought,
“Wow, Van Dyke, he really knows about New Orleans, and he’s a great
songwriter.” And he’s a friend.
 So I called him over, and I said, “I got this track. Don’t have a song
yet.” And we were sitting around, and he mentioned bamboula. And I said,
“Never heard of it—what is bamboula?”
And then he was telling me about in New Orleans—’cause the track is
New Orleans-y—the guys that were brought to New Orleans [laughs]
would play these drums. Then he went on the Internet, and then there’s a
sheet of paper giving us the whole rundown on bamboula.
So we wrote this song. But it’s still like a love song. But once we had
the word “bamboula,” that’s all we need as writers, and we’re off—yeah,
and the idea that the drum led this song.
Anyway, we finished it. And we tried it in a New Orleans-y way. He did
all the brass arrangements and that, and we think in a New Orleans way.
But then I thought, “You know, I want it to sound more like a street band.”
And it’s like a song they all sing.
So I played every drum I had. I have these three huge African drums
that Joe Walsh sent me from Africa. And so I just hit them. And I hit
everything else. And I didn’t hit everything perfect, because I wanted it to
seem like the whole town was playing drums. And I thought, “Well, we’ll
fade it up, like it’s coming from, you know . . . the Sunset Marquis.”
[Laughs]
You can hear the band. Okay! It’s excitement. Then you get the song,
and then they go past. And so that’s why I did that to it. And I did bring him
over, and he was smiling all the way through, so I thought, “Okay, he likes
it.” Because I didn’t want to do anything that would upset any of the other
writers.

Van Dyke’s synth playing is amazing. I thought it was Stevie Wonder.

Oh yeah. And he’s playing accordion. Well, he’s always been great.

Your drumming on that is wonderful.

Well, that’s great. Does it sound New Orleans to you?

It does. But it sounds like Ringo too—

Well, that’s what I’m saying. Liverpool–New Orleans.
Did you think of writing “Rory and the Hurricanes” before working
with Dave Stewart on it?
Yes. Because I’d written down, suddenly, a stream of consciousness of a
time. And this was an absolute fact, that when I was with Rory and the
Hurricanes we rented a van and went to London. Had never been to London
—the big city—like going to LA. And we had no money. We bought the gas
to get us there. And we all stayed in one room. Slept on the floor, whatever,
we didn’t care—we were lads. And we lived on bread, butter, and jam. And
the butter ran out. And we just had bread and jam. And it’s in the song.
And we did go to a dance. And no London girl would dance with us
because of our accents. Because we were from the north.

Is that right?
Oh yeah, they wouldn’t. We’d say, “Excuse me, love, do you want to
dance?” But no. Then I asked this French girl, and she said, “Oui.” And it’s
in the song.

So cool you chose to write a song about being in Rory and the
Hurricanes, this famous but distant chapter of rock and roll history,
which hadn’t yet to be written in song.
Well, it was big in my life. Rory and the Hurricanes. You know, Johnny
Guitar was incredible. And Rory was the ultimate showman. And in Rory
and the Hurricanes, I left the factory. That was big news. I said, “No, I am a
musician.” We sort of turned professional overnight. We didn’t know if it
would last or not. And look where it led me.

Yeah, you did pretty well.

[Laughs] Yeah, but you didn’t know that then.

You even did a drum solo on this album, on “Rory and the
Hurricanes.” Which you famously don’t like to do—
I don’t like to do.

What led you to do the drumming on this?

Because the next time I had gone to London, it was different. If you
listen to the song. But still playing the drums, like I always do. [Sings drum
groove] I love the end of that fill, that dat-dat-dat—all very simple. But I
thought it was emotional. Because I wanted it to feel like those days. I
didn’t want it to sound like John Bonham or something. And I think we
captured that, you know?
And also when I called Dave—now we just pass back and forth, e-
mails, which in the song, you can send them to each other—I wanted him to
put voices on it. Girl’s voices. But I wanted them young, like we’re trying
to get to those days, when the girls’ voices were really pitchy and up there.
And he got these two fourteen-year-olds. One of them he owns. [Laughter]

His daughter Kaya. She is quite a singer.

She is quite a singer. I went to see her when she played the Troubadour.
That wasn’t easy, at fourteen.

What led you to writing all these songs with your friends? Of course we
think of you singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
Well, it is a little help from my friends. And the last three records were
all cowritten. Because it’s a perfect excuse to hang out with writers and
musicians. And I haven’t sort of written a solo song in a long time. I have
the idea, and I want to know where it’s going. If we start writing together,
and it’s going somewhere, I’ll turn it into where I want it to be because it’s
my record—that’s what I do. But I’m hanging out with musicians, which is
just great.

These songs seem so inspired. Seems like you guys were having fun.
We were having fun. But I should have you around more often—
inspiring!

The title song, “Postcards from Paradise,” is quite remarkable—using

all those iconic titles from Beatles songs.
That was a lot of Todd Rundgren in there. Because I had the track. And
Todd took it and brought all that to it.

You famously came up with some titles that Paul and John used, such
as “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Eight Days a Week.”
 No, not “Eight Days a Week.” Paul straightened me out. He was in a
taxi with a guy who said, “Oh, I’ve been working so hard, eight days a
week.” [Laughs]
And he and John wrote the song. But I’ve always claimed it was me.

Did you ever think you should have your name on the song when you
came up with the title?
Well, no. That’s these days. When Gary Brooker, who was being sued
by the organist [for “Whiter Shade of Pale”] ’cause the organist was saying,
“My line.” And I thought, “Oh shit, my drum fill!” [Laughs]

Yes, if not for coming up with titles, every drum part was so distinctive,
it was just remarkable.
I think you should talk to the camera and tell them they should give me
half. [Laughs]

I think of your part on “Come Together,” for example. It is amazing.

No drummer has ever played it right, like you did, since. Even [Jim]
Keltner.
I had dinner with Jim the other night. He’s still talking about my
drumming. But he was great. I was really with John, Paul, George, and
Ringo when we came here. As musicians. Like the new boy. And he was
telling me—and other drummers—man, they’re making us all play like
you! In the studio we have to play like you.
So no matter what they said, it didn’t bother me. I knew the reality of it
was real out there.

Songwriters know it because you so served the song—

I do.

Every fill was part of the song in a wonderful way.

That’s what I do. I’ve always had that concept that the song—if a guy is
singing, they don’t need no damn drum fill over it.

So many of those songs and those records blew our mind when we
heard them, whether it was “A Day in the Life” or “Strawberry
Fields.” Was there any one, when you first heard it, you thought was
really mind-blowing?
Well, I was laughing the other night with Jim because I mentioned
“Rain.” He said, “You always mention ‘Rain’!” Well, I say it was like an
out-of-body experience. I have never played that way since.
Or “Tomorrow Never Knows”—the one with the drone, and I hit the
tom twice. And so just a fun story, my boy Zak said, “And that loop you
had!”
[Laughs] I said, “Loop? We didn’t have any loops!”
He said, “It’s a loop! It’s perfect!”
I said, “Phone this number.”
And he phoned the number. And George Martin said, “Yes?”
He said, “Is that a loop?”
And George Martin had to tell my boy, “Look, Zak, we didn’t have
loops in those days. [Laughs] Your dad had great time.”

It seemed you worked out amazing parts almost immediately. You’d

hear a great song and find the perfect part for it.
Well, I was always pleased when I found a part, you see.

When you heard something like “Strawberry Fields” for the first time,
do you remember how you felt about it?
Yeah, but it didn’t sound like that the first time. It sounded like [sings
quietly] “Let me take you down . . .” And then I would try different things.
And we could always tell when it was coming together. We always knew
when, yeah, that’s a good move. And we always knew when we were fed up
with a song. Not that song, a song. Just give us a cassette. We all knew that
when we were coming in the next morning—

Like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”?

Yeah, we had to do it again, you know. [Laughs] A lot of that went on.
It was just a love of each other and playing and supporting. Even when, in
the late sixties, it was a little tense. It was never tense after the count-in.
Everybody gave their all.

You can hear that.

 Always. And that’s a great credit to any band.

Your drum part on “Get Back” is amazing.

I know. I thought I was a genius.

You are.
And Billy Preston, how lucky that he came to see us that day. That’s all
that it was about. It wasn’t like a big plan: and then we’ll have Billy Preston
do this. It was, “Hey Billy, you can play. Play whatever you want.” And in
my estimation—Billy was a good friend of mine—and Billy never put his
hands in the wrong place. Never.

Your music has so impacted the world. Clearly as profound as what

Beethoven or Mozart did.
Well, that’s what we all say. And we’ll see in five hundred years.

I don’t think there’s any doubt anymore.

I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt the music. We were the best band in the
land. Inventive. And anyone who is honest in a band today will say they
recognize that. A lot of bands have used what we created.
You know, The Beatles were a cover band too. It’s a bit different now
because the writer is there already. But when we started, George Martin
brought songs. And we had to make a decision. We said, “No, no, we only
want to do Lennon and McCartney songs.” And that was a huge move on
behalf of The Beatles. To stand up for that. But every song he brought us
was a hit for somebody else. It wasn’t like he was bringing us trash.

But early on, the quality of the original songs was so high.
Yes. All love songs. “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I mean, how hard is
that? The drumming on it was good.

And it was musically ingenious, going to the minor V chord on the

bridge—
I wouldn’t know a minor V chord if it trod on me. [Laughter]

But there’s so little music we know that is so universally loved by

almost everyone. Almost everyone loves The Beatles. What do you
think led to that?
Well, I think those emotions still play today. And a lot of kids are
buying our records. Few artists still sell records. And we actually are still
one of them. How is that?

Because there’s no better music.

Well, I think the atmosphere we came with, we gave out. And musically
it’s still cool. It’s emotional. It’s laughter. It’s tears. It’s love.

OceanofPDF.com
Brian Wilson
 Beyond The Beach Boys
Beverly Hills, California 1995

“Okay, I believe you,” he says unconvincingly. We’re having breakfast at

his daily deli, moments from his home up here in the Hollywood hills, and
I’m trying in vain to communicate to Brian Wilson the level of joy people
receive from his music—and have received for years. He’s not hearing it,
looking up at me with his face downturned and a decided “if you say so”
expressed in his weary eyes.
As anyone who knows anything about him already knows, he’s not the
type to revel in joy at his own greatness. Quite the opposite. His endless
summer is a season of perpetual discontent. In an immaculately blue
Angeleno sky, the sun a distant jewel of radiance, he sees only crows. “See
those two?” he whispers, pointing out two distant birds outside the window,
perched on a tall palm. How and why he noticed such faraway birds is
beyond me. “They have been watching us this whole time.”
I mention, in a musical tangent that seemed related at the time, that the
composer John Cage composed melodies based on telephone wire birds he
saw.
“I know,” Brian smiles.
“So what would that melody of those crows be?” I ask.
He pauses for a moment and giggles softly to himself. Then he intones
an ascending pair of notes (the interval of a major sixth, from E to C above)
and sings it again, looking inward.
“You know what that is?” He sings it again and then sings, “Be-cause . .
. be-cause the world is round . . .” It’s “Because.” By The Beatles!”
“Aha. So John Lennon is singing to you through the crows?”
“Yes,” Brian says, still smiling. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Many times he sings his answers. Rather than using words to describe a
certain groove or melody, he sings. Asked to describe how he composes
harmonies, he sings each part. Which is impossible to transcribe into
written language, of course, but still a joy to behold. And which is why
interviewing him is a perpetual challenge—the fullness of his thoughts, as
the world knows well, is devoutly musical. His genius is for that which is
expressly beyond words. Which is why he enlisted others such as Mike
Love, Tony Asher, and Van Dyke Parks to write the lyrics that fit his
melodies. It’s that singular focus that has enabled him to write so much
gloriously tuneful and timeless music as well as harmonies to make heaven
smile. Today, over a big breakfast and two bowls of strawberries, he
patiently listens carefully to each question. “Let’s eat first and then talk,” he
says, and I agree.
But first it’s time to sweeten his strawberries. “They just aren’t quite
ripe yet,” he says and opens up several tiny white packets of artificial
sweetener to sprinkle on his strawberries. “It’s fake sugar. Real sugar can
kill ya, you know,” he says with a sly smile. “But as long as it’s fake, it
can’t hurt you.”
I’ve had the privilege—and the challenge—of interviewing Brian
several times. He’s not an easy man with whom to have a conversation, as
his soul is so troubled that personal darkness sometimes sadly obscures
everything and it’s impossible to get in. The very first time we spoke, back
in 1988 (which is in SOS I), he was under the care of the doctor Eugene
Landy and laid on a couch as if I were his analyst. One of Landy’s
assistants also taped the interview, and Brian spoke carefully, almost
painfully, not unlike a prisoner of war knowing he’s going back to his cell
after this talk. He gave full and complete credit to Landy, testifying that “he
rejuvenated my soul.” Months later Landy, who cowrote songs with Brian
and put his own name and that of his girlfriend, Alexandra Morgan, on
many songs, had his license revoked for entering into a business
arrangement with a patient.
 The next time we met was at his home up off of Mulholland Drive,
where he sat under a red tartan blanket pulled up to his chin on a couch far
from the windows overlooking the San Fernando Valley. He sat motionless
as an iguana, his face ashen, never facing me, and saying very little. He was
so distant that day and so deeply sorrowful, I could barely reach him.
The next time I was to meet him, almost exactly two years later, he
disappeared. Set to meet me at the deli where he daily dines, he didn’t show
up. With other people this might have been a minor concern, but with Brian
it was major. I contacted his wife, Melinda, who was panicked. Brian’s life
was well arranged so that his whereabouts remained known. Perhaps he
drove off of Mulholland this time. Or into that big Pacific Ocean that
inspired so many of his songs and into which his beloved brother Dennis
was lost.
Fortunately he soon surfaced. No attempt was ever made to explain to
me what happened, only that our interview would take place the very next
day, same time and place. And on that day, unshaven and in a billowy
Hawaiian shirt, Brian appeared. Asked where he went yesterday, he paused
for a long time and then said, “I went to see a friend. And she took me to
see another friend, and before I knew it, it was sundown and we were in
Venice. Having Thai food.”
This time around the talking came easy. Sometimes the clouds that
obscure that lucky old sun are clear, and he shines. And having known him
now for all these years, I have learned those things that wake him up and
inspire him to come alive and participate. There are others, certainly, but the
best I know are women and song. One time at a party for our mutual friend
Henry Diltz, the legendary photographer-musician, Brian was sitting alone,
unsmiling, withdrawn. I mentioned to him that my son, who was eleven
then, had discovered The Beach Boys and loved especially Brian’s beautiful
ballad “God Only Knows.” A change came over him as I said this, like he
was returning to his body. With a slight smile he said, “I love that one too.
Maybe the most of all.”
I asked if I could take a photo of him, and he consented, but without
smiling—without is actually an understatement: he looked terrified.
Fortunately the lovely Michelle Phillips was at the party, and I invited her
to pose with Brian for a photo. Rather than stand next to him, she
immediately got on his lap. His eyes opened with surprise and joy like Stan
Laurel. She snuggled up to him and purred in his ear. This worked.
Suddenly the big ice melted, and Brian Wilson was smiling. A big smile.
Afterward I said, “So is that what it takes to get you to smile? To have
Michelle Phillips in your lap?” He nodded and said only “Yes.”
But the other dynamic that brings Brian back is music itself. Over our
lunch, during which I conducted the following interview, when I brought up
nonmusical topics he was nonresponsive. But as soon as I got into music he
was there with me. The man is a musician’s musician. He lives inside of
music. It might be why it’s hard for him to communicate to the nonmusical
world; it’s a whole other language. Brian didn’t write lyrics, after all. But he
made those lyrics come to life with music of great complexity and beauty.
That he was a major inspiration for The Beatles—and Paul McCartney
especially—is well known and not lost on Brian, who during lunch sang for
me all of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” McCartney and The Beatles’ most overt
Brian-inspired composition.
He even was game to play along with my musical key/corresponding
color query, based on the fact that many songwriters and musicians have
colors in mind that correspond with each or most of the musical keys. Brian
had specific ones for the major keys, but unlike every other songwriter I’ve
ever spoken to, he had only one color in mind for the minor keys. Black.
Every single one. Black.
In fact, almost all of his songs are in major keys. He’s famous for being
a dark soul forever tied to the task of writing sunny songs. He was the
Beach Boy who didn’t surf and preferred to fill his entire living room with
sand than actually go to a beach. Yet the entire weight of The Beach Boys
was on his shoulders. In the following he compares his situation to that of
The Beatles, noting they were a unified group who worked together. Paul,
John, George—even Ringo—wrote the songs and then made the albums
together. “They were a unit,” he said. “And they couldn’t be torn apart.”
Not so Brian and The Beach Boys. He would write and produce the
albums himself, often staying home in LA when the group went on tour,
and bring in the legendary members of the Wrecking Crew to cut the tracks,
rather than his own band. Of course, Brian being a keen musician, got the
best players in the world. Though his brother Dennis was the ostensible
drummer for the band, on the record we get the soulful precision of Hal
Blaine, one of the world’s greatest drummers.
 But all of it was Brian’s vision—the songs, the sound, the spirit. And
the pressure to be a genius—and to do it all—overwhelmed the fragile
human at the center of it all, and Brian Wilson cracked like a cymbal hit too
hard. But the man survived. He’s still here with us. Long after so many of
his contemporaries are gone.
And it seems impossible for him, sadly, to fathom, even after all these
years, his actual impact on the world. I have said to him on more than one
occasion that his music has brought joy to so many people and brought
sunshine into the darkness of so many souls. But saying that to him is like
talking to a man down in a well. It doesn’t seem like the words ever really
reach him.
As Dylan said, people have a hard time with anything that overwhelms
them. And the music of Brian Wilson is overwhelming. His use of
multitracked vocals over many concurrent harmony parts changed the
sound of popular music. Suddenly there was the richness of a choir with the
precision of a quartet. It was the arrangement of the vocals that provided the
timeless infrastructure, a brilliant blending of barbershop quartet chords,
doo-wop, and rock and roll.
Then came the magic of the studio. Six or more separate harmony parts
would be sung often against a counterpoint of other vocals, and each part
doubled or even quadrupled to tape, creating a deeply dimensional and lush
landscape of sound. He took everything he could absorb from the Phil
Spector Wall of Sound school of recording and then added his own
harmonic genius to the mix, and his singular sweetness.
He was born on June 20, 1942, in Inglewood, California, not far from
where the planes of LAX take off and land. Absolutely terrorized by a
tyrant of a father, Murry, Brian retreated always to the piano and into the
music. Boxed so hard in the head once by Murry, he became deaf in one
ear, making this musical innovator unable to hear stereo. Into the heady
days of Beach Boys success, like his idol Phil Spector, he became obsessed
with perfecting records and would work endlessly on them. He spent half a
year and a small fortune on “Good Vibrations” alone. But he made
masterpieces. Working with another genius, Van Dyke Parks, who
contributed not only lyrics but also musical ideas to the songs and
recordings, Brian created the astounding and expansive “Heroes and
Villains” and other great songs. It’s with that song that our discussion
begins.

How did you get the drum sound in “Heroes and Villains”?
Brian Wilson: I played the bass drum. I played it with a mallet. That is
the only record I ever cut having the bass drum be the backbeat. [Sings first
verse, emphasizing the backbeat] Great boom boom. People across the
street were saying, “Hey—whatever you’re doing sounds great!” Thank you
very much!

Van Dyke Parks wrote great words to that—

He wrote some of the music too. He wrote some of the arrangement, not
the melody. [Sings horn line] Like that Gershwin stuff, he wrote that.
Gershwin got his way into rock and roll. Gershwin’s music was rock and
roll.

How so?
How? [Sings melodies from “Rhapsody in Blue”] What’s more rocking
than that?

Gershwin was like you—wrote amazing music, but others wrote the
words—
Yes. I think Ira [Gershwin] resented having to live in George’s shadow,
but he wrote some wonderful lyrics, he really did.

Having famous brothers is something you obviously understand. Your

brothers were famous, but in your shadow.
They were. They probably felt some envy for me.

Did they ever express it?

No. The only guy I ever really had problems with was Mike [Love].
Because he was sarcastic.

The Beach Boys still go out on tour each year without you, yet they’re
doing your music. How is that for you?
Well, they’re keeping the music alive. But you know what they’re
doing? Driving the name into the ground. In the overall scheme of things it
really doesn’t matter. But some things do matter. The things that matter is if
someone is happy with a melody. If someone says, “I want to do the lead!”
And you say, “No, Mike, I want Carl to do the lead.” “But I want to do that
lead!” And I say, “Okay, Mike, you can do that lead.”
Michael and Carl both achieved a good place with their singing. Carl
Wilson was one of the greatest singers in the whole damn business. Michael
too. Michael was a good rock and roll singer. And I’m a good soft-rock
singer—ballads, soft-rock kind of songs. So we all did our best.

Is it true that you don’t like the sound of your own voice?
You know what? I did like it some of the times, but most of the time I
didn’t. On my solo albums I didn’t like my voice. I don’t think I sing as
sweet as I used to. On some songs, like “Let Him Run Wild,” I hated my
vocal on that. On “California Girls” I liked my vocal. “Don’t Worry Baby” I
liked it. “I Get Around” I liked it.

When you would write a song would you know who it was for?
No. As soon as I had the song done, then I figured it out. As soon as I
was done writing the song I’d say, “Who is this song for—me, Carl, Mike,
Al, or Dennis? This is for Dennis.”

Your songs are so much about being in California. Had you been born
elsewhere, would your music have been totally different?
Probably. They wouldn’t have been as much about surf and cars.

Do you believe that Providence, or God, has guided your career?

Yes. I live my life under God’s help. God helped me through my life.

Many of your songs are happy and make people happy—

Like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”?

Yeah. Or “Good Vibrations.” And yet we know you’ve not always been
happy in your life.
Yeah. Though the songs I’m writing now are not ballads anymore. I’m
trying to write hard-rock songs that will sound like [sings strong rock
rhythm]. Because I think Phil Spector paved the way for me to learn how to
write rock songs.
Was “Don’t Worry Baby” influenced by him?
Yeah, it was.

When you’re writing a song like that, what are you aiming for?
I’m trying to think about pleasing people with harmony. I like to make
people happy with harmony. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Your songs all have amazing harmony parts. How did you create those?
I work them out in the studio. Phil Spector taught me how to do that. I
have to hear them over the speakers to know what is there. First I put down
the melody, the lead part. Then double it. Sometimes quadruple, four voices
on one part.
Some songs would only have two parts and two voices doubling them,
so that’s only four parts. But on other songs we had up to twenty-five
vocals.

Do you think a normal listener can hear all those parts, or is it

something they feel?
Can you hear them?

No. I can’t tell how many voices are there. But I feel it.
I don’t think anybody can. But they feel it.

The Beatles imitated that sound on “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

Yeah, I remember that. [Sings entire song] I remember the first time I
heard it. It blew my mind!

Blew your mind in a good way?

Yeah, of course.

Unlike The Beatles, you not only wrote all the songs, you produced the
records.
Well, I was producing, writing, arranging, and singing. I learned that
from Phil Spector. I don’t know if I did more than The Beatles did. I think
Paul did some producing too.
But they were a unit. And they couldn’t be torn apart. They were one
unit. And Harrison came into his own later on. He wrote some really good
music. It really surprised me to see what Harrison was up to musically.

Yeah, he reached their level. And they realized to do great albums, they
had to stop touring and work. Whereas you did that while The Beach
Boys toured without you—
Right. I sacrificed the tours in order to make great music. It gave me the
freedom and the liberty and the space to make good music. I told them I
needed to record, and they got Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnston.

What you accomplished on your own is miraculous, really—

Well, I had to do it. It was my life work.

True, but you did more than work. You created masterpieces—
There is a big ratio of those.

Absolutely. “Heroes and Villains,” “God Only Knows”—

“California Girls.”

How do you get through writer’s block?

The key is not to try to write when you’re not inspired.

Last time we spoke you were having trouble writing new songs. How
did you get through that?
Slowly. Very slowly. I wait until I get inspired. The key is to not try
writing if you do not feel inspired. If you feel up—if your energy is up and
your strength is up, then I think it’s a good idea to try to write. If not, don’t
try to write. I won’t touch the piano unless I’m very inspired.

The songs on Lucky Old Sun sound inspired—

Two summers ago I wrote all the songs.

But you never force it if it’s not coming?

Yeah, well, sometimes I’ll give it a little goose.

Do you write at an acoustic piano these days?

No. I write a lot at my synthesizer. That’s where I wrote all of Lucky
Old Sun stuff. Lately I have been at the piano again, but I might go back to
my synthesizer.

Why?
Because the synthesizer sounds so good. It inspires melody.

Do you use different sounds?

No. I always use one called Full Grand. It’s a mellow sound. Very
mellow.

Your songs have always been very sunny, from The Beach Boys up to
now. Do you write during the day when it’s sunny?
Yes.

My current favorite song of yours is “Midnight’s Another Day.”

It’s very dynamic. The dynamics of that are very different. I wrote the
melody and then Scott Bennett wrote the lyric. He had full rein on the
lyrical content. He was interpreting me. But we don’t talk much except
when we work. We blow all our karma on work.
I had that lyric, “lucky old sun,” so I bought the Louie Armstrong
version, learned the melody, and then reconstructed the chorus to make it
updated and modern.
I started with that and then I wrote sixteen songs. We only used ten of
the sixteen.

“Lucky Old Sun” is a suite of songs—and it’s something you’ve done as

far back as “Good Vibrations,” write songs that are suites really, with
many parts.
Yeah. “Good Vibrations” has six, seven sections, right.

It showed us pop songs can do more—

I think pop songs can do much if not more than people think, depending
on who writes it, what the content is, how far the range of the melody is, the
intimacy of the lyric, and the delivery of the vocal—they all matter.
[Laughs]

And back then “Good Vibrations” was one of the records that changed
the idea of what a record could be.
 Oh my God, yes. Music was changing in psychedelic terms. I think Sgt.
Pepper was a psychedelic album. I think it was a drug-inspired album. Just
like Pet Sounds. Marijuana inspired Pet Sounds.

You spent a long time just making one record, “Good Vibrations”—
Six weeks.

Was the band okay with you taking that time?

No. They’d say, “Brian, what’s goin’ on here? Why do you want to go
to another studio and another studio?”
“Because I want to get different sounds for different parts of this
record.”
“But Brian, we want to get this done! We want to get this done.”
“Guys, take it easy. I got to do it my way or we’re not gonna do it. Look
—I’m gonna do this in as many studios as I want.”

What led you to using theremin on it?

My brother Carl, believe it or not, said, “Why don’t we use a cello and a
theremin?” And I had never thought of that. So we called the Musician’s
Union, local 47, and we got a cello player and a theremin player. I sang the
part to the guy and he played it. [Sings part “whoo . . . oo”] I came up with
the arrangement. But he had the idea for the instruments. Without him we
wouldn’t have had “Good Vibrations.” It wouldn’t have been as good a
record.

You rerecorded the entire SMiLE album—but all alone. You used the
same arrangements, yet it sounds way better.
It was a kick. It was fun. I had to figure out all the parts—I didn’t
remember them. That was very difficult.

I love the album Orange Crate Art, which you did with Van Dyke Parks.
Oh, that’s a great, great album. It’s a masterpiece. Only he could have
done that. Nobody in the world could have done that but him.

Do you have favorite songs of your own?

Well, yeah, I have favorites. “God Only Knows” and “California Girls.”
“Good Vibrations”?
No. I like “Good Vibrations,” but it’s too arty for me. It’s not rock and
roll. [Sings strong rock beat] I just didn’t like it.

The chorus is rock—

Yeah, it isn’t rock and roll. It’s pop. Rock and roll has drums in it, and
guitars and bass and piano, keyboards.

So many great songwriters I know had dads who were tough on them.
Oh yeah?

Yeah. Many said how much it would have meant to get their dad’s
approval. Your dad was tough on you, wasn’t he?
Yeah, he was rough on me. He lit a fire under my ass. He set me on fire
is what he did. He got me going. He got me producing. He was a coach.
Like a football coach.

Was he harder on you than on Dennis or Carl?

No, he was harder on Dennis than on me. Carl he let go. He went easy
on Carl.

It’s true that you are deaf in one ear?

Yes. I can’t hear stereo. When I would mix I just had to do my best. It’s
sad. My right ear is shot, doesn’t work. I just can’t hear out of that damn
right ear. My right ear is gone.

Your music impacted The Beatles, and their music impacted you.
Music was changing fast then, whereas it kind of slowed down—
It reached its peak in the sixties and the seventies. And after that it
started to descend a little bit.

Any idea why?

You want to know the truth? I think songwriters went out of business.
It’s hard to write a song. An original song. I think that’s the reason that the
business went down the tubes.

Was it the songwriters or the industry who caused that?

 Both.

In doing my homework, I noticed that almost all your songs are in

major keys—
Yeah.

Any reason why?

No, only to say I like major chords.

Guitar players use keys like E, A, and G a lot. Whereas you use keys
they never use, like F sharp. Like “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl.”

Do you like that key?

I love it. Because it resonates in my ear very well. The sound of that
key, F sharp, appeals to my ears.

Irving Berlin only played in F sharp. It’s the only key he knew.
I can’t believe that. That’s hard to believe.

I know. Though he had a transposing piano, so he could stay in that

fingering of F sharp. Do you feel each key has its own color or feeling?
Yeah. I’ll tell you my favorite keys, okay? D, B, F, and F sharp. A’s a
good key too, sometimes. A has a strong vibe, very powerful vibe.

A happy vibe?
A happy vibe to me would be E and B. A is not a happy key, just a
powerful key.

“Mexican Girl” is in B.
Yeah. [Sings chorus] Yeah, B is not a common key, is it? I think “Whiter
Shade of Pale” was in B, wasn’t it?

I think it’s in C.
I thought it was in B. [It is in C major.]

I’d like to name keys to see if you have colors associated with them.
All right.
A.
Red.

E.
Red.

F.
White.

F sharp.
Green.

G.
Black.

A flat.
Turquoise.

A.
Red.

B flat.
Brown.

B.
Yellow.

E minor.
Black.

A minor.
Black.

C minor.
Black.

B minor.
Black.
Are all the minor keys black?
Yes.

“God Only Knows”—that’s in F sharp minor, right?

You know what? It’s not really in any one key. It’s a strange song.
That’s just the way it was written. It’s not written in any one key. It’s the
only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written
hundreds of songs.

Yes, it doesn’t start on the I chord.

Right.

Which is part of its beauty. It is an utterly stunning melody. And the

words to that are perfect.
Tony Asher. He expressed it beautifully. With that one I wrote some of
the melody and then he’d write some of the lyric, and then I’d write more.
We kind of wrote it together.

Your drum parts are unique—quite intricate and unlike normal drum
grooves. Rarely would you have a backbeat on the snare in a normal
place, often turning that around and other cool anomalies. How did you
do those?
I would write out the manuscript. Like with Hal Blaine, I would write
out the chart. With other drummers who couldn’t read charts, I’d have to
teach it to them without the charts.

Was Dennis a great drummer?

No. He was a good drummer but not a great drummer. Hal Blaine was
great. He was my favorite. A great drummer is important. But you can’t
forget the bass lines. Drummers are like [sings simple drum beat]. The bass
player sometimes plays that bass, but sometimes he’ll play a third instead of
the tonic, like in Motown. You’re in C, but you play an E in the bass. Or
you’re in the key of F and you’ll play a C, which is the fifth. You can’t
forget Motown.

Besides being a pianist, you play bass and played bass with the band.
How did being a bassist influence your music?
 I learned how to write bass lines. I’m self-taught. I taught myself how to
write bass lines. Knowing how to play bass affects how you write. You
write the melody then and the changes, against the bass line, and build a
strong structure. If you start with the bass line, you can be sure of having a
firm structure.

That structure is what causes your songs to resound. They are timeless
—
Depending on who you talk to.

Do you feel your songs are timeless?

Well, yeah, I think my music is all-time music. I think if you listen to
any of The Beach Boys records ten years from now, you’ll like them just as
much.

What makes a song great? What’s the most important thing? Is it the
melody?
I think the most important thing about a song is the melody and the
lyrics.

More important than harmony?

Harmony, like with “Don’t Worry Baby,” the harmonies are very sweet.
The harmonies on “California Girls” were very sweet, but they were nice.
The harmonies on “Good Vibrations” are not real sweet and pleasant, but
they were right for the song.

Do you think of harmonies while writing?

No, that’s a later thing in the studio.

With The Beach Boys would you record each part separately?
Well, it depends on what year you’re talking about. In the sixties we
would do it all at once. In the seventies and the eighties we would do it,
sometimes, one part at a time.

You’ve gone through lots of hardship in your life. Without that pain do
you think you would have written the masterpieces that you did?
 Probably not. No. Because I went through a lot of bullshit in my life,
and that’s probably why I had to squeeze out some good songs.

First time I interviewed you, back in 1988, you were working with Dr.
Landy. In retrospect was that a good thing?
Yes. Well, he yelled a little bit, you know. He yelled at people. He didn’t
have much control on his temper.

Do you have any sense of how much joy your music has brought to the
world?
I don’t know if it brings joy or not. I don’t know.

It does. There are so many people just in my life who turn to your
music to make them feel better.
Oh. That’s amazing. When people say, “Brian, you brought a lot of joy
to me with your music,” I don’t know if they’re telling the truth or not.

They are.
Okay. I believe you.

OceanofPDF.com
Kris Kristofferson
 Another Word for Freedom
Nashville, Tennessee 1999

Only two times in my life have I seen women actually swoon. I mean total,
fall-down swoon. The first was at an event that Gregory Peck attended. And
though Peck was in his eighties then, he was still tall and debonair, and
upon seeing him in the flesh, a young woman swooned. Her knees seemed
to buckle backward, and she folded softly to the ground. Peck smiled and
offered her a hand, as if this happened all the time.
The second time was with Kris Kristofferson. We were walking together
in the lobby of the old Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, where he was taking
part in a show I helped write and produce called The Salute to the American
Songwriter. There he swiftly charmed everyone with his acoustic renditions
of classics he wrote such as “Me and Bobby McGee,” “For the Good
Times,” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
The afternoon of the show we were strolling through the lobby, and
being with this legend of songwriting, who also happened to be a movie star
who had done not a little but a lot of acting, I asked what meant more to
him, the music or the movies. “Oh, the music,” he said immediately. “By
far. The music means everything. Movie acting is fun, and I can do it. And
people pay me for it. Sometimes a lot. But it’s not like writing a song.”
He said this while we turned the corner, at which time a young woman
in a floor-length white gown saw me and then saw the man I was talking to.
She seemed to faint with her eyes open, but vertically. With an odd smile
she softly tumbled in on herself like a rag doll, collapsing softly to the floor.
There were people all around who came to her immediate aid, and she was
fine, her head still spinning slightly as she still focused on him and said
meekly, “Hi, I’m Karen!”
When I interviewed him for this discussion I related the swoon story,
and he said, “Really? Who was she?” I told him I wasn’t sure and asked if
that happened a lot. “Not as much as it used to,” he said.
He was born Kristoffer Kristofferson on June, 22, 1936, in Brownsville,
Texas. His father, Lars Kristofferson, was a US Air Force major general
who encouraged Kris to become a soldier, which he ultimately did.
His first song, written when he was eleven, was called “I Hate Your
Ugly Face” (which, he said, his kids love). After the first, he kept honing
his songwriting chops through high school and wrote more seriously when
he got into college. A Rhodes scholarship came with a ticket to England,
with study at Oxford University and exposure to the Soho folk music scene.
Paul Lincoln, the manager of UK pop star Tommy Steele, placed an ad in
the paper, which Kris answered, looking for singers to make records. They
changed his name to Kris Carson. He cut a few songs, but legal
entanglements kept them from being released, and Kris Carson became Kris
Kristofferson again.
But he hadn’t paid any dues, he said, and he felt he had some life to
live. His father’s pressure to join the Army worked, and after receiving
flight training in Alabama, he became a helicopter pilot and worked his way
up to captain. Stationed in West Germany in the early sixties, he formed a
band and wrote some songs. “Once I started writing again,” he said, “I
decided when I got back into the music that I wanted to start at the bottom.
Fortunately that’s where they put me.” Soon he was sweeping the floors at
Nashville’s famed Columbia Studios.
Proximity to country legends allowed him to peddle his songs. When
June Carter Cash was in the studio he gave her a tape for her husband,
Johnny Cash. Which she accepted, but it seemed to get lost in the piles of
tapes people sent to him. So to get his attention, and using skills he learned
in the Army, he borrowed a helicopter and landed it right in Cash’s front
yard, where he delivered his tape. It got his attention. Johnny cut “Sunday
Morning Coming Down,” and his career was officially launched.
 But he didn’t stop flying. To support himself while writing songs and
trying to get them cut, he worked as a commercial helicopter pilot for
Petroleum Helicopters International. Many of his songs were born—or
worked on—while in flight or between flights while sitting on an oil
platform, as related in the following conversation.
In 1966 he started recording his own songs and, in 1970, recorded his
first full album, Kristofferson. Though it didn’t sell much at first, many of
his songs were recorded by many singers, including Ray Price (“For the
Good Times”), Waylon Jennings (“The Taker”), Sammi Smith (“Help Me
Make It Through the Night”), Bobbi Bare (“Come Sundown”), and others.
In a very short time he went from student to sweeper to songwriter-singer to
legend. Somewhere along the way he also became a movie star in A Star Is
Born, with Barbra Streisand, as well as one of the most famous flops of all
time, Heaven’s Gate, directed by Michael Cimino. When I told him I
actually loved Heaven’s Gate, which I did, he said, “You’re the one!”
His most famous song is “Me and Bobby McGee,” recorded by Janis
Joplin. As he explains in these pages, he never heard her record of it until
after she was gone.

Do you always write your songs on guitar?

Kris Kristofferson: Usually. Often I write them in my head. Then when
I can get next to a guitar, I see if it works.
When I was real young the tunes used to come first. But then once I
went to Nashville and started being serious about it, then it went just the
opposite. And finally, after watching some songwriters like Mickey
Newbury, I realized you had to have a combination of the two. But still the
words and the ideas come first to me now.

And then you’ll think of the music in your head before going to guitar?
Yeah.

Bacharach said he did it that way. But most songwriters write with an
instrument.
I’m not that good a musician, I don’t think. I probably have more
freedom in my head.
Do you remember writing “Casey’s Last Ride”?
I do. I remember starting it years and years ago. The imagery goes all
the way back to London, when I was hanging around there. But I didn’t
finish it until I was driving around one night. I used to work out of Morgan
City, Louisiana, for a helicopter company. Flying out to the offshore oil
rigs. And I used to drive back and forth from Nashville, every other week,
right up to 1969. Anyway I can remember driving through a rainstorm. One
of those jungle storms [laughs] they have down there in Louisiana. At
night. Those verses in the middle of “Casey,” that pretty part starting with
“Oh,” she said, “Casey it’s been so long . . .” Those just came to me. It
seemed I didn’t know whether they would fit together or not. That’s always
been one of my favorites.

Is that unusual, that lines to a song like that will just come to you?
No. No. Some of my best songs have come like that. But, I mean, I’m
always thinking about them at some level of my consciousness. [Laughs]
Running through my computer up there.

The mind never really stops working on them, does it?

Yeah. I think that’s the way mine organizes my experience. Lines just
keep going through it. Especially here where I live now. I go out and work,
clearing weeds and trees and stuff. And I’ll be working for eight hours out
there, and you’ve got a lot of time for stuff to run through your head.

You come up with songs out there?

Yeah. And some of them never go anywhere. But lines are always going
through my head.

Do you need to write down the good ones to remember them, or do they
stay with you?
I count on them to stay with me. If they’re good enough, I stick with it.
Unfortunately I’ve lost some stuff that way. [Laughs] My wife just pointed
out some things she found that I put down on tape and just totally forgot.
But they have good stuff in them.
Are you always working on songs, or do you take time off from
writing?
I think both. But I think on some level my brain is always writing.
Probably always will be. I noticed one of my youngest kids—he’s five years
old—he does it all the time. He just walks around singing his experience.
Whatever’s happening.

You’ve written several songs that are standards now, such as “Help Me
Make It Through the Night.” Was that one where the title came first?
No. No, I had the title last. Which is kind of odd, because that’s
probably the best-known part of it. I was sitting on an oil platform fifty
miles south of New Orleans [laughs], out in the water. I had my helicopter
tied down on top of the deck, and I would sit up there with my guitar by
myself. I had an old twelve-string at the time. And I remember the images
were first. The images of the verses. “Take the ribbons from your hair /
Shake it loose and let it fall . . .” Probably just what a guy thinks about
[laughs] when he’s out there on Alcatraz! No wine, women, or song out
there on those oil platforms. I think I got the title from something I read that
Frank Sinatra said one time. He said he would take a bottle or a broad or
whatever it took to get through the night. [Laughs]

When you get to that place, where you reach a title that is perfect, is
there a sense you are finding something that is there or inventing
something new?
Well, I never thought it was that unusual—help me make it through the
night. I thought the whole song was good. I thought it was a sensual kind of
sexy song. Feedback that I got from my friends—Sammi Smith was one of
them—was so positive that I figured this one worked. And actually Sammi
got her record out. I think Waylon and Ray Price were arguing over who
would record it. While that was going on, Jim Malloy recorded Sammi, and
she had a hit with it. And then Gladys Knight had a hit with it.
And Jerry Lee [Lewis]. When Jerry Lee sang it, it was a command:
“Help me make it through the night!” [Laughs]
Jerry Lee has a way of transforming everything he sings and makes it
his own song, whether it’s an Al Jolson song or Hank Williams or whatever.
I remember the first time he recorded a song that Shel Silverstein and I
wrote called “Once More with Feeling.” And we were just blown away
because it was an okay song, but he made it wonderful. [Laughs] It’s one of
the special joys of being a songwriter that a novel writer or painter doesn’t
get. That you can see someone else take your work and transform it.

And transform it positively?

Not always. But more often than not. Because most people who are
making music are doing it for a reason—they’re good at it.

Shel Silverstein was such a brilliant songwriter. And one of the very
few people with whom you’ve collaborated on songs.
I’ve never really got my name on a collaboration with a lot of people.
Because I just wanted to see the credit, like sitting in the same bus or
something. But Shel’s one of the few people that I actually cowrote with. A
couple of songs. One of them, he just gave me the idea and I went and
wrote it myself. “The Taker,” that Waylon [Jennings] cut, and “Once More
with Feeling.”

Why did you end up writing with him?

Shel, he showed up in Nashville at a time when I was a couple of years
away from making it as a songwriter. He hung out with us songwriters. He
was a respected writer already as well as being a guy who sold books. He
was kind of famous when he came to town. He hung out with all these
broke songwriters. Loved songwriting. And he was such a good one. To me,
some of his songs are just perfect. Like “Boy Named Sue.” It’s a perfect
example of a Silverstein song to me. Because it grabs you with its great
imagery all the way through, and then he hits you with the surprise ending.
And then, just when you are saying wow about that, he hits you with
another one—the last line. [Laughs] I mean, you never saw it coming. I
really appreciated working with Shel.

I understand you and Willie Nelson tried to write a song together, but
you only got one line.
[Much laughter] Actually Roger Miller was in the room too. And the
three of us should have been able to come up with something wonderful.
We didn’t, though. We were having too good of a time, I think. We had one
which started, “‘Hello,’ he lied . . .” That was as far as we got. [Laughs]

“Me and Bobby McGee” is your most famous song. Do you remember
writing it?
Yes. I wrote that, again, while I was working down in the Gulf of
Mexico. At the time I was flying around Baton Rouge. That is probably
why Baton Rouge and New Orleans were in it. But it was an idea that Fred
Foster had given me. He told me he called up one time when I was about to
go back down to the gulf for another week of flying, and he said, “I got a
song title for you: ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’” Boudleaux Bryant, the
songwriter, had an office in Fred’s building. Fred was the guy who owned
Monument Records and Columbine, which I was writing for at the time.
And Boudleaux’s secretary was named Bobbie McKee. I thought he said
“McGee.” And he told me to go write this song. And God, I can’t write on
assignment. It gives me the worst case of writer’s block that I’d ever seen.
[Laughs] So I had to hide from him for a couple of months.
But then the idea just started growing in my head. And I can remember
when the last line came to me. I was driving to the airport in New Orleans,
and the windshield wipers were going into the line about “the windshield
wipers slapping time and Bobby clapping hands . . .” And it finished the
song for me.
And I went back. Found Billy Swan back at Columbine Music, he was
the only guy who was still there when I got back to Nashville. So we stayed
up all night making the demo of it. It just blew Fred away.

So the only idea he gave you was the title?

No, he said Bobby McGee is a she! And I thought, “Oh God, I’ve got to
start over.” [Laughs] But I don’t know, we sort of talked it over, what could
happen. I was thinking of it as two people traveling around. I thought of the
movie La Strada with Anthony Quinn. He’s traveling around with Giulietta
Masina in this little funky circus thing they had. He leaves her by the road.
She’s kind of half-witted. And he’s getting tired of taking care of her.
Anyway, he leaves her there.
And at the end of the film he hears this song she used to play. And this
woman, who’s hanging up laundry, is singing it or whistling it. And he goes
up and asks her where she learned that song. And she said, “There was this
little girl who came into the village, and nobody knew where she came
from, and she died.” And later you see Anthony Quinn out there in this
tavern getting in fights. He goes out on the beach and ends up howling at
the stars. It was like the double-edge sword of freedom. He was free from
her. He left her sleeping by the road. He wheeled his motorcycle off so he
wouldn’t wake her up. But he lost her. And that was the feeling that I
wanted to get out of “Bobby McGee.” And freedom’s just another word for
nothing. Nothing left to lose. Then when I wrote that, [laughs] one of my
songwriter friends, at least one of them, tried to get me to take that line out.
[Laughs] They said, “You’ve got so much good concrete imagery all
through the song, and then you get all philosophical in the chorus.” I’m glad
I didn’t listen to them.

That’s why it so works so well. That line works so well because you set
it up with all that imagery, so it’s a departure point. That’s a song, of
course, which has been so transformed by different versions of it. None
more famous than the Janis Joplin version.
You can’t think of it without thinking of Janis. Because she made it her
own. But I love the way Jerry Lee [Lewis] sang it too. And Willie [Nelson].
And Roger [Miller]. And shit, Gordon Lightfoot, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. It’s
one of those great songs that a lot of different people can own.

And like a lot of your songs, it can be done in many styles. It can be a
fast rock song or a country song.
Yeah. I’ve done it every different way.

Did you have anything to do with Janis’s recording of it?

No. Janis and I hung out for a couple of months right before I started
performing at the Troubadour. She was going off on this rock and roll train.
That was a tour that was in the east. I was starting to perform at the
Troubadour and the Bitter End. And then I went over to the Isle of Wight.
And I was starting to do my own performance. I wasn’t around her much
then. When I came back from the Isle of Wight, I came back to do the
Monterey folk festival, that Joan Baez was putting on. And the day after it
was over we got the word that Janis had died. And so I flew down there and
we were hanging out in the motel where she died. The Landmark. And Paul
Rothschild, the producer of the album, told me to come by the studio the
next day, and he wanted to play me that. And I did. It just blew me away.
Just blew me away. I heard later—many years later—a tape of her singing it
at Threadgill’s in Washington. She had a big old teary introduction and
everything.

Of course, the Grateful Dead used to do the song too. And they changed
that line to “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to do—”
Nothing left to do! [Laughs] That’s the most hippie thing I’ve ever seen.
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do. God almighty, how can
you do that? [Laughs]

Do you remember writing “For the Good Times”?

Yeah. I was at the end of a relationship. Pretty way to say good-bye.

That is a great thing about being a songwriter, that even when the
relationship is over, you still have the song.
Yeah. Don’t cross a songwriter. He’ll get you back. [Laughs]

How about “Sunday Morning Coming Down”?

That was just autobiography. It’s funny—that was Sam Peckinpah’s
favorite song. And Robert Mitchum liked it. And Kurt Vonnegut told me it
was the best song [laughs] that he’d ever heard. I tried to figure out what
we all had in common. And I think it was drinking. Waking up with no way
to hold your head that didn’t hurt. And that was just walking around on a
Sunday in Nashville. In those days I didn’t have any family there in
Nashville. I was living in a slum tenement. [Laughs] A condemned
building. And the bars weren’t even open on Sundays. So it seemed like a
perfect day for that song.

How old were you when you wrote your first song?
I was eleven.

Is there one song of yours that is a favorite?

Oh no. It’s the last one I’ve written. But they’re like your kids.
Somebody was trying to put together a collection from my different albums,
and they wanted to do about thirty songs. And I started going through the
different albums, most of which nobody ever heard. And taking songs out
that I liked. And I had it down to like seventy-five. And that was too many.

OceanofPDF.com
Bernie Taupin
 Writing with Elton
Hollywood, California 2009

He loves cowboys. And all things of the American West. As Elton John’s
lyricist for three decades, Bernie Taupin is one of the most famous British
songwriters of all time. Yet his passion is planted firmly in all things
American—he lives the life of a working cowboy on his ranch near Santa
Barbara, and even when he comes to his Hollywood office to tend to
business, he is forever surrounded by immense posters of The Wild Bunch
and other vestiges of the Old West. Though this fervor has been reflected in
his songs dating back to 1970’s Tumbleweed Connection and most
pronounced, of course, in the words and spirit of their Captain Fantastic
and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, it’s a subject matter to which Elton John no
longer related at the time of our talk. So Taupin created a new outlet for
such songs, his own band Farm Dogs, with whom he recorded the
gloriously acoustic Last Stand in Open Country and was at work on the
follow-up.
And when the time came to write new songs with Elton, Taupin
restricted himself to neutral content that met his partner’s approval, a
process entailed in the following discussion. “I write songs about desert
nights and horses and guns because I’m around them,” he said, laughing.
“That’s what I do. I spend most of my life on a horse. Elton doesn’t. He
spends most of his life in Versace.”
 Born in 1950 in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, England, he met his lifelong
partner in song in 1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper, by answering an ad in the
UK music paper New Musical Express placed by Liberty Records. They
were in search of new songwriters. Elton answered the same ad, and
whether it was providence or happenstance that brought them together, they
were the perfect team. Bernie was known to famously labor for months, if
necessary, crafting a lyric. He’d deliver a bunch of these, typed, to Elton,
who would quickly page through, land on one that spoke to him at that
moment, and compose the perfect melody.
It was a wedding of great craft and instinct, of determined diligence and
unconstrained genius, and it produced miracles. From early classics such as
“Your Song,” through multidimensional suites such as “Levon” and “Tiny
Dancer,” to the explosion of chromatic narratives and adventures in
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and beyond, Elton and Bernie wrote songs for
the ages.
Taupin spoke softly and with much humor and British self-deprecation
about this challenge and others that exist in the life of a world-famous
cowboy-lyricist.

Is it true that Elton will take one of your lyrics that you’ve worked on
for a long time and write the music in ten minutes?
Bernie Taupin: Yeah, yeah. It’s ridiculous. He has written four songs in
a day sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t even write songs before he goes
into the studio. He goes in the studio on the morning that they are going to
start recording and writes a couple of songs, and when they come in he
starts recording. Go figure.

How do you explain it?

I think he’s a borderline genius. I think because of Elton’s persona—
because he is larger than life—sometimes people forget that. He is an
unbelievable singer, an amazing musician, and an incredible writer. He’s
just got a natural flair for melody.
What he does is very interesting, because sometimes he’ll play me
something, and I’ll think, “That’s not so great. It’s quite good, but it’s not so
great.” And suddenly you realize that there are little nuances in that song
that come back to haunt you. And you’ll hear it again and you’ll go, “Shit,
this is good. I didn’t realize it, and now I know better.” That’s his ace in the
hole. He just has these little elements where he’ll twist the melody to make
it interesting. He’s still doing it. The songs that we are writing for this new
album, they’re for the most part human condition songs. They don’t venture
out of that. They’re just really, really good songs. Real classic material. And
he executes that stuff just brilliantly.

You said you just wrote thirty new songs for Elton. Does he take them
all and decide which one to work on?
When there’s that many, I put them all in a folder. And he just goes to
the piano, puts the folder up, and sees what catches his eye. He’ll skim
through it. I’m sure he looks at titles too. Sometimes he won’t even read
through a lyric. He’ll just start. [Laughs] He won’t even understand what
the song’s about till probably it’s recorded, and six months later he’ll come
up to me and say, “You know, I just figured out what that song’s about!”

Do you think the lyric and the music are of equal importance in a song?
I think it should be. I don’t necessarily think it’s the truth. I think the
melody sells the song. I don’t think the lyric sells the song. But if you’ve
got them both, it’s even better. But melody is what sells a song.

Can a song be great even without a great title and lyric?

Well, I think the perfect example is that Eric Clapton song that won Best
Song of the Year.

“Change the World.” [Written by Tommy Sims, Gordon Kenny, and W.

Kirkpatrick]
What sold that song, I believe, is production. And it had a good melody.
But don’t listen to the lyric. Because the lyric is appalling. [Laughs] It’s a
bad lyric. There are some rhymes in there that are really awful. But that’s
not what sold the song.

Presently you’ve been writing songs both for Elton and for the Farm
Dogs. Might a Farm Dogs song ever work for Elton or vice versa?
Oh no. I had to put myself in a whole different frame of mind because
when I work with Elton—and I credit him for his honesty—he likes the
material to be ambiguous. No “he” or “she.” The references are important
to him. He wants people to believe that what he is singing about is true.
That it’s honest. So the subject matter is different. When I come back and
write for Farm Dogs I get gritty and write about things that I want to write
about.

So many of your previous songs for Elton were story songs—

Yeah, but the thing is that times change. Elton could never make a
Tumbleweed Connection now because he wouldn’t want to. He wouldn’t
feel himself honest doing it. Because his personality has developed into
something larger than life. And that’s not what he’s interested in. In a way
Elton’s a lot more advanced than I am. I’m a bit more retro than he is. He’s
very into what’s going on in England. And it doesn’t interest me. It’s all too
parochial for me. I can’t relate to bands singing about bus shelters in
Newcastle.

In the past was Elton open to all kinds of subject matter?

Well, in the past we were finding our way. I think that’s why people
love all that old stuff. Because it was very evocative and it covered every
musical source. He’s developed his style, he’s developed his personality,
he’s developed his character. And now his music reflects the character he is
now.

Do you always write down your ideas to preserve them?

Oh yeah, I have to. If I get too drunk, I’ll forget them. I’ve been in
horrible situations sometimes where I’ve not been in the vicinity of paper
and pen, where I’ve come up with several lines strung together and driving
along and repeating them till I can get somewhere where I can write it
down.
I came up with the first verse of “Rocket Man” like that. It was in my
head as I was driving to my parents’ house in England many years ago. I
drove like crazy down these backroads trying to get there in time so I’d
remember it and rushed in the door to write it down. I had the whole
opening bit: “She packed my bags last night, pre-flight / Zero hour, nine
a.m. / And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then.” That all came to me at
once.
When writing a lyric, do you work from titles?
Yes, very often. I have my word processor, a writing pad, my guitar, and
hopefully I have a title. I always work off titles. I have a tape recorder in my
car, and whenever I get ideas I just talk them into my tape recorder. I love
titles. Titles have always fascinated me. I usually got the title on the top of
the piece of paper, and I will start basically at the beginning and work my
way down. Sometimes I’ll just write all the verses first and then come back
and write the chorus. I never usually write the chorus first. It’s almost like I
create a song like writing a story. The story comes alive.

Do you generally grasp the full meaning of a song while writing it?
In the old days I didn’t really think at all about what I was writing. It
used to just fall into place. That’s why some of that early stuff is very, very
esoteric. Some of it I haven’t got a clue what it means anyway. Things like
“Take Me to the Pilot”—I haven’t the foggiest idea what the song is about.

Do you always designate specific song sections for Elton?

Yeah. Always. Even if you look at my early files. My assistant just
dragged out a big trunk, and the first lyric on top was the very, very, very
first song that Elton and I ever wrote. “Scarecrow.” It was never recorded.
It’s on a little piece of schoolboy note paper, and it’s very meticulously
written, and it has verse one, verse two, chorus, and so on.

“Your Song” is also one of your first, and it’s such a timeless, beautiful
song.
It was one of the first songs we wrote when we really got locked into
writing and when we had really honed our craft after writing all this sort of
early bits and pieces that never surfaced.
I wrote that song one morning when Elton and I shared an apartment in
Northwood Hills just outside of London. And I remember writing it as I
was having breakfast—the original lyric had tea stains on it. He wrote it the
same day. We went into the room where the piano was and just hammered it
out.
The great thing about that song is that the naiveté of it is truly honest.
It’s real. It’s not somebody pretending to write a song that is simple and
naive. It is a simple, naive song. And it still stands up.
It’s one of many standards you’ve written with Elton. Is it satisfying for
you to have written standards?
Oh, sure. I’m very proud of my songs. I’m fiercely proud of our catalog
and what we’ve done. I think it’s pretty remarkable. I think it’s remarkable
that two people had been writing consistently well for thirty years. That’s
over half of my life. And still writing, still being prolific, still writing great
songs.

OceanofPDF.com
Paul Williams
 Only Just Begun
West Hollywood, California 1992

His first job was as a sport parachutist in air circuses. “It was a very brief
period of my life,” he said, “but it has that nice carney ring to it. There I
was, high over Albuquerque on the wing of a biplane, barnstorming.”
He first came to Hollywood not to write songs but to act in movies.
“But I looked like a little kid with a hangover,” he recalled, “so it wasn’t
easy to cast me.”
Unable to land any acting roles and finding an abundance of time on his
hands, Paul Williams turned to songwriting. “I didn’t have any money,” he
remembered over breakfast at Hugo’s in West Hollywood, “and I couldn’t
get any work. So I started writing songs mostly for my own amusement.
And once I started writing, that’s all I did. I was constantly writing. When I
got an office at A&M, which was a few years later, I was there around the
clock. I loved it.”
Recognizing Paul’s intense drive and inherent talents as a lyricist, the
publisher Chuck Kaye teamed him up with the composer Roger Nichols, a
collaboration that started slowly but lasted for many years and produced
countless hits, including “We’ve Only Just Begun,” “An Old Fashioned
Love Song,” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.”
It was Nichols from whom Paul learned the basics of song craft: “For
about four years he was my music school. He was a trained musician, and I
learned a lot of the basics about how to put a song together from Roger
Nichols and from Chuck Kaye.”
For four years the team of Williams and Nichols turned out songs and
had no hits. And although they would work solidly for hours, when the day
was done and Nichols would go home, Paul would stay in the office and
continue writing. To eliminate the need for sleep, he turned to artificial
means, as he remembered. “I think I discovered amphetamines by then. So
many of the songs were written by Paul Williams and those little yellow
pills.”
He’s sober these days, and this change is foremost in his thoughts. “I
can talk to you about songwriting,” he said, “or I can talk to you about my
life. And my life right now is about being in recovery.”
He was a “construction brat” born Paul Williams Jr. in Omaha,
Nebraska, in 1940. On the road with his family since he was an infant, he
lived all around the Midwest as well as South Dakota, Wyoming, and Ohio.
His father, an architectural engineer, was killed in a car wreck when Paul
was only thirteen, after which Paul was sent off to live with an aunt in
California. After high school in 1958 he moved first to Denver, where he
learned to parachute, before moving to Hollywood to pursue acting.
He was raised on the music of Crosby and Sinatra, making him the
perfect choice to write the hilariously inept songs for the movie Ishtar. But
it was the beginnings of rock and roll that truly fueled his fire in the fifties.
And when he heard The Beatles his life was altered forever: “The Beatles
made me crazy. Sgt. Pepper was a turning point in my life.”
His collaboration with Nichols resulted in worldwide fame, thousands
of recordings, and many awards. It also led him back to the world of
movies. He wrote the entire song score for Alan Parker’s delightful debut
film, Bugsy Malone, starring a teenage Jodie Foster. For the 1976 film A
Star Is Born, costarring Kris Kristofferson (see page 286), he collaborated
with Barbra Streisand on “Evergreen,” which won the Oscar for Best Song
that year.
Although he has written so many standards known the world over, when
asked what his favorite song is, he answers with one most people don’t
know, “A Perfect Love,” which was recorded by Gladys Knight and Ray
Charles. “The lyrics say a lot about my own life: ‘Old enough to know
when I’ve been wrong, and fool enough to think I might still change.’”
 This interview was conducted in 1992. He’s since not only remained
sober but also became the president of ASCAP in 2009, and he has worked
diligently ever since as a champion for songwriters’ rights and education.
Instead of looking back and mourning the business as it was, as do
many of his peers, Williams looks forward with both realism and optimism.
“Yes, the business has changed,” he said at an ASCAP event in 2014, “and
a lot of us don’t even recognize this business that it has become. But we
must recognize that songs matter as much as ever. How people are buying
and listening to them now has changed profoundly, but as the creators of
songs, we must adjust to the new world and recognize that songs are still in
the very center of people’s lives. And we will fight to ensure that
songwriters receive fair compensation as they always have up to now.”

How did you learn to write songs?

Paul Williams: I learned by doing it. I would write all day with Roger
Nichols, and then at the end of the day Roger would want to go home. And
I had a tendency to not want to do that. So I’d stay up all night and write
with anybody who wanted to write with me. And out of that came other
collaborations.

Did you and Roger develop a routine for writing together?

Nichols would write a melody that I’d like, and then he locked me into
the office and wouldn’t let me out until I finished it. Roger’s like six foot
five, and he’d make me stay. So all of my lyrics were written to existing
melodies.
When writing words to a melody, I always thought the words were
already in the music. The music is the key that opens certain emotional
rooms in me. I hear the music and it touches certain places in me, and then I
speak about how I feel about those places.

One of my favorite songs that you and Nichols wrote is “Traveling

Boy,” which Art Garfunkel recorded.
“Traveling Boy” was written in the embryo. We wrote it and it laid
around a long time before anyone did it. Garfunkel recorded it beautifully
on the Angel Clare album. I usually closed my show with it when I
performed. I loved it. I ripped off [Garfunkel’s] arrangement and used it for
myself.

You and Nichols wrote many hits for The Carpenters. Were those songs
written specifically for them?
The Carpenters were good for me. The songs that they did were not
written with them in mind.
“We’ve Only Just Begun” had all the romantic beginnings of a bank
commercial. Roger Nichols and I were asked to write a song for a Crocker
Bank commercial. It was something that really hadn’t been done yet, to use
a song instead of copy for a commercial. Roger wrote the music, and since
it was a commercial about a young couple starting out, I wrote “We’ve only
just begun / White lace and promises / A kiss for luck and we’re on our
way.” That takes us through the wedding. Then driving off into the sunset
—“Before the rising sun we fly . . .”
We wrote the bridge after the fact and just strung together what we had
as a song, just in case anyone wanted to record it. It never occurred to us
that anyone would. I mean “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was the big song at the
time, so to come along with something as schmaltzy as this and to have it
take off like it did . . .
Mark Lindsay recorded it first, and his record was on its way up the
charts when The Carpenters, who had also heard me sing it on the
commercial and had asked if there was a whole song, recorded it. They
released their single, and it just raced up to number one.
Some songs take months and some take minutes. “Old Fashioned Love
Song” was about a twenty-minute song. That’s how long it took to write.
“Rainy Days and Mondays” took months to write. I knew that part with
“rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” but I didn’t know why or
what I was going to do with it.
I think the interesting thing about the song is that it sold more than 3
million copies of sheet music. Which means people were buying it and
learning it. To me that was a sign of something going back into the family
structure—learning the song and playing it at home.

It’s an interesting dichotomy that you were writing these beautiful old-
fashioned ballads, although your life and lifestyle were anything but
old-fashioned.
Yes. It was very Norman Rockwell for someone who was as Mad
magazine in their personal life as I was. Because just as my success was
ascending, my lifestyle was getting more and more like Dante’s Inferno. I
never looked like the kind of guy who wrote the songs. I wore round black
glasses and had shoulder-length hair, a top hat with a feather in it, tie-dyed
pants, and took a lot of psychedelics.
I remember Bing Crosby driving off the lot at A&M, pointing at me,
and talking to his driver with great disgust. And I thought it was interesting
because I was probably the only guy on the lot who wrote the kinds of
songs he would sing. So I felt very rejected. I think I went out and drank.
I am a very romantic person, but I had a dark side. I think I had a
spiritual awakening, and it’s the reason I can sit down at this table and talk
about this stuff.

Do songs come from spirit?

It feels that way. So much of songwriting is on a subconscious level,
where what you’re writing just comes out of you. And it’s totally different
from what you’ve been concentrating on consciously. It comes from a
totally different place, and I think that if I can trust that work is being done
on a subconscious level, then it kind of flows out.
I used to use drugs to get to that place; now I have patience. Have a
little patience, give it a little time—it will come. You don’t have to write
down every single line. If you just sit quietly or go about your business, the
right line will come. I write just what I need.

I’m a big fan of your songs for the film Bugsy Malone. How did that
originate?
It was Alan Parker’s first film. He came from London with these
amazing drawings of what he wanted to do. I thought he was crazy. But I
loved the idea. Because these were kids dressed as adults driving cars with
pedals. It seemed to me I could take that twist and use it in the songs. It was
creating a nonspecific period music. It wasn’t really thirties or forties. Jodie
Foster played Tallulah in that, and she was wonderful.
You wrote the beautiful song “Evergreen” with Barbra Streisand. Was
that a melody that she wrote prior to you writing the lyrics?
Yes. She had the melody down and played it for me on guitar. She was
really shy when she played it, really charming. That melody was full blown
and complete when I got it. I didn’t change a note. I think I would have
been picked up by the hair if I had.
As I started working on the lyrics she got really excited, as if she had
never heard the song before. It was really charming. Her performance in
that movie [A Star Is Born] was brilliant.
When I heard her melody for “Evergreen” I knew we had a love ballad
that’s a classic ballad. Now all I had to do was write words for it. No
wonder I did drugs—when you set yourself up like that. It was a classic
melody. I’d like to see her write some more. She writes with two
instruments, the guitar or keyboard. And this amazing voice and this head
that thinks melody options against chords that I don’t know where they
come from, but they’re beautiful.

What was it like to write those intentionally bad songs for Ishtar?
I became possessed with my absolute belief that Chuck and Lyle were
real guys, the characters that Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty played. I
worked months on that project. Oddly enough, a lot of the underground
bands in LA started to do those songs.
I enjoyed that; it was like therapy finding out who those guys were. I
crawled into their heads. It was a safe place to go because I was busy losing
myself, and I wasn’t comfortable in my own head, so I climbed into their
heads. I had to write good bad songs.
I was surprised the critics panned it to the extent that they did. They
didn’t review the movie, they reviewed the budget. I thought it was a great
film.

I did too. One of the great songwriting films. When they’re crawling
through the desert, about to die, and start coming up with lyrics—that
is the essence of the songwriter’s life. This is a bad situation, but maybe
there’s a song here.
[Laughs] Yes. I’m glad I did it.
 Everything I’ve done has brought me to where I am right now, and I’m
the happiest and most serene I have been in my life. There was a time in my
life when I first got sober, I didn’t know if I would ever write again. Not
just my songwriting but my entire life was caught up in drugs and alcohol
use. But I now know that my ability to communicate came from God. So
I’m running a little slower now, but at least I’m still writing.

OceanofPDF.com
Maurice White
 Inside Earth, Wind & Fire
Hollywood, California 2008

He was the shining star, the drummer turned songwriter turned singer and
producer extraordinaire, the heart in the heart of the soul, the founder of
Earth, Wind & Fire.
Earth, Wind & Fire. The elemental poem, connecting the natural
elements at play forever on his astrological map to form his universe of
song. Earth is the rhythmic bedrock, the groove, the foundation for the
tower of soul. Wind is pure melody, notes in succession, the expression of
the human soul, the voice, the tune forever flowing, and with harmony
entwined, perpetually in motion, flowing forever forward. Fire is elemental
passion, the heat in the blood that pumps the heart, the sparks that catch
when words of love and spirit fuse with groove and melody and everything
ignites. All these disparate elements he wired together and connected like
miracle clockwork. Everything to accentuate everything. Pure precision yet
infused with authentic soul. Always crested with that element that always
sent the thing home and connected directly with the heart: human voices in
harmony. In a world of chaos, as he knew well, few things go deeper than
that sound of humans combining their voices in perfect harmony.
He was the guy who did it. The unifier.
First came gospel. It’s there he got that fire, that deep knowledge of
passion injected directly into the bloodstream by way of singing. Many
voices, many timbres, many different ranges and frequencies and textures,
all united into one rich, joyful sound, linked by one melody and one
message. It’s the reason song is forever linked with religion, with all
religions—that holy connection that comes when humans stop clashing to
sing together and to harmonize about God and man and heaven and earth.
He sang in church and he sang at home. Then came the drums and the
passion for pure rhythm that propelled him on a forever path toward one of
the most essentially soulful, exultant musical experiences ever preserved on
record: Earth, Wind & Fire. As the guiding light of this expansive group,
the unifier of all elements, the heart in the heart of the soul, Maurice White
wrote or cowrote all of their signature songs, including “That’s the Way of
the World,” “September,” “Fantasy,” and “Shining Star.” He won seven
Grammy awards and a total of twenty-one nominations.
He was also an artist highly respected by his fellow musicians and
industry folks and universally beloved by all those whose lives he touched.
But like other shining stars that burn so brightly, his light is already gone.
Just weeks past turning in the draft for this book, February 4, 2016, Maurice
White died at the age of seventy-four in Los Angeles from Parkinson’s
disease.
But that shining-star spirit shines forever bright in his chain of
inspirational songs and in those deeply dimensional musical tracks he
concocted, always anchored with solid grooves and colored beautifully with
horns, strings, synths, and rich vocals. The sound Maurice made.
He was born into a musical family in the musical mecca of Memphis,
1941. His father was a doctor who also played saxophone, and his
grandmother was a gospel singer. Gospel was the only music he knew for
years, and it was enough. Raised by his grandmother at first in the Foote
Homes projects in South Memphis, music infused his soul.
He started singing at six. At twelve he started playing drums. He took to
them like he’d played them his whole life. His great rhythmic prowess on
the snare itself inspired him to join the school marching band, becoming its
shining star. Not only was he a naturally gifted musician, he also had a flair
for performance and dug the shiny uniform he got to wear while dancing
down the field with his drum. It was a taste of things to come.
In time he moved to Chicago with his grandmother to be closer to his
mother and stepfather. It’s there he fell in with Chess Records, or “Chess
University,” as he called it, as it’s where he gained experience and wisdom
about how great records are made and how the business works.
At Chess he became an in-demand house drummer, playing on records
by their legion of legendary artists, including Etta James, Ramsey Lewis,
Muddy Waters, Betty Everett, Buddy Guy, and Sugar Pie DeSanto. In 1966
he went off to become the drummer in Ramsey Lewis’s trio.
His own band began to coalesce when he first teamed up as a
songwriting trio in Chicago with Wade Flemons and Don Whitehead to
write jingles for commercials. This led to a record deal with Capitol as The
Salty Peppers. Their first single, cowritten and performed by all three, was
“La La Time.” When the second single failed to fly they realized it was
truly “La La Time,” and they moved to Los Angeles to regroup.
Maurice renamed the band after the elements that united like harmony
parts in his astrological chart, Earth, Wind & Fire. He was the guiding light
of the group always, the chief songwriter, lead and harmony vocalist, and
producer. Always yearning for new equations of sounds to distinguish his
tracks, he began to weave in the acoustic kalimba, a thumb piano, with
early Moog synths, rich horn sections, and lush strings. It all came together
like magic, and it was a magic that emanated from his singular soul. He
redefined his own group, gave funk and soul a new depth and grace, and
impacted all in his wake, even fellow geniuses like Stevie Wonder.
Stevie was known to be reverential in his love of Maurice, a love that
was mutual. At the 2016 Grammy Awards, only eleven days after Maurice’s
death, Stevie expressed that love as he does best, transcending words to
pour his soul into a song. With the glorious five-part groove vocals of
Pentatonix joining him in exultant vocal richness, Stevie lit Maurice’s
“That’s the Way of the World” on a fire that burned so brightly the entire
audience was on their feet, dancing with joy, only moments in. Such is the
power of song.
Having momentously stepped out front from behind the drums, Maurice
was always impeccably and chromatically attired—this shining star shone
in shiny suits ever since the marching band showed him the way—and he
danced his exultant way up the soul and pop charts, shaping the sound of
the late seventies. In time his band would sell more than 90 million records.
Eventually the Parkinson’s caused him to cease touring with the band,
but like Brian Wilson with his Beach Boys, Maurice stayed at home and
wrote songs and produced records—the music never stopped flowing. He
also wrote songs for and produced a host of great artists, including Minnie
Riperton, Weather Report (he did the vocals on “Mr. Gone”), Barbra
Streisand, Neil Diamond, and Barry Manilow. All turned to Maurice as the
magic man, wanting an infusion of his chromatic soul in their music.
Personal aside: I always remember, personally, being in my freshman
dorm room at Boston University, 1977. These were the days long before
computers. We didn’t even have a TV in our room—we didn’t want one.
We had a stereo. And my roommate, who was a terrific dancer, had Earth,
Wind & Fire records. It’s when I discovered what true soul—the heart of
R&B, with harmonies and synth textures transcendent—sounded like. It
sounded like Maurice White and his band.
We spoke on a resplendently sunny day in Los Angeles, where he
graciously and generously expounded on his remarkable life in music.

Maurice White: When I moved to Chicago I was seventeen. In order to

go to college. I went to a junior college first, and then to Chicago Musical
Conservatory. I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to be a music
teacher.

What happened?
What happened is that after about a year or so I started to work at Chess
Records. Chess Records was like Chess University. [Laughs] It gave me an
opportunity to really spread my wings. I got an opportunity to play with all
of the artists I had dreamed about when I was a kid. I would pick up their
records and follow their careers. I had an opportunity to play with just about
everybody.

Were you already writing songs before this time?

Well, what happened, as a result of being in the business, going to Chess
every day, I kind of got the knack of understanding the simple songwriting,
you know. That was what it was really all about.
I kind of experimented a bit with some of my friends as far as song-
writing, but we just did, like, local stuff. We did commercial jingles and
things like that. So it wasn’t anything on a large level at that time.
And at Chess you got to work with Willie Dixon—
Yes, I played with Willie. I got to play drums on a lot of his records, and
he played stand-up bass. I learned a lot from him.

Etta James?
Yes, Etta James. She was extraordinary. I worked with everybody on the
roster.

And when you were playing drums were you also beginning to produce
and arrange?
Not at first. Mostly drumming at that time. I was just getting my feet
wet learning the structure of song and learning how to apply it in the proper
way. It was like a university, man, it really was. All the production was
done in one room, and I just got a chance to pick it up.

How long were you at Chess?

For five years.

Longer than a college term—

Yes. And it was like college and graduate school all in one.

How did you hook up with Ramsey Lewis?

Ramsey Lewis was an artist on the label. And he used to come down to
Chess all the time and just watch the band. Because we had a band that
worked for Chess primarily. And so he would come down and just watch
us. And we all knew each other.
When his own band broke up he needed a drummer and a bass player.
So he called on me and a friend of mine, Cleveland Eaton, who played bass.
And we’d go out on the road. It started as just an experimental trip to see
how I would work out. And we all gelled, so we decided to stay together,
and I joined his band. I worked with Ramsey for about four years.

Before Earth, Wind & Fire you started your own band?
Yes. What happened, during the time I was with Ramsey, I had a group
on the side called The Salty Peppers. And we made a little record deal with
Capitol Records. We had a regional hit in the Midwestern area with a song I
wrote called “La La Time.” I wrote it with Don Whitehead and Wade
Flemons.
What happened was when we wrapped up doing what was the formation
of that band, and I didn’t know it at the time, but the members of that band,
The Salty Peppers, became the original members of Earth, Wind & Fire.

How did that transition from Salty Peppers to Earth, Wind & Fire
happen?
We all came out to Los Angeles after I quit Ramsey’s band as The Salty
Peppers. So we changed our name to Earth, Wind & Fire.

Your name?
Yes. That’s my name. I was looking for a name for the band because I
wanted to change it from The Salty Peppers. This all happened in Chicago
before I had my astrological chart done. It was laid out on the table, and I
saw the elements that were in my chart, which were earth, air, and fire. I
turned air to wind. The rest is history.
We all came out to Los Angeles to try to make it. There were six of us.
In fact, we had a female in the band too. Her name was Sherry Scott.
Then I augmented the band with some members I picked up out here.
But it was six of us from Chicago. We stayed together for about eighteen
months. Then my brother Verdine eventually joined that particular band as
bass player. We began to augment and expand the band, and Verdine was a
part of that.

In the band you started by playing drums?

Yes, I was playing drums at first. And I was singing a little bit, but I had
to have some main singers because they were away from it.

By that time were you writing a lot of songs yourself?

By that time, because of circumstances and because I didn’t have any
writers to depend on, there were two other writers in the band, Don
Whitehead and Wade Flemons—they had a lot more experience in
commercial writing than I had. But I picked up on it because of my
experience of my playing, you know.
 So we wrote all the songs together. And then Sherry Scott, she was a
pretty good writer too. She contributed heavily to the writing.

So the writing would be done in a collaboration of all of you working

together?
Mostly the three of us, Whitehead, Flemons, and myself.

Is it true your songs always start with music?

Yes. The way I’ve always written is that we write the music first, and
then the music suggests the lyrics. I’ve always written like that.

Do you write on keyboard now? What do you usually use to write?

I usually write on keyboard now. I usually collaborate with other
people. I like writing with other people.
There are only two songs that I wrote primarily from the piano by
myself: “Head to the Sky” and “Devotion.”
But the band changed, and after eighteen months we decided to go
separate ways. So I had to re-form the band and got Ralph Johnson as
drummer, and I got Philip [Bailey] as a conga player and singer, and Larry
Dunn and Andrew Woolfolk, and that was expanded from that point on.

How did you hear of Philip Bailey?

A real good friend, Perry Jones, was a friend of Philip’s, and he turned
me on to Philip.

What a perfect player for your music. And his voice and your voice are
perfect together.
My intention in the beginning, when I got Philip in the band, was to put
him out front. I was not going to sing. I was only just going to play drums
in the back. But that didn’t work out because Philip’s range was a high
range. So I needed to balance that range.

Did you enjoy stepping out front from behind the drums?
It was always hard to get out front. I didn’t like it too much. But after
the girls started screaming and that stuff—

Then you got used to it.

 I got used to it. [Laughter] It was pretty easy to get used to.

Also you got a fine drummer in Ralph Johnson. Early on you started
using kalimba in your music.
I started playing kalimba while being with Ramsey. Because Ramsey
gave me a great forum for exploring my talent. Ramsey, every night during
the concert, he would feature me as a drummer. I had a twenty-minute
feature. During that period, of course, I played the drums. But then I started
to introduce the kalimba as well. That’s how the kalimba was discovered.

That’s such a great sound. You also began to write songs with Charles
Stepney.
Charles Stepney was a great friend of mine. He contributed heavily to
my development. During my years in Chicago playing jazz music Charles
and I used to have a trio. We played jazz music. Also, Charles was great as
an orchestrator. While working at Chess, Charles was an orchestrator there,
and he knew about arranging and stuff. Once I got my band together,
Charles contributed quite a bit to the sound of ours, as far as strings and
horns.

So that’s why he has writing credit on “That’s the Way of the World”?
No. He has credit on that because he helped to write the melody. But he
had started to work with me much earlier. I think the first album was Open
Our Eyes. And he contributed very heavily to the orchestration because he
was really good with that. He was my first real coproducer.

On your records not only is the songwriting great but the horn parts,
harmonies, and vocal arrangements are so beautifully conceived, as
perfect as the songs themselves.
Yeah. Well, everything enhances, everything enhances the other. That’s
our objective of it, to make sure everything fits hand to glove.

When you write a song, are you thinking in terms of the parts of the
production, or does that come afterward when you go to the studio?
First of all, I think in terms of the melody. Melody and rhythm, that’s
my first thing, the first thing that approaches me. And then from that point
on, I’ll start to think in terms of story. But first, melody comes first for me.
Melody is always to me influenced by lyrics.

So you generally finish an entire melody before you even consider

lyrics?
Yes, I do. And it’s worked for me all these years.

Yeah, it sure has.

Yeah, pretty much. The melody complements the words, and the words
complement the music. And you also have a string melody that
complements the horn melody. It all fits together.

Some songwriters keep the tape rolling while they’re writing.

Yeah, I like to do that too. I do.

Do you generate melodies from chords, or do you work on the melody

itself?
No. From chords. What I try to do is I try to push chords. I’m concerned
sometimes when certain melodies will not fit up with certain chords. And
I’ll push real hard and try to make something fit.
There’s no real formula that I use, other than to start off first with
melody or rhythm. I always start from that point, you know.

Speaking of melody, “That’s the Way of the World” has such a sweet
and enduring melody. It’s inspirational.
That melody was written by Charles Stepney, and from that melody and
those chords I wrote the words. The music influenced the lyrics. It sounded
in a way that suggested those words.
He wrote the melody and the chords sometime before we really
approached the song. And I knew it was great. It reaches a climax and just
stays there. It was a great song from the beginning. Some songs are just
more inspirational than others. And that’s one of the few.

It sure is.
Yeah. When it comes on, I think what happened too is that all the pieces
fit together perfectly. The melody, the strings, the horn melodies—
everything works hand in hand.
It’s a song—and track—that never loses its greatness.
It just gets better and better and better. It really reaches the climax, and
it just stays there. And one point that made that record good was the
contribution of Charles Stepney. Especially with the string lines and the
horn lines. By that time he had really developed as a great string writer.

He also wrote “Reasons” with you?

Right. He wrote “Reasons” with Philip [Bailey] and I. That came out of
the same batch of songs. There was “Reasons” and “That’s the Way of the
World.” Those two melodies were two melodies that he played for me.
It was very interesting because during our time, that was a rather early
time for the synthesizer. And all melodies he had put on tape with the Moog
synthesizer, which was brand new and unknown still at that time.

So he didn’t sing them at all?

No. They were all done with synthesizer. And that was from the
midseventies, ’75 or something like that. That sound, the sound of the
synthesizer, was very new.

On “That’s the Way of the World,” did that lyric come quickly or did
you have to work on it for a while?
We had to work on it for a while. The overall lyric came easy, but the
verses were something we had to labor for a while. It wasn’t hard, but it
took time.

“Shining Star” was written with Philip Bailey and Larry Dunn?
Yes. “Shining Star” was very easy to write because we came out, and
we had just recorded a melody in the studio, like a funk melody, and I was
just walking. We actually did it in Nederland, Colorado, at Caribou Ranch,
where Chicago used to record.

I love Nederland.
So you know. It’s a beautiful place. We were just walking outside, and
the stars were so plentiful, it was almost like you could reach in the sky and
pluck one out. And actually it was having that experience of the stars in the
sky, being able to see them so clearly influenced me to the title “Shining
Star.”

I had no idea! It’s a Colorado song!

Yeah. The environment helped. Had we not been there, I don’t think that
song would have happened. The stars don’t shine as brightly in LA.

Not the ones in the sky anyway. [Laughter] Do you recall how
“September” was born?
Yep. That was written by Al McKay and myself and Allee Willis.

You came up with that melody?

Al McKay and myself. That was written actually in Washington, DC, in
the middle of a riot. We were checking into this hotel in Washington, DC,
and I remember there was a riot going on outside. We were just trying to
find something to do, so in the middle of it, we just started to write a tune.
[Laughter] We wrote it while looking outside the window at the riot. And
“September” was the song.

Yet that lyric wasn’t about the riot at all?

Oh no.

Why did you choose that title?

September had always been a favorite month for some reason. I don’t
know why.

That’s another great melody.

That was another great one, yes. A ballad with big groove.

I understand that the last time the band went on tour that you stayed at
home to work on the record?
Yeah, while they were on the road. I am basically retired from the road.
And after twenty-five years on the road, that’s long enough for me. I’m
getting more into production. I am basically a producer now. It was the first
time, and we wanted to see if they could do a performance without me.
You think it works okay without you in the band when they are out
there?
It works pretty well. I make an appearance every once in a while.
[Laugher] I stay at home and work on a live album. We have a live album
that’s coming out pretty soon. We recorded in Japan. So at first I stayed
home to work on that.

Many great artists, such as The Beatles or Brian Wilson, did some of
their greatest work when they stopped touring.
Yeah. You can really concentrate on the work. Touring takes a lot out of
you. It takes all your concentration.
Also, at the same time I’m dealing with a company now. I’m actually
building a studio right now.

Is there a favorite Earth, Wind & Fire song of yours?

Probably “That’s the Way of the World.”

Yeah.
Probably is my favorite. There’s another tune that I like pretty much.
It’s called “Love’s Holiday.” I like that too.

It’s a great song.

Yeah. We’ve recorded quite a number of tunes [laughter] throughout
our career, you know.

OceanofPDF.com
Bryan Ferry
 Of Roxy Music
Los Angeles, California 1993

Bryan Ferry is poolside. It’s a posh Los Angeles hotel bustling with midday
activities: limos and taxis arriving and departing with doormen handling
luggage and palming tips, banquets of businessmen and women
congregating around big circular tables in formal dining rooms, a ballet of
waiters and bellboys and clerks circling, tending to wishes and conflicts. It’s
one of those glorious Southern California days during which the sun is
sumptuous, a cool breeze is blowing, and some people are very, very busy
while others are anything but.
Ferry is calm and comfortably shaded beneath an umbrella, reflecting
elegance and luster in country-club white at a table by the pool. He’s
wearing dark shades, hair slicked back, drinking a frosty glass of bottled
water. Occasionally he casts a glance toward the turquoise pool, where
people are wetly frolicking, while others lie around the periphery in pastel
suits, reading papers and paperbacks and sipping cold tropical drinks. After
dispatching a friend for a particular hair tonic, he happily agrees with my
estimation that Avalon—one of the many wondrous albums he conceived
with his group, Roxy Music—remains one of the best albums ever.
At the time of our talk he had been toiling away on a still-unfinished
album of originals called Horoscope. But he put that on hold to record Taxi
instead, an entire album of covers.
 He was born on September 26, 1945, in Washington, in the north of
England, near Newcastle. It’s the town, he tells me, where George
Washington was born, a coal mining area surrounded by farmland. There
were never any other musicians in his family before him. His father, Fred
Ferry, was born on a farm and farmed himself until the Depression, at
which time he went down in the coal mines to work with the horses—the
“pit ponies” that pulled the trucks. “He was an old-fashioned man,”
remembered Ferry, “so we never had a telephone or a car, but we had a
radio.”
Before becoming a professional musician, Bryan was a pottery teacher
at Holland Park School in London. From there he formed his first band, The
Banshees, and later The Gas Board. In 1968 he moved to London and
formed Roxy Music in 1971. It was composed of many friends, including
Graham Simpson, Andy Mackay (on oboe and sax), and none other than
Brian Eno, who played Andy’s synth and also recorded the band. Other
musicians who ultimately joined included Dexter Lloyd, David O’List, Paul
Thompson, and Phil Manzanera. Their first hit was “Virginia Plain” in
1972. Eno left the band before the second album, and Bryan took over. In
1976 he disbanded them for the first time to do solo work. They got back
together in 1979 and did several more albums.
Their first and only UK number-one single was the song “Jealous Guy”
by John Lennon. It’s classic Lennon, an aching melody of great beauty with
words of dark candor, so ideally suited to Ferry’s smooth delivery.
He was a visual artist and painter before he started songwriting, and he
continued in that vein by designing all of his album covers, videos, and
stage shows. Today he has about forty minutes to talk before being limoed
to Burbank for a rehearsal of The Tonight Show, then still hosted by Jay
Leno. On the show that night he talked about including the late Anna
Nicole Smith in his new music video for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,”
the famous ballad by Goffin and King. Today at poolside he’s talking
mostly about music, origins and goals, and the technological burden of the
modern recording studio, with its limitless possibilities. With swimmers and
sleepers reflected in his sunglasses, he joins in a recitation of lyrics from
one of his own songs, the hauntingly beautiful “More than This” from
Avalon. Speaking of how the lyrics delighted me, I mentioned the first lines,
which slowly turned into the two of us, poolside, celebrating these lyrics in
unison: “More than this, there is nothing.” That said it all.

I know you had no TV or telephone growing up. But you did have a
radio. What did radio mean to you?
Bryan Ferry: It meant everything. Radio—and music itself—was very
important to me growing up. One of my aunts who babysat me would play
me all the American crooners: Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, The Ink
Spots.
So I was brainwashed into that kind of music at a very young age. Later
came 78s that my sister played: the early Elvis records, Little Richard, Fats
Domino.
I got into blues and jazz from about the age of eleven and got obsessed
with it. I got an EP of the Charlie Parker Quintet with Miles Davis and
learned every note of that. When I went to university I studied painting for
four years, from ’64 to ’68. After graduation, since music meant so much, I
thought that maybe I should try to write some songs. I knew that if I didn’t
try to do it, I would always regret it.
So I started learning piano. Actually a harmonium was my first
keyboard. I remember pumping away furiously at it, playing these rather
modal, droning things.
After writing a few songs I thought, “This is what I want to do. This is
what I want to do all day.”

Do you remember your first song?

Yes. It was called “Psalm.” Maybe not the very first, but the first one
that mattered. I held back until the third Roxy album. It was hard at first to
write songs. It’s even harder now. The music always comes to me much
easier than the words. That’s always been the case. Especially in the last ten
years. Ever since Avalon. I started to work in a larger format, which,
looking back now, I realize was a big mistake. With this album, Taxi, I’ve
gone back to twenty-four-track analog, but for all those years after Avalon I
had doubled up to forty-eight-track and, lately, fifty-six-track. Which was a
nightmare.

Why?
 I have a habit of writing in the studio and using the studio as an
instrument. When you’re working twenty-four-track, that method is just
about workable because, at some point, you have to stop filling up tracks
and do the vocals. When you use forty-eight-track, you double all your
options, and it becomes a torturous process—a very interesting one,
because you can experiment with textures. But it creates problems too. And
that whole time I was producing myself.
When I did my own work, my own songs, I’d build this abstract
soundscape and then try to find lyrics to fit that. And the more sophisticated
the abstract instrumental composition became, the harder it was to find
lyrics that would work.

So finding the words is harder than finding the music?

Yes. Melodies come to me easily, I think because I have eclectic tastes.
I work on melodies at the piano, playing chords. Sometimes I just get a
mood, a chord structure, and not even know the top line. Or sometimes I get
a top line, but it changes radically. I work on it for weeks and months.
Sometimes I get tired, and I find a melody that is a negative to the positive.
I start singing in the spaces. It’s like painting. You work on something and
rub it out and do it again. It’s not finished until you sign it. Or till you go to
the mastering room.
Sometimes I have an idea for a song and write it down in the notepad,
and months or years later, when looking for an idea, I find something that
will fit a chord sequence with a melody I have. Sometimes something
completely spontaneous will come up musically that will match an idea.
There was a song called “Kiss and Tell” that was inspired by some English
National Enquirer–type paper about some girl’s revelations. I first did a real
slow, haunting version of it. Which sounded quite better than what the
original record turned out to be, which was a faster version.

When it comes to writing the lyrics, any advice about how best to do it?
No. It’s a nightmare writing lyrics. I’m still looking for the answers
about writing lyrics. I loved reading about novelists who get up early and
write solidly from seven until noon and then take the rest of the day off.
That sounded wonderful to me because I always worked late at night. But
things are beginning to change for me. For this new album I got into singing
during the daytime, and it was much better. I used to think that I can only
sing at night, at concert time, or much later. Similarly, with writing lyrics,
the next time I do it I will try to write lyrics during the day.

You said you used the studio as an instrument for songwriting. What
kind of track would you start with?
When I would write songs in the studio I would often start just with
some percussion. I like electric percussion. So it’s not heavy drums, but
something lighter. Then usually piano, electric piano, is the first thing that
goes on, and then maybe some strings or a sound that fits the music.

“More than This” is one of those magic songs that sounds as great as
when it first emerged. How did that one come to be?
I composed “More than This” on a keyboard with a string sound. But
maybe it was piano.
I think it’s one of my best songs. I wrote the lyrics in different places—
some of it was England, some of it was Ireland, some was in Nassau, some
in New York.

Did you write “Avalon,” the song, at the same time?

Yes. When I wrote the song “Avalon” I made a little, private keyboard
demo of it, and it was quite fast, a much faster groove. Seven months later I
came to cut the song and did it in a slow way, and it suited it much better.

To those of us in Southern California, when we think of Avalon, we

think of the little town on the island of Catalina. But that had nothing
to do with your song, did it?
No, it didn’t. The title came from some reverie, and it seemed to suit the
music very nicely. I was in a hotel in New York when I wrote the finished
lyric. I finished it up on a Saturday night, desperate because I had to go in
the next day and sing it.
When I went into the Power Station [recording studio] the next day to
sing it, I discovered the girl who sang on it at the coffee machine. It was
Sunday, and this girl from Haiti [Yannick Etienne] was getting downtime
and was strumming an acoustic in the corridor, practicing a song.
 I heard this voice, this beautiful voice, and I thought that I must get this
girl to sing on the record because her voice was just amazing. And now you
can’t imagine the song without her. I just got her to do some scat singing on
it.

Do you have favorite songs you’ve written?

I think, of my own songs, I have a few favorites: “Do the Strand,”
“Dream Home,” “Mother of Pearl,” “Windswept,” and “Avalon.”

Each one of those, though they’re very different songs, shares one
element: a strong melody. Do you have any idea what makes a melody
great?
Good melodies are often infuriatingly simple. You realize that when you
sing some songs by other people. I sing “Rescue Me”[written by Raynard
Miner, Carl Smith, and Fontella Bass] on this album, and if you analyze the
original Fontella Bass version, you see that. It has a great female, diva-like
performance, a wonderful bass line, and that was it. If you take the bass line
away, there’s not much there. We changed the bass line to change the entire
feel of the song, which is quite nice.

In your lifetime—and mine—we have seen the popular song go through

some serious changes. Do you think there are new places to go with the
song form?
Yes, absolutely. Some people think the song form has exhausted itself. I
don’t think so. It would be depressing to think so. I think people need songs
in their lives. They always have and always will.

OceanofPDF.com
Elvis Costello
 A Man Out of Time
New York, New York 2015

“There’s no one way that I know songs to be written,” he said in the midst
of discussing the miraculous multitude of songs he’s written. And so he
wrote every kind of song that can be written. His vast lyrical span is
matched only by his tremendous musical range, quite unlike most
songwriters. It’s not only that there are a lot of songs—and a lot of great
ones—but such a vast array of songs in every style. From the pumped-up
and frenetically brilliant first work through the expansive, cubist stylings of
Imperial Bedroom, to the Americana of Blood and Chocolate, to the
sophisticated and complex songs written with Bacharach on Painted from
Memory, and beyond, his work has spanned more kinds of music than most
people ever listen to.
But it’s all him. All united by a charmed gift for melody, a penchant for
sophisticated chords and harmonies, and endless lyrical ingenuity. He’s one
of the few songwriters who is as equally inventive and inspired with lyrics
as with music.
That vast musical range was instilled into him since he was a kid. Early
on, he heard a lot of songs. All kinds of songs. His father was a professional
singer who would do dance band versions of standards as well as songs
from the Hit Parade—all kinds of songs. He’d come home with a weekly
armful of records, and father and son together would absorb them. His dad
even appeared on the same 1963 Royal Albert Hall bill as The Beatles, the
show most famous for Lennon’s cheeky remark that the people in the
cheaper seats applaud while the wealthy should just “rattle their jewelry.” In
that very show Ross MacManus, who used the pseudonym sometimes of
Day Costello, performed “If I Had a Hammer,” written by Pete Seeger and
Lee Hays. (See SOS I, page 1.)
Elvis delighted in the range of music his dad would deliver, always in
search of the right song to sing in the dancehall. “Every weekend he’d come
home with a stack of records,” he said. “And they were anomalous records,
really, for someone who was singing with a dance orchestra. He’d bring
home the hit tunes of the day and learn them. When he struck out on his
own he started to make his own choices of songs because he no longer was
told what to sing, and by then he had opened his mind up to all sorts of
music that you wouldn’t expect a man his age to be interested in. But he
was. He would be listening to the new Marvin Gaye record and then the
new Jefferson Airplane record, and then he’d say, ‘Okay, I got that now,’
and he’d give it to me. He was always my conduit of new music. I always
had much more music than my allowance would have allowed me to buy.”
Not only did his dad come home with records, he also came home with
sheet music. And it’s there that his young musical son discovered a musical
and magical realm that forever enriched and expanded his own musical
vocabulary—all the rich and often complex chords, wrapped around
sumptuous melodies, used in standards. He already knew the basic chords,
the I, IV, V, and VI found in rock and roll. But suddenly he learned all the
chords between the chords—the minor sixths, major sevenths, and even
those beautiful adult chords—the diminished and augmented ones that
many rock- and folk-based writers never learn. Although he didn’t
theoretically analyze these chords, he used them early on in his own songs
—bringing sophisticated harmonies to rock and roll—as if Buddy Holly and
Cole Porter collaborated. And like both Buddy and Cole, who were gifted
wordsmiths as well as great composers, Elvis had a love for wordplay and
the delicate dynamics of fusing language and tune.
Elvis always had a reverence for great songwriting of every generation
and genre. After his first albums, while many of us were listening to him, he
was listening to Sinatra and others sing the songs of the past—the standards
of Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and the rest. He even went so far as
to invite Sammy Cahn, lyricist for so many Sinatra classics, to write with
him, a story shared in the following conversation.
Like his dad, he’s joyfully journeyed through periods of immersion in
different flavors of music, times that forever shaped his own songs. Father
and son bonded in their happy inclination to slip on different styles of music
others never would consider and making it their own. “[My dad] had a
similar thing that I seem to have experienced,” Elvis said, “when he would
be all about one kind of music for a little while. When I was a kid, he was
all about Irish music. Then Spanish music. Then there was this period when
he was only playing the St. Matthew Passion [by Bach]. He was that kind of
creature.”
It’s the same kind of creature Elvis is, as he admitted, though he’s
always been a fan and practitioner at the same time: “Often I only listen to
one kind of music exclusively for a period of time. Partly enjoying it, partly
learning from it.”
In his dad’s later years, after Elvis had become a famous songwriter,
father and son continued their listening parties: “We always enjoyed
listening to music together. I would go over to his house and play him
something I was working on, and he’d be playing some records for me.”
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is his memoir, published in 2015,
just in time for this conversation to take place. Though we were only
officially allotted one hour, he kindly spoke for more than two. I thanked
him for giving so much time and thought to this, and he said, “Actually I
hadn’t noticed how much time had gone by. I guess we must be doing
something right.”
In fact, it was one of those conversations that only scratched the surface
of his genius and could have gone on for many more hours and still be
incomplete. His mind, as is evident in his often gymnastic lyrics, is agile
and leaps from subject to subject—each with its own validity.
He’s a humble guy and, like others in these pages, deflects any
pomposity or, as he calls it, “piousness” in regard to his own prodigious
gift. Instead he insists he is lazy and that the word “prolific” does not apply
to him.
Regardless, he’s written a vast amount of remarkable songs in every
style and form and approach, starting with his remarkable 1977 debut, My
Aim Is True. Masterful collaborations with Bacharach, McCartney, and
others proved that which we already knew, that he’s a deeply gifted
craftsman; his descriptions of writing those songs sheds substantial light
into the joyful mystery of songwriting. Although he allows that much about
making music is often “beyond language,” his explanations of the delicate
dynamic required in discovering—as opposed to inventing—a song is
revelatory and is as beautifully expressed as thoughts within his lyrics.
At the time of our talk he was discussing returning to his work with
Burt Bacharach on a stage musical that would incorporate new songs they
have written together but remain unrevealed. “I am writing things you can’t
hear right now,” he said, “but there are very extraordinary songs that we
have in our folio, which we have expanded to create a stage musical.
Beautiful ballads. I am just now starting to go back to work with Burt again.
Since the very beginning, with ‘God Give Me Strength,’ we have this
powerful collaboration which leads to a lot of things. And I am thinking of
how I take all the songs in this folio and connect them for the stage. That
would be a contrivance. When you are facing the puzzle of how to get a
story to credibly run through songs, sometimes you have the songs you
need already, and sometimes you simply have to write new songs. So we
have the opportunity to write another ten songs. Hopefully that will happen
and you will see them produced.”
Because Elvis took on the tough task known so well to this writer, the
challenge of using words to write about music, we started our conversation
there.

You wrote in your book how certain aspects of music are “beyond
language,” which is a good understanding with which to start this
discussion, as much of this is about that which transcends words.
Elvis Costello: Yes. Writing about music is tricky. There have been
erudite books about classical music using all sorts of big words which are
often misleading and probably not that expressive to the casual listener. So
those things suffer. Steel guitars are always lachrymose [laughs] if not
weepy.
I think you can probably put yourself into the mood of a song and
assume that listening to it will burn away that gap between elusive things in
music and what is literally beyond words. It’s part of the reason people are
inspired to go to their own train of mind while listening to music.
It’s much easier to describe where words from a lyric come from
because they are a direct recitation of experience or they’re an imagination
of someone else’s experience or an observation or commentary on
something in the world. Or in praise of something or in lament. There’s not
that many different things that we do with songs. Not to say that they can’t
have a great number of variations.

You meet the challenge in the book of using language to get inside of
music and also inside the job of the songwriter. The way you described
the dynamic necessary when working with Bacharach was perfect in
showing the songwriter’s goal. You wrote, “Those songs required me to
listen to what the music was really saying to me. Sometimes it was
speaking quietly and I had to listen very intently.” That songwriting
isn’t a process of imposing yourself onto a song as much as it is
discovering what the song is.
Particularly when it’s music that someone else has written. Or for that
matter, even if it’s music that you’ve written yourself. [Bacharach] wouldn’t
disagree with the fact that there are many of those songs for which we both
shared responsibility for the music. There’s an assumption that says because
I am better as a lyricist and he is better as a melodist, it must have all been
divided along those lines. In fact, that’s not true at all. There are some of
those songs where the initial statement of music is mine. But then his
intervention—sometimes quite small—would change and expand that
music.
And sometimes I’d have a story and I couldn’t quite grasp all of it and
put it into workable language because the melody was so big and unwieldly.
So it would require me to recognize what the story was and then puzzle out
how to say that thing in the right amount of words.
Then I started to think more that way so that when I wrote the next one
it worked even better. And that is why I was able to write so much with him
even though we came at it with wildly contrasting styles. It is something
that could seem like an awkward joint. I tried to think in his language a
little bit.
And you did so beautifully. These songs you have written with him are
stunning. I admit, like everyone else, I thought you did the words and
he did all the music. Not because you are not a great composer yourself
but because Burt writes only music and not lyrics. So I assumed you
became his Hal David. But I was fascinated to discover that for “God
Give Me Strength” you actually wrote the initial melody that started
the song, and then he altered it.
It was very subtle. He took one of the phrases of mine and stretched it
over twice as many bars. He kind of elongated one of the phrases, and he
added the introductory figure. Some of the others, like “In the Darkest
Place,” also started like that with my music. Then the things he did in
response to my music were so dramatic.
It was always a conversation. Some conversations are even longer.
When I was working with Paul McCartney the volley back and forth was
much swifter. After a while it got hard to say who came up with what line
because it was all happening so fast. I can’t break those ones down in the
same way. But I have sheet music for the Bacharach cowrites, so I know
exactly where the starting place was on certain songs and where they ended
up.

You wrote that he composed the bridge music for “God Give Me
Strength,” and then you wrote the words “instantly.” Yes? That is an
astounding bridge—the music so dramatic, and the words matching
that intensity.
Yes. The bridge came very quickly, the lyric there. It took the writing of
a dummy bridge that I wrote. Burt looked at it and said, “No, that music
doesn’t quite work.” And then he realized it did need a bridge structurally,
even though it’s quite a long song. It needed to get away from the original
statement of music. And then he wrote this beautiful passage. It’s one of my
favorite parts of all of the songs we wrote.
It was all a very good experience. The one song that took a really long
time to puzzle out was “This House Is Empty Now.” Though I had the sense
of what kind of song it was, it took a while to get the words.

It’s interesting you use the word “puzzle,” as it applies to how you
construct a song. It’s a word you use in the book as well. Does the
puzzle of a song have only one ultimate solution? Or can you solve that
puzzle in different ways?
Not every song is actually like a puzzle. Some are more like an electric
shock. They appear too quickly. And they are too complete. I wrote “The
Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes” while standing in the rain. Ten
minutes or fifteen minutes, and the song just presented itself. I wrote six
songs for The New Basement Tapes end on end in something like ninety
minutes. Of course, I then had to go back and work with the raw material.
There are these strange things, when it all comes beaming in. Is that
inspiration? I don’t know. And then there are other times when you have
disconnected bits of language and fragments of music, and you might think
there is something to that, and then one day something emotional will
trigger something, and that fragment will return and fit perfectly. There
have been times when I discover a lyrical passage or a couplet and I see
how to make sense of it now because I have lived three more years and am
in a whole new place. So sometimes you have to be patient and wait for the
thing to happen in life before you can put it down in a line in a song.

All songwriters know that great experience, when a song arrives just
like a gift. Any explanation of how you get to the place where that can
happen?
No, I can’t explain it. Some people want to be mystical about it, and
that’s completely legitimate. I think a song can have a precious little secret
or sentimental dimension, but I don’t go around with a pious face on feeling
that I’m above everything because that can happen once in a while. I think
it’s shocking when it happens.
There’s the famous story of the composer getting up every morning in
his pajamas and going to the piano and saying, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” And
writing a little ditty. You could have written a nursery rhyme and think
you’ve written the most original tune in the world. Because it gets in your
mind and it’s seductive. And it’s deciding whether that tune is really an
original tune or a cliché.
That’s what makes Hal David so great. To write so economically and
with such unshowy language and yet write such indelible words. It’s so
confounding to someone who doesn’t do that.
I agree. In your book you mention how songwriters are often
complimented by being called poets, as in “He isn’t just a songwriter—
he’s a poet.” But as you wrote, songwriting is not an inferior art. In
many ways songwriting has become the poetry of the masses. Would
you agree?
No. Poetry is the poetry of the masses. They’re different.
It can seem patronizing to say, “Well, you’re quite good. For a
songwriter.” The way in which words work in songs is unique. It is not the
same as poetry. I personally resisted having my lyrics printed on the sleeve
because I was quite earnest, I suppose, early on that I wanted the words to
be heard as part of the whole picture. And then people really asked for the
words to be written down, so I accepted it. I tried to make them interesting
to look at, when we laid it out. And then that becomes a different thing. It
makes the whole package into something that seems worth your time.

I didn’t mean to denigrate poetry in any way, but I find in these

modern times, if you long for rhymed verse, it is in songs and not
poetry where you find it.
I can’t agree with that. It depends on what kind of song you’re talking
about. There are some pretty dreadful songs out there that make a poor case
for the art of songwriting. And there are perhaps a greater number of
rhymed verses being declaimed on hip-hop records for a much larger
audience. So does the ubiquity of it make it inherently superior? Well, in the
case of some records, yes. Some of those have a level of dexterity and
daring that some songwriters don’t even approach.

Regarding your resistance to printing your lyrics on an album’s sleeve,

on Imperial Bedroom you printed the lyrics but without punctuation.
Yet it showed me how much of a difference punctuation can make, as in
the great chorus to “Man Out of Time,” which begins, “To murder my
love is a crime.” Leading me to believe it was a contemplation of the
murder of your beloved. But in your book you provide the
punctuation: “To murder, my love, is a crime.” Which has, of course, a
whole other meaning, that you are discussing murder with her but not
contemplating murdering her!
 Well, I think, to be honest, the way it’s sung it can have both meanings.
That was also because you can’t convey a dual meaning—you either leave
the comma out or not. It gets into hair-splitting and a very good case for not
having written it down originally and not having the punctuation. Because it
does mean either, in the song, as I sing it. But when I wrote it down on this
occasion in the book I felt it was more accurate to punctuate it that way.

In the book you discuss this issue, the way words can be used on more
than one level at a time in a song. You wrote, “If you can do this in a
painting you can do it in a song, using words in a manner that don’t
necessarily accumulate to literal sense.” Which was fascinating to read
because often your songs are like Cubist paintings that are
multidimensional and can be seen from several perspectives at the same
time.
[Laughs] That’s a very nice comparison. I think Barney Bubbles [the
cover-painting artist, credited to Sal Forlenza] might have been alluding to
that on the cover of Imperial Bedroom. He painted the cover of the album
after hearing the record, and he, of course, made this reference to Picasso in
it. And I [laughs] never had this grandiose idea that I was writing Cubist
songs. But I did definitely have a feeling that you can have more than one
reality on the same plane. So I suppose without giving it that actual title,
that was what I was doing.
But I didn’t stand back from the page enough to say, “Okay, I’m now
doing this.” I was just doing it. Quite often you have to think about it later,
what you were doing.

Yet without thinking about it too much, you were stretching the limits
of what you can do in a song—
I wasn’t doing it so other people would notice it, because then it would
seem self-conscious. I was following my instincts and emotions, which is
really all that ever drives it. And I was also writing at the same time songs
which, as you say, have these multiple planes. Like “Beyond Belief” and so
forth.
There were just different ways to present a song. A feeling for a song
comes to you, and you use the tools that are at hand, whether it’s a complex
tune or a simple tune. Is it an elaborate melody with unexpected harmonies?
A big, bright open tune in a major key? A dark ballad? You can actually
select any one of these things.
I relay in the book the story of my calling Sammy Cahn and asking him
to write the words to “The Long Honeymoon” on Imperial Bedroom. But I
wasn’t really able to convey coherently what I was after. Because that was
the way I was in those days.
I sent him a rather rambling piano demo—music without words—but he
wasn’t able to get a handle on it. He said he couldn’t hear the structure of
the song. So I ended up, two days later, writing the lyric myself. In the end I
ended up with a good song. But I wished I’d have had a cocredit with
Sammy Cahn—it would have been lovely to have a connection. Because
some of the songs I wrote then were inspired by my exploration of the
shape of his songs from his period. He was really one of the last
songwriters of the time, in the fifties and sixties, when he was writing songs
with people like [Jimmy] Van Heusen and other composers as well. [See
Sammy Cahn, SOS I, page 27.]

Having interviewed Sammy, I know he always stressed the architecture

of a melody, its sturdy structure. You gave him a complex melody, but
had you given him something more traditional, like “Almost Blue,” I
think he would have jumped on it—
Yes. I think if it had been something perhaps more obvious, it would
have worked. [Jazz trumpeter] Chet Baker had a hard time with the
structure of “Shipbuilding” because it isn’t a normal by-the-bar form. I
could have narrowed the shape of the song, and obviously there was great
invention within that, and there was con-ventions I didn’t obey. And that
came because I was playing the piano instead of Steve [Nieve], so it was
my own piano playing, not unlike a gorilla wearing boxing gloves.
Chet Baker had some trouble memorizing the form of the song. Not the
harmony—he had no problem with the harmony. On some of the takes,
when he was really flying and playing beautifully, he anticipated the change
in the harmony, and it didn’t go where he thought it did. Because the form
of the song was quite unconventional in his experience. It is not a standard
thirty-two-bar form.
“Shipbuilding” is a magical song. So haunting and yet so specific and
cinematic. How was it born?
I came up with the melody first, which I put on cassette. I was singing it
wordlessly, maybe just humming, while playing the melody on an organ. I
sang just the vocal melody over these beautiful changes. It was for Robert
Wyatt [of Soft Machine]. He had the hope that I would write something
bright and optimistic that would be the way Robert intended it, sort of like
Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.” Maybe something more poignant, but it
should be like a conventional pop lyric. Instead of which I wrote a very
specific song about something else entirely, and that reflects what was
happening at that moment, that particular conflict of all these dilemmas that
blew up and came out of the lyric of “Shipbuilding.”

That song, as you said, stretches the song form. And many times you’ve
stretched and reinvented the forms of songs, more so than most
songwriters who stay within the usual verse-chorus structures.
Yes. When I was working with The Roots, with Steve and Questlove
predominantly, we wrote a whole song based on a loop of us playing “High
Fidelity.” I wrote a song called “Waltz,” which was somewhat of an answer
song to “Shipbuilding,” looking at that same conflict from the other side of
the ocean.
You can travel as a songwriter. Like a novelist can. Crime writers kill
people all the time, willy-nilly, but they never go to jail. So I could imagine
this girl watching the victory speech from London, after the fact.
So I think I learned something valuable from that. You can tell a three-
dimensional story, and it didn’t obey any of the structural rules of any of the
songs I’d written over the last forty years. There’s something very
refreshing to have yourself confined by a loop like that. I’ve written a
number of songs that are based on something like this, by the tension
created by something coming round and where you’ve got instincts to go,
“Okay, we’re going to the IV now; well, we’re not! We’re going back!”

Yes, and music is always about playing with expectations.

Yeah. And if you’re also dealing with a textural sonic realm, where
you’re dropping things in and out, like a dub record does, you create these
holes, this negative space, also into which the words drop. And then if you
add other voices, and singers singing in Spanish, it is like making a little
film almost. The continuity was completely different than any song I had
ever written before.
It’s good not to be so self-satisfied that you know all the ways that you
can tell a story. That was just one occasion where it was markedly different
—structurally, texturally, even in terms of the language, going in and out of
English and Spanish.

One of the greatest examples of song expansion is “I Want You,” which

throws away verse and chorus and ties the song together with emotion
and a haunting repeat of the title. It broke the form in a remarkable
and powerful way.
At the time it had written itself before I had the chance to think, “Oh,
this is different.” That is similar in a way in that the monotony of the form
reflects an emotional claustrophobia that is going on in the lyric. And it’s
also prefaced by this strange, lullaby-like melody. I think I wrote that intro
part, that acoustic lullaby section at the top, in a Japanese restaurant with
Japanese music going at the same time.

“I Want You” is also a great example of your greatness as a songwriter

in that both the words and the music of that are equally intense.
I think it’s very specific. But lots of songs are. But that one carries it on
for six minutes. A song like that certainly would not work if it lost the
intensity halfway through. If it suddenly drifted off and started talking about
the pattern of the curtains, it wouldn’t be right.

It arrived before you had time to think about it?

Yes, the bulk of it I wrote on a train. The preface was written afterward
as another form and then was used as the introduction in the recording. But
the main body of the song was one long appearance.

So you wrote the lyric on the train only, or did you write the music as
well?
Well, the music was sort of very obvious. The music was sort of there.
Often with words, you can just hear the music. There was a little bit of
panic having to get from the train to my mother’s house to make sure I
didn’t forget.
Same as when I wrote “Red Shoes.” There were no portable tape
recorders at that time. Well, I didn’t have one, anyway. So I didn’t have any
way to capture it. The only way I could ever remember a song, I would just
have to sing songs over and over until I was sure I wouldn’t forget them.
And that’s some test of how indelible a melody would be, would be that you
could retain it and play it for an evening, and wake up the next day—and
could you still recall it?
[“Red Shoes”] appeared whole in a ten-minute burst, and I had
everything in my head playing like a record. But there was a panic that
something else would enter it and alter it somehow. Like something
ambient, like a radio playing in a car or a station announcement that had a
note in it.
With “I Want You” I was going in the opposite direction on the train.
And obviously it took a longer portion of that journey to write that song
because it is a longer song. And there were probably images that got edited
out. It was perhaps even longer originally. But when I got to an instrument
the music was already there. And then the preface came at a separate
occasion.

It’s rare that another artist can do one of your songs with anything
approaching your intensity, but Fiona Apple’s rendition of that song is
simply chilling.
Oh, Fiona turned it into Shakespeare. It was like Lady Macbeth’s
version of “I Want You.” [Laughter] You know, I was standing next to her
while she was doing that. We just couldn’t believe it. It was very thrilling to
do that. You know, she has that intensity in her songs. She’s a wonderful,
wonderful musician.

I agree. Does that often happen, when you get a song completely like
that?
Oh no, no. Songs came in all sorts of different ways. And that’s the
beauty of it. If you knew how to do it, you’d just keep doing that. If you
knew how to get the jackpot out of the fruit machine, you’d keep pulling the
handle.
 Of course, sometimes it’s a big sheet of paper with lots of words thrown
on it. Sometimes it’s a tiny little notebook with scrawled handwriting.
Sometimes a couplet that you stored away might suddenly connect up with
a new set of thoughts, something with a brand-new exterior for something
in the world you want to remark upon. And it’ll all just fall into place.
I suppose the often manner by which it all falls into place is fairly swift.
But there have been songs, like I described, that I pondered for a long time
before I found the right words for the melody.
There’s no one way that I know songs to be written. I have written a
number of songs in collaboration, and then you have to think about the
other person’s rhythm of creation, the rhythm of their creative process. You
can’t hurry it up if somebody else takes a different path to it. It would be
inelegant and presumptuous.

It’s instructive to learn that a great songwriter such as yourself doesn’t

have an easy answer, because there are no easy answers.
Yes. You know, there are a lot of examples of writers in every form who
get up very, very methodically and go to the desk and do something every
day. I’m talking now about writing books. But there are some writers of
songs who do that, and it doesn’t mean they always come away with
complete songs, but they may do something. It might seem an odd thing to
say, as I remarked in the book, but I’m quite lazy. I feel as though indolence
is my main vice. Yet somehow I’ve managed to write a lot of songs. Heaven
knows what it would have been like had I been hardworking. [Laughter]

You’ve not only written a lot of songs, you’ve written a lot of great
songs. If someone writes one song that impacts the world, that is a great
thing. But you have done that in so many songs and sustained your
songwriting over a long time. So however you’ve done it is clearly the
right way.
It’s nice of you to say. I don’t know that they matter anymore than
anybody else’s songs. But they mattered to somebody. If only to me, or I
wouldn’t have written them in the first place.
And it’s a curious thing to think after a number of years that anyone
wants to hear a number of these songs that I wrote a while ago. At different
times I’ve resisted that. But I’ve come around to ways of approaching them.
That is why I keep trying to change the way I’m approaching the material
so that it’s not a ritual that can be anticipated.

When you say you’re lazy as a songwriter—

No, I’m just lazy generally. [Laughs] I’m making a joke, but it feels that
way to me. I don’t get that prolific thing because there are long periods
when I don’t write. So I suppose what it must be is that I must write
intensely when I do write. I don’t keep a diary, so I don’t notice that.

When you approach a song do you think about the story you want to
tell before writing it, or does that happen while writing?
That really depends. I think there are times when you’re letting yourself
be guided. Perhaps by an enigmatic phrase that had been intriguing to the
imagination—or just to the mind, not necessarily the imagination—and
what the implications of that phrase is. Sometimes it’s the opening line of
the song; sometimes it’s the title. I have notebooks in which there are lists
of titles. Sometimes titles predate the song. The title was there. And there’s
a whole story you can paint in that title.

I often wondered if you started with titles, as so often you have

evocative titles. In the book you mentioned one of your first songs was
“Poison Moon,” which is a strong title—two words that conflict, a good
dynamic.
Well, because people wish upon the moon, that immediately suggests
that it’s not a good-luck song; it’s a hard-luck song. At that time I didn’t
know how to write in realistic language about my life, so I borrowed these
idioms and tried to write more like a Tin Pan Alley songwriter in a way. I
wrote in a romantic idiom. But it was a slightly sour one in this case. I took
something which people often wrote joyful songs about and twisted it, and
it’s got this little sadness that things are not going to work out.
The song is about looking in the mirror and not being what you want,
the dream not being fulfilled. That was a real feeling. That part wasn’t
romantic. But the rest of the language that I used was sort of a borrowed
idiom. I found songs that I wrote right before then that sounded just like
Robert Hunter songs. ’Cause that’s who I listened to. They were filled with
these paradoxes, and his songs have a lot of that in them. I was so enamored
of that, I tried to copy it. But I never recorded any of those songs; I just put
them away. They didn’t sound real.

Yet so early on it seemed you completely found your voice and your
own world with “Watching the Detectives,” which, to this day, is a
revelation, a rock and roll love letter to crime fiction, even with camera
directions. It was unlike anything we had heard and remains so to this
day.
It’s a device. It has to be one that has a reason to exist. I have returned
to that idiom a few times because you can tell different stories. There’s the
Mingus song [“My Flame Burns Blue”], and there’s “Church
Underground,” which is a complicated idea.

“Watching the Detectives” also has this arch A minor melody and
slinky electric guitar, linked to a “Secret Agent Man”–like riff. It’s
another example of how in your songs the music speaks as eloquently
as the words.
It does for you. And whether it communicates to anyone else in the long
run, it actually doesn’t matter. Unless you are a gun-for-hire writer, where
you have to hit a certain mark and you know a song is a failure unless it
says something specific. I have dozens of songs which the meaning is
specific to me. They express something I wanted to say very much.

But are there songs that are unclear even to you?

Yes. Songs are like mysteries that you can go back to. And they can
change on you. They can turn around and bite you, even, while you’re
holding them. And that’s a great thing to have that, as well as songs that are
very clear. To have songs which are mysterious even to the person who
wrote them is exciting.
There are songs that transform themselves as you are performing them.
I have as many of those as I have songs that are clear. I like the fact that I
have those songs. Maybe some of them don’t get aired very often, but that’s
for the very reason that I have to be in exactly the right mood to sing them.
Otherwise they just sound confusing. I’ve stood on the stage and sung “All
These Strangers” and it’s been exactly clear to me what it’s about, and other
times I’ve sung it and it just sounded like I don’t know what is going on in
this song. [Laughs] I’m not entirely certain where that came from.
I have a few songs which are like mysteries to ponder for all time. And
they’re companions. And that’s a comforting thing. It’s good to have songs
which are very, very clear and obvious, like “Indoor Fireworks,” where
you’ve got a very strong central image and you run up to it with something
that is full of emotion. Or “Stranger in the House.” These are songs I wrote
a long time ago. And then it’s good to have mystery songs too. It’s good to
have them.

Leonard Cohen said being a songwriter is like being a Catholic nun,

that you’re married to a mystery. Embracing the mystery is part of
being a songwriter.
Well, you can hear it in his songs. The precision of his words in the
greatest of his songs, that everyone agrees about, doesn’t mean that the
songs that are not as universally embraced are not great songs as well.
There are many of his songs which are mysteries. And in a beautiful way, in
a beautiful way.
But so many songs contain mystery. Whether they’re old Tin Pan Alley
songs, you go, “How did they come to that image?” Such as in “I left my
heart in an old cathedral town,” in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Well,
“old cathedral town”? Why that? That seems so strange to me. Every time I
hear that line.

“God Give Me Strength” has a melody with a big range. Is part of the
secret of a great melody a big range like that?
I don’t think so. The idea that a melody has to have a big range, I think,
is a mistake. There are songs that are written in the thirties, and in some
ways the harmony’s more complex on those songs. Those songs have the
appearance of greater development because of the genius way they’re
harmonized. It is true when snobs who like jazz go on about “It was all
better then,” the only part of what’s true about that is that the harmony in
those songs written in the thirties and even some in the twenties gave the
appearance of the melody traveling farther than it actually was in register.
Also, those songs were written to be sung by anybody. The song didn’t
really have one definitive version. Something like “Side by Side” [by Gus
Kahn and Harry Woods], there must have been five hit versions of that song
in the year it was written. And yet some of those songs have the appearance
of great drama. In different times the way people created that drama was
different. Power chords, power ballads. There are other solutions to creating
the drama. Another way is making people lean forward. Jobim songs. The
Bacharach songs, even. Some of them are very dramatic and have a big
range, but some of them are very intimate. But they’re very ingenious in the
way they use the harmony to create the development and tension.

You had very ingenious harmonies and even modulations—but often at

a very fast tempo—such as “Oliver’s Army,” which is complex and
even has a key change.
Yes, it’s one of the rare songs of mine that modulates, and I don’t know
why, but that is how I heard it. I heard it doing that when I wrote it—it’s not
something that the arranger added, that modulation to the bridge. That song
also shows my indiscipline as a songwriter, particularly early on, in writing
three verses that were superficially the same but actually had crucial
differences in the harmony or in the length of the lines. It makes it a
nightmare for musicians to remember them. And you have to pay attention.
I’m not saying they’re wrong to be written like that.

In the book you describe poring over sheet music your dad would bring
home and discovering all the chords you didn’t know—the major
sixths, the augmented fourth, even diminished, as you wrote. From an
early age you were bringing what we sometimes call the adult chords to
rock and roll.
I learned to play the guitar from following chord symbols. To learn to
play this quite complicated song, “Man of the World.” And then I realized I
had enough chords, and then I learned more chords to play these Beatles
songs and things that I knew. I knew them all the way through, but I didn’t
know how to play them. I thought they were completely beyond me but
then found some of them were very simple.
Then I bought chord books with my buddies, they were these simplified
chord books. I don’t know why, but they’d write them out in these beginner
chords. So they would write something which, if you weren’t paying
attention, sounded okay. But there’s a big difference between a minor chord
and a diminished chord. Quickly it would become dissatisfying. I’d listen to
the record again and I’d go, “That can’t be the chord.” And then I went and
just saw what it was. And once I saw it, then, of course, I could hear very
clearly that that was the correct harmony that I’d heard on the recording.
Because my ear was good. I could always hear all the parts of the vocal, all
the vocal harmonies.

Your songs have always been distinguished by these chords. I think of

“Almost Blue,” for example, which is such a passionately sad melody in
A minor. It goes from the A minor to A major, which then leads into D
minor, which is like something Cole Porter would do. It lifts us up and
is also beautiful.
I didn’t think of it, truthfully, in that analytical way. But of course, I was
spending a lot of time listening to—guess what—Cole Porter. And Jerome
Kern and Gershwin. I wasn’t listening to rock and roll in 1980. I was
writing some rock and roll records, but all my listening, all my records that
I carried around with me, were Billie Holiday records, Miles Davis,
Debussy. I was just curious to hear other harmonies. I suppose some of it
got into some of the songs in a very limited way. If I could write a song as
good as “Ghost of Yesterday” [by Irene Wilson and Arthur Herzog Jr.], I’d
be very happy. But I can’t. Or at least I haven’t yet.

Another one of my favorite songs you have written is “The

Comedians,” which you wrote for Roy Orbison. But I really love your
version of it and the way you sing that melody.
I never really cared for our recording of it. I felt I let the melody get
away from me by breaking it that way. And it had different lyrics. That was
one of those times when changing that lyric didn’t come back to me later as
being that satisfying. Generally, when I sing it now, I return it to the original
bolero rhythm and play it something like Roy’s arrangement.
I love to sing it. I have to be in very good voice to sing it because it’s
quite the challenge. I do sing it now and again, and it has a big impact when
I play it right. It’s a very emotional song, and one of the most amazing
experiences in my career as a sideman, which is a very short career, was to
be behind him when he sung it live [Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and
White Night, 1988] at the Coconut Grove. [Laughs] That’s the sort of
experience you’re not going to easily forget.
And he was singing like that all night long doing his own songs. I’m
just sitting there, behind my little music stand, trying to get the changes
right. He’s doing one after another of those huge crescendos.

In our remaining time might I name some of your songs and invite you
to share any thoughts about them?
Sure, we can try, yeah.

“Pidgin English.”
As I recall, it’s one of those songs that I really took apart and
reassembled in the process of rerecording. I’m sure there was a much more
straightforward version on the Trust model. And then, of course, there’s all
these overlapping vocals. I recomposed some of the songs in the studio.
That was the hallmark of that—“Kid About It” and “Beyond Belief.”
“Beyond Belief” being the most extreme example, because I completely
retitled that song. That’s what I most remember about it. Superimposing
incoming ideas over the blueprint of this idea about communication.

You wrote in your book that “Beyond Belief” was originally titled “The
Land of Give and Take.” Did you then rewrite that lyric to the track?
Yes. Some of the same melody stayed there; it was just the spacing.
Rather like what Burt Bacharach did with “God Give Me Strength”—it was
like stretched, the music over more bars, the melody over twice as many
bars in some cases. Or I compressed some sections and made some things
stretch out and change the register.

“Pills and Soap.”

This was a song that was written as a bulletin. I recorded it as The
Impostor, with just a drum loop. And I’d written it sort of like a Ramsey
Lewis–style figure. And then Steve [Nieve] played on it, and he didn’t
know any of that kind of music, so it came out much more dramatic. When
he played it, it took on an orchestral scale. I’d have this kind of vamp thing
that was there. It was more proclaimed than it was sung. So it was definitely
influenced or affected by hearing the first hip-hop records out of New York.
 The war was going on in the country at that moment, and I tried to sum
it up in that lyric. And Steve kind of played over it. I didn’t want it to be
played by a band; I wanted a very mechanistic aspect of the literally switch-
it-on-and-let-it-run kind of thing, finger clicks and backbeat. It was very
simplistic, very spare. And the only other orchestral elements were the
background voices that were tracked.
We got it out on record a week later and had it in the charts by the
following week. That was really the instant part of it.

“Clowntime Is Over.”
That’s one that went through a couple of transformations. I can’t
remember which came first, but it was both a ballad and an up-tempo song.
And there were a lot of sessions of Get Happy! when we would try many
versions of that. There was a lot of drinking going on. Some of their
reactions were very exaggerated by that or our ability to realize things we
were trying to do. So at some point it was done one way and then the other.
And I like both versions now. I’m glad we cut it twice. Both versions
emphasize different parts of the tune.

Again, it’s the sign of a strong song, that it can stand up fast or slow—
as Dylan did “Forever Young” both fast and slow on Planet Waves. The
song isn’t dependent on one record or tempo—it stands on its own.
Yeah. The slow version has one of these anthemic organ melodies. If I
could have sung like Mavis Staples, then the ballad version would have
been a killer. But I can’t. That was as close as I could get.

“Suit of Lights.”
That’s a very emotional song in a couple of different ways. I wrote it
about my father. It’s the only song The Attractions played on King of
America. The original idea for that record being one side electric and one
side acoustic. But then I went to Hollywood and cut so many acoustic songs
the first week that it completely unbalanced the record, and I had to go with
what was best.

You dedicated your book to “My Three Sons,” and you also have a song
with that title.
 Yeah, that’s a very truthful song about the discomfort of people who
want you to remain angry and be the angry guy forever. I thought I’d
explained that pretty well, the emptiness of that. “My Three Sons” is one
rendition of that feeling. I could write a number of different things about
that perspective—I’m a father and a son.
I love the record of it that we made. Particularly having David Hidalgo,
who is one of my very favorite musicians, playing on it was great. It’s just a
very simple bedding, you know? I also really like to play it in the chamber
arrangement that I made. Where the lines of the second verse are
interrupted by the melody of the Welsh hymn “All Through the Night.” And
that’s used as a motif that then answers each line in the song from the
second verse onward. That’s a completely different version of the song,
which I don’t have a recording of.

“Pump It Up.”
Well, I mean, it wasn’t a song I felt needed a huge amount of
explanation. It was some verses that I wrote late at night, the first time I
really ran up against rock and roll mayhem rather than just being in a band
playing at a local bar. I suppose I was sort of intrigued, thrilled, and
revolted at the same time. So the song is disdainful, [laughs] but it’s also a
rock and roll song. Is it a contradicted song or is it having your cake and
eating it? Probably a bit of both.

In the book you said “Alison” is a work of fiction. Is that different from
how you feel about most of your songs?
Well, I thought of it as a work of fiction. I think the point being that I
don’t suppose it was in the long run. Obviously it’s based on somewhat of
an experience. I mean, I think of all of the songs, anyway, none of my songs
are literal, real-time experiences. I mean, a few of them might seem that
way, like when you get the longer, more concentrated songs like “I Want
You.” Even then, that was edited after the fact.
When you write out of a direct experience and don’t transpose it, it’s
more readily understood that this is from life. But the songs on Painted
from Memory are called that because they are displaced only by time;
they’re not distanced from the feeling. And the songs on North don’t
employ any tricky lyrical conceits. They are pretty straight recitations of
feeling. There are some people who mistrust that when they come from
somebody who is better known for wordplay. But of course, that was just
how I felt at that moment, to actually speak clearly and say something like,
“You turned to me, and all at once I knew I was betrayed.” And what kind
of clever, arch way would have made that more sincere?
At other times you want to put a little distance between yourself and the
feeling, and obviously that is what I’m talking about with “Alison.” There’s
something very real, some real dread in that song. The fact that it’s endured
this length of time is probably down to people being able to imagine
themselves or somebody they know having that kind of conflict.

That and a tremendous melody. The words are so evocative and

visceral, with music that is pure yearning. And the visuals were
immediate, as when she took off her party dress—
It was something that you don’t analyze when you’re writing it—you
just go with the instinct. But then when you sing it you realize it has an
impact on people.

Randy Newman suggested all songs a songwriter writes, even story or

character songs, are ultimately about the songwriter. Do you feel that?
Well, don’t you think “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear” is
a personal song?

Yes. About one’s aspiration to be part of showbiz and about

exploitation.
Yes. About a dancing bear. And about exploiting yourself. I think I
found those songs very moving when I heard “Davy the Fat Boy” and these
things. The insecurity of the person standing outside of the party.

“This House Is Empty Now.”

That’s the song that I really had to ponder a long time with Burt’s music
until I got the right balance of words. And it was, funnily enough, from
recalling these lines from an ABBA song that made me realize it was that
mood that I wanted to capture. It was very affecting about the way they
didn’t over-emote. That made it very feeling, that recitation of “Walk into
this empty house, tears in my eyes . . .” And once I thought about that, well,
what if it were an inventory? That was the solution. In the end the song
became an inventory.
“Do you recognize the face / Fixed in that fine silver frame? / Were you
so unhappy then?” The picture in a frame idea is in a lot of songs. The thing
that Burt’s melody allows me to say, because there was space to say it, was
“Were you really so unhappy then? You never said . . .” It’s “you never
said” that says so much and shows how intolerable it was. It’s because of
the length of the melody, I was able to do that. It’s beyond recognizing that
someone is unhappy but the fact that they couldn’t say it out loud.

You wrote in the book that with the Bacharach songs you’d find the
title first. And that title so perfectly is wed to that melody—did you
find that first?
Yes. I knew it was called that. But I didn’t know what all the fill-in was.

That’s an example of a title that tells the story. Of course, how deep
that story becomes is another thing.
Yes. The weight of the words. The first couple of drafts I wrote were
much more strong, and I had to chill it out. That’s where the ABBA song
became the key, because it was much more dispassionate in the recitation of
the inventory.

You spoke of writing drafts. Are there many songs for which you also
wrote many drafts?
Oh yeah, I have whole notebooks. There’s drafts of “Oliver’s Army,”
but it has different rhyme schemes. I put a reference to Solsbury in there at
one point. And then that didn’t survive into the final version. Some of it is
just technical.

What allows those words to come through when you are in that first
stage of writing? Is it necessary to get out of your own way?
I don’t think the way of getting out of your way is to just keep writing. I
wrote it out like twenty times in some cases. Some songs came quite
quickly, while others I wrote them out, wrote them out, many times.
Some songwriters say they start judging it too soon and get in their own
way in terms of letting it come out.
I have friends who have done that. But they’re sometimes listening to
other voices. They’re listening to their sisters or to people they should more
cheerfully want to strangle. [Laughter] And they get whispering in their ear
about stuff. But you’ve just got to do it. You’ve got to do what you feel.

Some songwriters I’ve spoken to, like Randy Newman, complain about
songwriting and don’t enjoy it, while others love the process and find
joy in songwriting—
I’ve heard Randy say that. I sat with him not very long ago, and he
described the most beautiful song that he was working on. It was
overwhelming to me that he was telling me about it. He described a song to
me, which was just a magical thing, seeing someone struggling with how to
write this song, and I saw what he was going through. And of course, if you
got me on a certain day I might say the same sort of distracted stuff. There
are things I’ve been wrestling with. I have had experiences with writing
without so much effort. And because this prolific thing has become attached
to me, it makes it seem like I have it all figured out. But of course, there are
some songs that are obviously frustrating while you’re working on them.
It’s just like injuring yourself in some way, or heartbreak, or toothache.
In some ways you forget about it. Like why do people get drunk and get a
hangover and say, “I’ll never drink again,” and then three days later they go
out and do it again? You forget quickly. Toothache, heartache, and
drunkenness, these three things we forget very quickly, otherwise we’d
never live. And songwriting is the same.

When I interviewed Dylan he said, “The world doesn’t need any new
songs. If no one wrote another new song we’d be okay.”
Well, you know, that is what he said one day. And then he wrote
Tempest.

Exactly—
[Laughs] He said that to me before. And I’ve said it too. I was on a
plane a couple of years ago, and I happened to be on the plane with James
Taylor, and I told James that, and James gave me a real talking to about it
and said “You can’t say that.”
I was on tour in Bloomington, Indiana, and Bob was there, and [John]
Mellencamp came to see me. And John obviously knows [Bob] well, and
we were just standing together in the loading bay, waiting for the trucks to
get out of the way so we could get to the coaches.
And John said, “You writing any songs?” And Bob said exactly what he
said to you. That the world doesn’t need any new ones. And I thought,
“Well, yeah, I believe that.” And I don’t believe it. You don’t want to
believe it when somebody good like that says that. And heaven knows, if he
never got round to writing another song, we’ve got a lot from him, wouldn’t
you say? So, you know, you have to sort of take him at face value until the
next time he’s moved to write one. Then he writes “Long and Wasted
Years.”

I felt maybe it’s a joke—

Of course, it’s a joke. I mean, what he actually said that night to me is
“What is it I need that I don’t already have?”
And I thought when he said that, is that a song title? Is he quoting a
song title?
Well, I thought, if it wasn’t, it fucking is now. And I wrote it down.

OceanofPDF.com
Joe Jackson
 Night and Day
Berlin, Germany 2015

Before he ever wrote songs, he wrote chamber music. Expressing himself

instrumentally—and with a beautiful range of music, whether orchestra or
big band—has been a part of his musical soul since the start. The ostensible
purpose of our talk on this day was to discuss his most recent project, The
Duke, and the big band music it inspired. But as he is Joe Jackson, one of
the great songwriters of our time, I indulged his generous spirit by inquiring
about some of his own famous songs and his ideas about songwriting.
We spoke over the phone from his home in Berlin, where he’d recently
moved. Asked why, he answered, “The cities that I have spent the most
time and I know the best are London and New York. And I am kind of
disillusioned with both in a way. And I find that Berlin is much more
relaxed and more livable, at least right now.”
He was born David Ian Jackson on August 11, 1954, in Burton upon
Trent, Staffordshire, England, and spent his early years in the Paulsgrove
area of Portsmouth before moving to Gosport, England, in his teens.
His first instrument was violin, but he switched early on to piano. He
started composing instrumental music at fourteen before he ever wrote a
song. “I came to songwriting fairly late,” he said. “I didn’t really start trying
to write songs until I was a bit older, nineteen or so, and playing in bands.
Before that I was trying to write chamber music first for various
combinations [of instruments] that were around me at school. I wanted to be
a composer.”
Asked to describe this early music, he said, “It was sort of a strange
mishmash of jazzy elements with elements of composers I’d admired, like
Bartok and Stravinsky. . . . It was not very good.”
At sixteen he started playing piano in bars and won a scholarship to
study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He joined two
bands, first Edward Bear and then Arms and Legs. In 1978 a demo found its
way to A&M records, which signed him as the Joe Jackson Band. The
debut album was the wonderful Look Sharp, with melody, jazzy songs, and
smart lyrics. It was a little new wave, a little jazz-rock Steely Dan, and it
was fresh and new. The single was a beautifully melodic ballad sung with
great urgency, “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” From this song on, we
knew he was the real deal.
Subsequent albums sustained this great fusion of smart British pop-rock
with jazz and soul. He also was adept at stretching the content of pop songs,
as he did with “It’s Different for Girls” from his second album, I’m the
Man, in 1979.
In 1982 came the landmark Night and Day, the quintessential Joe
Jackson album. Like some beautiful hybrid of Cole Porter, Cab Calloway,
and Frank Sinatra, it was unlike anything that came before—well, except
his previous albums. But it was the album of the time. As a personal aside, I
will always remember working that year, 1982, in a Hollywood recording
studio, where I was a second engineer. Often a third engineer, in fact. After
long recording sessions we’d have to clean up the studio—all the mics,
cords, mic stands, coffee cups, and other detritus of the recent session.
Nothing fueled those clean-up sessions like Night and Day. We’d put the
LP on and blast it over the giant studio speakers, and it was exultant Joe
with beautiful, bright, big-band beauty—in great fidelity. It was brand new
yet alive with electric spirits of the past, of those big, bright horn sections of
the big bands, of those sophisticated harmonies as cool and complex as
Duke Ellington yet wed with the persistent, incendiary urgency of rock and
roll. It was a new sound, a unique energy, both elegant and raw. It was all
Joe.
Since then other great albums have come, such as Body and Soul
(1984), with the haunting “Be My Number Two,” and the live wonder of
Big World (1986). The following year, 1987, he returned to his instrumental
roots with Will Power. Then there came Blaze of Glory (1989) and Laughter
& Lust. He then announced he was leaving pop music behind.
Indeed, his next music was a symphony, Symphony No. 1. And in 2012
he recorded a beautifully inspired and devoted tribute to Duke Ellington
called The Duke. It was the release of this album that give me a chance to
talk to him over the phone from his new home in Berlin.
This same year, 2015, he released his back-to-form full album of
originals, Fast Forward. But it was about Duke that our conversation
began.

Your own music is so rich and jazzy. I am not surprised you would do a
whole album of the music of Duke Ellington. What led you to this?
Joe Jackson: He’s one of my musical heroes and role models and has
been for a long time. It’s a hard question in a way. It’s ’cause I like Duke
Ellington. But why it is that so many Ellington tunes keep coming into my
head, I really don’t know, or why I was moved to experiment with different
arrangements, I don’t really know. And why it got to the point where I saw
the possibility of doing a whole album.
For me it’s just been like any other creative process of making an
album. Although I didn’t write any original tunes. But it’s a very intuitive
process, and it’s hard to say why.

It makes sense, as like Ellington, you have had pop hits and written
famous songs, yet your music is quite complex, orchestral, and full of
big-band sounds—like his.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly don’t want to come across as comparing
myself to Ellington. But he has been a role model to me, and I think I am a
similar musician to him. For one thing, Ellington didn’t respect categories
or boundaries in music at all and was very eclectic. So there’s certainly that.
And also, he was someone with a big musical vision, who saw the whole
thing, the big picture, but still found ways to let his musicians share the
spotlight. And that’s another thing that I always found very interesting
about him that I think I learned from, and I have done the same things.
Interesting you identify the way he’d cross over boundaries of music,
and you’ve done the same thing. In your career you’ve moved across
many genres, whereas most people in your field don’t cover as much
stylistic ground.
Yeah, I guess I just don’t see those. I don’t think it’s a good thing or a
bad thing to be eclectic or to be very much within one genre. I think you
just have to be yourself. As Oscar Wilde said, “One should do as one’s
nature dictates.” These sort of controversies about what is authentic and
what elements you’re allowed to mix together go way back. I was thinking
about Gershwin recently, how he got all sorts of shit from the classic people
and the jazz people because they said he was neither one nor the other,
therefore what he did was not authentic. Yet we still listen to his music. I
just went to a performance of Porgy and Bess, which is a big hit in New
York on Broadway.
Of course, now we recognize that it’s not the point whether he was
authentically jazz or authentically classical. He was authentically Gershwin.

Exactly. And as I’m sure you know, Porgy and Bess was panned when it
came out; people didn’t like it at all at first.
Yeah, and interestingly enough, Duke Ellington didn’t like it much
either, although he respected Gershwin.

Why did Duke not like it?

He felt that it was, in some ways, a missed opportunity. Of creating an
opera in African American style, which he felt it wasn’t. A rare example of
Ellington possibly missing the point a little bit. But I don’t know. He felt he
could do it better.

Did people in the business try to get you to stay in one area and
discourage your eclecticism?
Not really. No one comes into the studio and puts a gun to your head
and says, “Make this type of record.”

No? We felt record companies would do that. Not with a gun, though—
Well, no. I think what happens is that they just won’t promote it.
I ask because the thing about you that excited us the most was the new
sound you were delivering. It was as exciting as hearing Steely Dan the
first time, this heady mixture of jazz, soul, and rock and this
recognition that there is a whole new world here musically.
Steely Dan was one of my big influences, I think, as a teenager.

Like you, they have expanded the harmonic vocabulary of rock with
extended, complex chords and chromatic changes, yet still with a
visceral groove, like the best of rock. And your music is a lot more
chromatic than the typical diatonic pop music we hear.
Yeah, I guess so. [Laughs] I just try to avoid clichés. And try to avoid
things that sound like something I have already heard somewhere. That’s as
close as I get to a kind of a method.

And you knew how to notate and arrange music—

I learned that when I was eleven. It’s not that hard. [Laughs]

No, it’s not. But as you know, very few songwriters—except Van Dyke
Parks, Randy Newman, and Warren Zevon—know how to do that. And
you.
Yes, strange.

Strange they don’t learn to do it?

Yes. Strange to me that in the pop and rock world generally that people
tend to see it like rocket science or something. It’s easy. It’s really not a big
deal. It seems people who can’t do it make a big deal out of it. They build
strange myths around the whole subject. I’ve actually talked to people who
say they never wanted to learn to read or write music because they think it
will take away their feel or their soul or something like that. Which I think
is just stupid.

Yes, there is that school of thought that too much knowledge of that
gets in the way—
I don’t agree at all.

I know so many songwriters who say they can’t read music as if they
couldn’t learn. It isn’t hard to learn!
 It really isn’t. [Laughs] It’s like learning a very simple language that has
no exceptions to the rule, very logical grammar, and a small vocabulary.

Did having that knowledge inform your own songwriting?

I think everything informs everything you do. Everything you’ve
learned. But when it comes to actually doing it, speaking for myself, I’m
not conscious of it. But everything I’ve learned over the years I think I’m
using in some way. But when I’m actually writing, I’m not conscious; I’m
just following my own intuition.

What caused you to shift to songwriting—being in bands?

Yeah, I guess so. And just my openness to pop and rock music, which,
for a while, I wasn’t that interested in. I went through a bit of a strange
trajectory, I think, because when I was ten or eleven I liked all the same pop
music that everyone liked on the radio. Then I started with the violin and
got started with classical music. But within a few years I got into jazz, and
then into rock and roll. And really everything, really. So I just had to go
through that process of learning all kinds of music were valid.

Would you analyze songs musically to learn how they were made?
Sometimes. If they were interesting. [Laughs] If they were Steely Dan
songs, maybe.

Did you like simple rock or were you more drawn to jazzy Steely Dan–
type music?
I liked all kinds of stuff. By the time I was eighteen or nineteen I pretty
much liked everything. I liked even the trashiest stuff that was on the radio
and TV. I quite liked the glam rock stuff. Apart from David Bowie, who
was much more than that, I liked Marc Bolan and the Sweet. I didn’t mind
how trashy it was. Music either moves me in some way or doesn’t. It
doesn’t have to be complex or clever. Very often I’d rather it wasn’t.

When you started writing songs, did it come easy?

Not at all. I didn’t know how to write lyrics. It took me years, really.
Even a lot of my early recorded stuff, early albums, some of the lyrics make
me cringe.
When you would write a song would you usually start with some music
or chord changes before words?
No, the starting point seems to vary all the time. But once I have a
starting point, I work on words and music together. To write one first and
then the other doesn’t make sense to me.

Do you work at the piano?

Quite a lot. Not all the time. I mean, I work in my head a lot.

In your head can you hear the whole picture—the chords and melody?
Pretty much. Sometimes I have to go to the keyboard and figure out
what it is.

Interesting you say that, as when I interviewed Burt Bacharach he said

he needed to get away from the keyboard and think of melodies in his
head. Whereas, as you know, a lot of songwriters work from chord
progressions on piano or guitar and sing against them.
I think it’s a good idea to get away from the keyboard. Because you can
find yourself doing keyboardy things. [Laughs] For want of a better term.
And sometimes being too obvious.
To get back to Ellington for a minute, one of my favorite songs of his is
“In a Sentimental Mood.” Which I think is one of the most beautiful things
he ever wrote. I couldn’t come up with an arrangement for it for this album.
But today I was playing it on piano and really thinking how so much of the
time—really through the whole song—the melody is not what you’d think
of putting with those chords. It works. It sounds great. There’s a freshness
about it. In a way it doesn’t sound like someone sitting down at the piano
and, as you said, sang against the chord sequence. He always makes
unusual and not necessarily logical choices where the melody goes against
the chords. And yet it sounds completely right; it sounds logical.

Yes, I know what you mean. He is playing with expectations, so there’s

a freshness in his music, even though it’s obviously not new music.
Yes. That was the idea, where you take the directions which haven’t
been taken before and have fun with it.
I love the casting of various musicians and singers on it. Especially the
Sharon Jones track, which sounds amazing.
Yeah, she’s great. She came in at the last minute, the last vocal we did.
I’m really glad we got her.

Had you thought of vocalists in advance of making the tracks?

In some cases I did. In some cases I had a few different people in mind.
And we whittled it down. I didn’t think I would sing “I Got It Bad (And
That Ain’t Good)” myself. I didn’t think I could sing that.

I was wondering about that. You are a great—and famous—vocalist.

Why did you choose to sing what you did and not other songs?
I think it was a realistic view of my own limitations. But I also wanted it
to have different voices and different colors. Different voices that can do
what I can’t do.

Does the fact you did this mean you are not writing new songs yourself?
I don’t really have the time right now, [laughs] to be honest. I have been
working on a few ideas. But in the last few years I have been doing a lot of
touring. And then working on this Ellington project. It’s been pretty
absorbing.

Would you generally write songs all the time or just when it was time
for a new album?
I sort of would go through bursts. Sometimes I’d write a lot, and then
nothing for a while.

Is there any way to explain what affects and allows those bursts?
It’s a mystery. A complete mystery.

Many have suggested it comes when doing it a lot, and if you stop, you
have to start over. Do you find that?
I think it’s more like the cliché about riding a bicycle.

I always remember here in Los Angeles, 1982, “Stepping Out” was our
theme song. Everyone used it to get us going. It starts in F sharp minor
and then switches to F sharp major.
 I thought it was all in F sharp major.

Well, that is one of its charms, that the key center isn’t obvious.
Yes. It’s intuitive.

Many songwriters have expressed that what’s instinctual only takes

them so far and then they need to be more conscious of musical choices.
I think it’s more instinctual than anything. But sometimes I have to
think about it more. Somewhere I’ll have a problem. For instance, I think
one of my best songs is from my last album, it’s called “Wasted Time.” I
was trying to find a way to have a key change in the bridge but have the
bridge come back to another section that was in another key. So I really had
to use all my knowledge of harmony to structure that bridge. But I think
when you listen to it, it just sounds logical.

It sounds natural. It doesn’t sound contrived.

I hope so. It actually took a lot of figuring out.

That would be an exception?

Right.

Your song “Breaking Us in Two” also has a deceptive key center, also
going to F sharp major.
Yes, that was conscious at the time. To use a couple of the same ideas
harmonically but to do something different with it. It was almost like a
theme running through the album.

Yes, that theme of ascending major chords. Which is a very triumphant

sound. And for “Breaking Us in Two” it’s an interesting dynamic
between that sound with that lyric.

You’ve been writing songs for a long time. Does the process get any
easier, and do you gain new thoughts about how to write songs?
I don’t know. It’s changed in one way. I take a lot more time than I used
to. It used to be that if I got an idea for a song, then I knocked it out best I
could, and that was that. I think that more and more these days I’m more
inclined to scrap ideas or to edit myself more or really try something again
instead of thinking that however it came out the first time was the way it
had to be. I’ve even scrapped a whole lyric and started all over again. I
never used to do that.

Do you judge it while working on it?

Yes. When it’s feeling just not quite good enough to me. I don’t know.
I’ve got more fussy or something.

Even using F sharp in rock and pop is unusual, as most guitarists don’t
play that chord except with a capo.
Well, it just seems to be quite often a good key for my voice. I guess
I’m unusual in that I’ve had two songs in the key of F sharp. [Laughs] Yeah,
“It’s Different for Girls” is also in F sharp.

Irving Berlin could only play in F sharp.

Yes. He had a special piano with a lever that changed the keys.

Yes. It is a better piano key than guitar key. Do you find different keys
have different tones and moods?
I think the idea is common enough that there must be something to it,
but I can’t really hear it. I think there might be something to it.

Some songwriters associate different colors with every key. Do you do

that?
Not really. I think the colors come from the harmonic movement and the
contrast between keys.

So many of your melodies are simply glorious. Do you have any idea
what makes a melody great?
Do you?

I don’t.
I think it’s cool, though, to think about it.

Yes. Because all different melodies can work. There is no one way.
Yeah. But I do like a melody, as opposed to a few repeated notes or a
riff. Some songs work okay for what they are, but there’s not much going
on melodically. It’s one of the reasons I always loved standards, and
songwriters like Gershwin and Harold Arlen—because the melodies really
have an arc and a shape to them.

As do your songs, such as the beautiful “Is She Really Going Out with
Him?” It has such a great opening line: “Pretty women out walking
with gorillas down my street.” Which is a great opening, visually and
metrically.
I remember that was one song that started with the title, which has
sometimes happened. I hear a phrase or something and think that would be
a good song. What would that song be about? And in the case of that song,
that song was supposed to be a funny song. It was really amazing to me
when some people were interpreting it as being angry.

It is funny. And I love the call and response you have: “Look over there
—where?—”
[Laughs] It was just having fun.

Have you ever found any repeatable methods for writing songs?
No. There’s never been much of a pattern to it.

If something wasn’t happening, would you get up and leave or stay

there and work?
I am more likely to get up and do something else. It is good to do that.
To get away from a problem for a while and then come back to it and really
see it. I think that applies to any kind of process, any kind of problem.

Did you find anything made the process easier?

[Long pause, then laughter] I really don’t know. Mostly it’s a mystery. I
put one foot in front of the other and try to find something that is exciting to
me, and it gets fun, and I am almost jumping up and down.

Is it a sense of following the song more than leading it?

Yes. I feel like that sometimes. I’ve had this feeling quite often. It’s a
very spooky feeling; it feels like you’re just uncovering it.

And what’s the best way to uncover it?

[Laughs] Keep working on it.

OceanofPDF.com
Rickie Lee Jones
 Flying with the Cowboys
Malibu, California 2011; New Orleans, Louisiana 2015

Okay, truth be told, even if I had no outlet for this conversation, I would
still want to talk to Rickie Lee. I just love being the person who gets to ask
her questions and then bask in the sunshine and sometimes rain of her
wisdom and whimsy. She’s a compelling person, to put it lightly, and any
time spent with her is time I cherish and remember always.
Okay, it’s easy to remember, as I record our every talk. And then
transcribe it faithfully, sure to get the phrasing right. Because she’s serious
about songwriting. As are the greatest purveyors of this art among us.
Although it can be received as mere entertainment, to the serious songwriter
this stuff is never to be taken lightly.
And so she speaks in hushed and reverent tones. “The best thing you
can do as a songwriter,” she says, “is trust the higher part that is writing and
don’t judge yourself or worry too much about it.” That trust has connected
all her songs since the start. She wrote her first one at the age of eight and
never stopped writing them, a passion, interlaced with her love of singing,
that brought her eventually to the western slopes of Los Angeles. Playing
solo gigs around town, her music reached the ears of Lowell George, who
recorded her “Easy Money” and helped her land a record deal. And unlike
almost all songwriters who need a few albums at least to find their own
voice, her eponymous debut revealed an astounding maturity and range of
expression, from absolute exultation to darkest sorrow.
But despite its meteoric success, fueled by the euphoric “Chuck E.’s in
Love,” she was wise enough to know “you can’t debut twice” and never
attempted to repeat herself. She followed it with Pirates, a masterpiece of
songwriting and singing so sophisticated and soulful that fans were awed
and critics fell over themselves trying to capture with words what she did
with music. Here was proof that the first album was no fluke and that not
only was Rickie Lee Jones playing in the major leagues as a songwriter, she
was also one of the most soulful and versatile vocalists ever to grace rock
and roll. Pirates was likened to the music of everyone from Gershwin to
Steely Dan, but none of these comparisons sufficed, as she was then and is
now a songwriter and singer unlike any other, playing entirely by her own
rules.
Subsequent masterpieces followed, including the mythic soul mysteries
of The Magazine, the rich desert soundscapes of Flying Cowboys, the
propulsive electric-acoustic spook-hop funk of Ghostyhead, the political
rancor and redemption of the Bush-era The Evening of My Best Day, and
the miraculously spontaneous spiritual exhortations of The Sermon on
Exposition Boulevard. The gentle and wistful calm of Balm in Gilead is as
ideal for the cold madness of modern times as she’s been. And in 2015,
closest to the completion of this tome, came her move to New Orleans and
the album written in that wake, The Other Side of Desire, a beautifully
inspired collection of songs haunted yet joyful, like the soul of New Orleans
itself. Interviews that span several of these albums are combined herein.
Like Judy Garland, Billie Holliday, and other singers who invested the
fullness of their soul and its sorrows into every song, Rickie encompasses a
miraculous range of emotion in her work—“that’s my gift,” she allows—
but unlike the others, she is also the songwriter of these songs, so the
closeness to the bone we feel is ever more intense knowing it’s genuine.
These are not interpretations—although she’s great at singing other people’s
songs—these are songs straight from the songwriter’s soul. And in her work
—unlike that of her famous paramour of the past, Tom Waits, and those
who followed in his insalubrious footsteps—she did not wear masks or hide
behind characters. Every song she wrote, to quote Waits, was “one from the
heart.” And that reality, that lack of distance between the singer and the
song, is what gives her work so much poignancy and so much power.
For years she lived in the heart of Los Angeles, in and around the streets
of Hollywood, taking it all in. These days she lives high—way, way up high
—up above this vast city, up steep winding canyon hills over Malibu in a
cottage with lots of land around where she can keep her horse. It seems a
good place for those mythic flying cowboys she wrote about years ago to
embark on a voyage. And it’s from here where she embarks on her journeys
—and does so with surprising speed, as one who tried and failed to follow
her down winding hills to the Malibu flats knows well. She lost me! I tried
to keep up with Rickie Lee Jones and lost. Symbolic? Of course.
Everything to songwriters is symbolic.
We met the next day outside of a Malibu café where the sound of people
laptopping and cell-phoning and munching on sandwiches around us was
punctuated by the high-frequency cries of the gulls. It was an unusually
overcast day, one of those spectral afternoons when the lack of glaring light
causes the colors to radiate like mystic pastels on a canvas, and she seemed
both somber and joyous as she reflected on the myriad paths that led her
here. While we were talking, it seemed at first that nobody recognized her,
until out of nowhere a lady appeared with a bag of treats for her and said,
“Here’s some little goodies for you.” Rickie smiled for a brief moment.
“Does that make you happy?” I asked. I wasn’t sure. “Sure, of course it
does,” she said softly. “But only for a moment. And then it passes.”

“Wild Girl” is an amazing song about your past and present and about
your daughter. Like most of your songs, it works on many levels at
once.
Rickie Lee Jones: Yeah. “Wild Girl,” most of it was written in the
eighties. It was the first song written after The Magazine. But I didn’t have
the finish, and I kept playing it for people every few months. And it never
went away. It was a whole intact song. I couldn’t forget it, it just was.
Deciding who it was about helped me decide what I wanted to say. As long
as it floated around bodyless, you could say anything. I thought of my
daughter, Charlotte, and, okay, here’s what I want to say. And it finished
itself. Without being too revealing.
Were you writing about yourself in it at first?
I was thinking of that girl in high school that everybody sleeps with but
nobody likes. Who is she? What happened to her? And how could I save
her?
But songs are also amalgams. I was talking to me and to all the girls,
when we get all dressed up and we’re gonna go out and have fun. What is
the line between fun and not fun, and who set it? Did society set it? Did you
decide to defy society’s line, and how happy are you now? Come back.
That’s my guess. It’s many years later. I was always expressing myself
through other characters. And they’re real too. There’s a bunch of stuff
taking place. I’m talking to me, I’m talking to the future, I’m talking to
somebody I don’t know. And I believe somewhere in the world somebody
hears that and goes, “That was written for me.” And they’re right. That was
written for them.
And it was written for my daughter. Who I hadn’t met yet. And who
will later find out what the spirit of that song was. My mother loved that
song so much. She was the main reason I kept returning to it. Because there
was a point where it seemed really quaint and dated. And in the last couple
years, whatever the date is, this song has so much innocent heart that we’re
gonna bring it in. So I don’t know how, but I did bring it in. I just
transcended all the obstacles in my mind. It was right from my heart.

That sense of innocent heart is a prominent aspect of your work—

It is. I just started to get that picture—I don’t know how I got it—but I
just started to see if there’s one thing that is my gift in music, that’s what it
is. I have an absolute connection to my emotions when I sing. And that
seems to make people feel so healed.

You’re able to capture the genuine sense of extreme emotion in your

songs, from deeply blue to genuinely joyful.
I think I have to work to write a happy song. I write them carefully—
they’re simple; they’re about when it’s fun to walk down the street, you
know? Because that’s the best thing about when you’re happy. It’s just one
little thing that makes you happy, and you’re making friends. The kind of
thing I can do is capture this moment. But isn’t that what everybody’s
happy song would be? Like the Rolling Stones are really good at writing
happy songs. Even when their content is not happy, there’s something about
their energies that makes it sound happy.
The mystical thing is that the energy, the intention, is what gets
translated. Your intention is to express this moment when things go wrong.
But what you write about is a trailer court and a blue car in a trailer court.
Yet somehow when people come back to talk to you, they will say, “You
know I listened to that song, and it reminds me of when things go wrong.”
They always understand what you intended.
That’s the mystical thing about songwriting to me. We’re talking on
these other levels that we don’t know. And the best thing you can do as a
songwriter is trust the higher part that is writing and don’t judge yourself or
worry too much about it.
Yes, the wrong word or wrong phrase can impede that process, but let it
be. Trust yourself; trust your journey and your life. Write the song.

So when writing, you don’t judge it—

If I do, it’ll die. The moment it comes through, the moment this little
critic speaks up, it dies. You got to really protect it from what you think
someone who didn’t like you would say—the playground, you know.
Because it’s so tenuous. I am so afraid of losing them when I’m writing.
They seem so delicate. They are formed by my intention to them as well as,
it seems, their intention for something to say.
It’s like the beginning of a love affair. It seems so tenuous. You say the
wrong thing on that date and then they don’t call for two days and then you
get mad and then it’s over, you know? Just in the beginning you’ve got to be
very courteous with your song. You need to play it every day, every other
hour so it doesn’t die or you don’t forget exactly how you did that part.

When you start a song do you start with an intention of what the song
is about?
I don’t think I ever do that. I think it’s always just coming out of me. I
never know where it’s gonna go or what it’s gonna be. I don’t watch my
process, but I probably write a line or two and then know where I’m gonna
go right away. Do I want to do a rhyme scheme or a rhythm thing, or do I
want to write free verse? It will usually tell you a direction to go. And what
the subject is will be revealed. But it doesn’t have the conscious in it. I just
get out of my way. Following, not leading it. Not thinking about it at all. I
can take the pen and write you eight lines right now. When it’s done, it’ll
probably make sense, rhyme. Because the part just behind my
consciousness knows just what it is doing. If my consciousness gets in the
way, then that unconscious part goes, “Okay, you take care of it.” [Laughs]
And then my ego enters, and the flow stops. So I have to not guide it but
just trust that I know what I’m doing. And again, not bothering with it.
Like “Bonfires” was about twelve verses. There were a lot of beautiful
verses, but I felt that I was going to lose the impact. What I was thinking
about when I wrote that was Bob Dylan’s first record. I was thinking of how
he played his guitar. This is where I am right now—it’s simple. And that’s
how I wanted to deliver it. I didn’t want it to be like Fleetwood Mac; I
wanted to be like Dylan. Knowing there’s no other way to survive
heartbreak than to give love.

“Old Enough” is a great duet with Ben Harper. How did that evolve?
I wrote the verses, and he was brought in to sing one of them, the first
verse, which caused me to think about the second one and rewrite the
second one. It was like a Van Morrison thing. I ended up with kind of a
Marvin Gaye thing. I wanted to say something about why are you rejecting
me when I love you? And that was a case of wandering away from a song
and finding it difficult to have something to say in four lines five years later.
I had four lines I needed to write to connect what was there with what came
after. And that was a lot of work. [Laughs] A lot of work!
And the other verse which was there was [sings strongly], “I wake up in
the morning light / The world is bathed and blue / I take a walk when the
sun comes up / I run back home to you / And late at night as the cars go by .
. .” That’s where he comes in. So it was all one verse. Lately I’ve been
thinking, “God, that was a pretty good verse.” [Laughs]

When you write a song, do you ever choose a key prior to starting?
No, I’ve done that in the old days. They do seem to come a lot in G.

Do you think each key has its own color or characters?

Yes.
If I named several keys, could you tell me how it makes you feel?
I could try.

Okay. How about C major?

C seems like it would be dressed in a nice cowboy outfit. Friendly, not
bothering anybody. It could lead to the sad, it could lead to the happy. It’s a
kind of middle of the road. It’s a little low in my register; I think of it as a
boy’s key. It’s very friendly.

D.
D’s much more of a challenge. It’s got more tension in it than C. I think
of my mother a little bit. Seems like a feminine key.

E.
E is like the dirt. It’s where things fall to. E is something to lay down
on. It’s a really easy key to sing and play. It’s a good resolution. Masculine.

F.
I don’t know F very much.

G.
Celestial. Very expansive.

A.
A. I like A. Strength. It’s expansive but it’s consoled. It can be
masculine or feminine. It can go either way.

A minor?
I like it. It’s sad, but it’s not without hope.

E minor.
Seems much darker to me. Sorrowful. It will accommodate rock.
Powerful rock. It can be a pretty dire thing.

I understand that at times when you haven’t been writing new songs,
you studied certain songwriters to bring you back to songwriting.
That’s right.
Paul McCartney?
That was one. And I mentioned him mostly because of the Ram album.
Which I think is an amazing and still ahead-of-its-time piece of work. When
I listen to it, it’s kind of the precursor to everything cut-and-paste. But the
difference is that he’s still got great songs. He’s playing everything by hand
and it’s all homemade. And some of them are just fragments of songs, but
they’re all beautiful.
’Cause normally you’d think you go to John Lennon, right? Powerful
entity, great, amazing songs, and I do listen to them, but they were never—
maybe like the difference between the way one teacher reaches you and
another doesn’t. When I listened to John Lennon I didn’t turn around and
go, “I think I’ll write something,” I’d go, “Oh wow, that’s a real great song.
I’ll never write that song.” When I listened to Paul McCartney, I’d go, “Oh
yeah, yeah, I can go with that. I could do that.” And when I listen to Curtis
Mayfield, I go, “Yeah, yeah, I can do that. I know that language.”

With McCartney there’s a sweetness of melody that your songs share.

I guess so. Yeah. He’s very romantic, and he’s not afraid to be.
Romantic is the perfect word, but there’s always something very innocent
about being that romantic. You know, I’ve noticed men are mostly the only
people who can get away with that. Women, even though a kind of romantic
thing is attached to them, that’s not true. It’s usually men who write the
romantic love songs. And women are writing, generally, more aggressive,
personal complaint. I’m thinking of all the women who are contemporary to
me. While the men write an unmitigated [laughs] innocent “I love you so
much that butterflies are flying around” songs. And I find it just endears
them to me so much. Although I know men are more inclined to be warriors
and all the things we say about them, they’re also this. They’re also fragile
and terribly in love and terribly romantic. And I liked learning that.

And you studied their work?

I did. Studied them just by listening to them. But instead of listening
just for the pleasure of it, once your door is open, then everything is
knowledge. Everything you’re taking in, you’re taking in to build your
house that you’re building. You can get it from movies and songs, and
everything you look at gets processed.
You went a long time without writing songs. Did you ever feel the need
to write during this interim?
Sure. I wanted to write. But, you know, you sit down to write and it
hurts. The whole thing is a process, right? It’s kind of like creating the
universe. When you first write, you only have the little grain of sand. You
have no idea what it will be. So the first thing you write might be a terrible,
uninteresting song, but there’s one part of it that reminds you, say, of a kind
of emotional freedom you’d like to have. I don’t know why. Just a couple
bars. And then you go, “I don’t know what that is, but I sure wish I could do
it.” And then a year later maybe that feeling is more sophisticated, and now
you’ve written a line.
And so, if I really thought about it, probably in my way I’ve been
working the whole time. Waiting to write a greater song. And be totally
engrossed and energized and unafraid of writing. Because writing is so hard
when you stop. So hard to relearn again. It’s really hard.
There are a couple of things: I know how to do it. It’s what I do. But to
do it to the extent that I’d like to do it, to change my life or bring a good
thing to the world or shake it up or bring some new style or whatever it is
I’m trying to do, like any athlete, you have to just keep practicing and
practicing and practicing.
And then the question is, “What is your destiny?” So if you know that’s
not your destiny to do this, then my prayer is “Can you just show me where
I might be content?” This is what I’d like to do. I’d like to write a great
piece of work. But just guide me where I’m supposed to go. Because I just
don’t know where I’m supposed to go.
And I think that maybe if that’s your prayer and your point of focus,
then you can hopefully find contentment with whatever it is you manifest. If
you pray for a specific thing—which also is helpful—that may not actually
be what you’re setting yourself up to do. I think a lot of times people will
pray for a new car, say, but they’re not doing anything [laughs] to manifest
that thing coming through. So you’ve got to work with your intentions and
your muscles and keeping an eye about what your destiny is.
It’s all very complicated, and it’s kind of easy and silly to say from here.
Because from here I could look back, and this is what it looks like. I think
contrary things are always happening at the same time. While I was
breaking, I was also being restored.
 There was a year or two, I remember, in Tacoma, thinking, “You know,
I never sing.” And now I sing all the time. I wake up singing. It’s almost
like being manic-depressive. You know, because it’s so consuming that
when you open the door, that’s all you’re going to do and be. And now that
it’s open, I’m very happy. But it’s very difficult to do or be anything else but
a musician once that door opens. And [softly] I think I’ve been trying to just
be a mother.

You mentioned the tree you drive by, which became the song “A Tree
on Allenford.” It’s a stunning song. It has the powerful and beautiful
line, “Every drop of rain that fell or falls is always falling on and on.”
I wrote it in my car. There were a couple of songs I started writing as I
drove to work. And that was one of those songs.
I would pass this tree every day on my way to work. A child had been
killed there, and people left flowers and made it kind of a shrine. And I was
thinking how the tree had taken on that burden or that love of those people.
And I thought that somewhere in the ether the tree and the children are
sitting together.
It’s too metaphysical now. It’s about trying to offer complete relief to
the grieving parent. Not through the lyric but just through my prayer, as I
drive by, to say, “All is well, and we’re all part of each other. None of us is
gone. If we’re not in the rain, we’re in the tree, or we’re in the thoughts.
We’re all here.”
I’ve had that happen a few times, where I got the melody in my head.
And I just keep singing, just keep singing it, till I get to work, don’t let
anything take me away. Walk right in [to the recording studio] and said,
“Not going to do what we planned—I have a new song,” sat down right
away, and played it and recorded it. So what you hear is me writing it.
That’s it. That was like that day that I wrote it.

And you played it on guitar?

Actually on a keyboard first. I got that little melody [sings repeated
motif], and we got a little oboe sound and put that on. And then later we
brought in players and put that keyboard way in the back with a little echo
on it. So it almost sounds a little accordionish. What’s thrilling about it
technically is that it’s really the day I wrote it, that version.
Did you write other songs in your head like that?
The other one I wrote in my head like that was “The Mink Coat at the
Bus Stop.” I mean, I remember seeing her very well, so the way that I’m
remembering it is that I heard the melody. I’m not sure if I heard the
melody then or if I went in and wrote it.
But I saw this girl at the bus stop, a little younger than me, fortyish,
early in the morning, when I’m taking my daughter to school. And she was
sitting at the bus stop in a mink coat. Every day when I drive her to school I
see a lot of people out in the street with nowhere to go. And I knew that
people don’t look; they didn’t see her.
I wondered, “What are you doing there in the morning in your mink
coat at the bus stop?” She was looking up, her eyes were cast upward and
never changed. The whole time she sat there looking up. And I thought,
“Whoa, that’s a low-down scene, man.” [Laughs] And all these people
driving by in their brand-new cars. And all the people waiting for the bus.
What a hard way to go in this town. You’ve got to sit and wait for the bus.
And people drive by them. They don’t even see them; they don’t look at
them.
And you do really start to feel an incredible class division—the people
with the cars and not with the cars. Because that’s what this town is. And it
just made me go, “Hey, I’m that girl at that bus stop. She’s not different
than me.” And in the end how can you look and not extend compassion?
And expect compassion to be extended to you from everyone you meet? I
mean, what’s going on? [Laughs] Why is that so hard to give? You know,
give it up, give it up.

You wrote in that song that everybody is the same and people need
dignity, love, and understanding.
Yeah. Dignity.

Did you write the music for that one in your car too?
Yeah. That was fun because I had this nice tough blues thing, but I
wanted something else. I think what I started remembering is that I have a
great capacity in writing, an unexpected chorus or unexpected bridge. And I
remembered it, remembered how to do it. I did it a couple of times on this
record, and that was one of them.
 I said, “I want to go somewhere new,” and it said, “Okay,” [sings] ‘I
look at the people . . .’” And initially they were so pleased and surprised
that it was such a wild turn. But by the time we finished producing the
record, I can’t tell—does the listener go, “Whoa! What is that?” Or is it just
as natural as can be to go there? It is the commentary on the world. So the
blues number is we’re down at the bus stop, and then the other part is me
turning to the camera and speaking to you. Also, it’s all kind of urban. Like
Curtis Mayfield would have written that melody. So they’re all cousins, all
these kinds of musics. You just have to find a way to patch them together.

When you write a melody in your head, is it easy for you to go to a

guitar and play it?
I think it is, yeah. Now it is. I’m a good enough player now that I can
replicate what I hear. I’m better on guitar. I’ve come pretty close most of
the time if I hear something, knowing right where the note is on an
instrument. Sometimes I might be a half step or a whole step off. But by
now I know the neckboard enough to know where the notes are.
And that’s very comfortable, because I can sit with all these men, and I
definitely hold my own playing with them. And, in fact, they’re really
dependent on what I play. That’s a great feeling, because I think up to now I
felt more like a singer who could play. But now I feel like a good player.
The thing I know how to do, I know how to do really well. [Laughs] I do it
really well. Confident.
And I can tell the players feel great. I know how to talk to them now
with an instrument instead of just with my voice. And that’s so fun. It’s
something I always wanted to be able to do, and I can do it now. So I’m in
this kind of great celebration of my life. And I think for many years I would
not have been able to say I can do that well. I would have been really afraid.
I was afraid of this nameless enemy that would hit me. Like a journalist. Or
my karma, which would say, “Oh yeah, you think you can do that well?
Hey, watch this!” And kick me down the stairs, you know? So I don’t have
this fear anymore. I know exactly what I do. And I’ve come to do it. If you
like it, come and see. If you don’t like it, go away. [Laughs] I have my feet
on the ground.

What affected this change?

 Well, I think that was a process. It’s a whole bunch of things, really.
And they’re probably mostly private. But generally, three years ago I had a
manager who was a friend who screwed me really bad. And then I had a
series of terrible things happen professionally. And they were so
debilitating.
Actually now as I tell you why I didn’t write, I think that’s why. There
was this series of things that happened—with the band and the bus
company [laughs]—I went, “What is going on? What did I do to deserve
this?” Because that’s the silly way I process stuff. But somewhere in the
back of my mind I thought, “I haven’t done anything. This must be payment
for something really great that’s coming. [Laughs] Because I don’t deserve
this. So this hard time must be preparing some ground for me rising.”
I guess it’s my nature to think, “How can I rise?” It’s not my nature to
roll over, even though I might complain and cry and be sorrowful. It’s just
my nature to go, “How can I use this to get back up where I want to go?”
So then that happened. Last year my mom had a stroke. And I think
taking care of my mother, being so close that she almost died, looking at the
people in my family, thinking of my whole life, my dad’s life, my
grandfather’s life, ten thousand years of people who procreated to bring me
here. Watching my mother. And you know, when she tries to talk, she can’t
say it, and she laughs. Seeing my mom laugh made me go, “What a
wonderful world. What a wonderful human being I grew up with.” I always
loved her, but I didn’t realize how wonderful she is. Look at her laugh at
herself.
And I guess it made me turn and go, “Okay, no more fooling around. No
more feeling sorry for yourself.” There’s a whole world of people who need
my help. They need my help to help them find a hospital for their parents.
They need my help with the poem I write. My daughter needs my help; my
mother needs my help. And I have unlimited energy to give till I die. ’Cause
once you start giving, you have more. That’s just how it is. You don’t give,
you don’t have anything to give. You give, you’ve a lot to give.
And seeing my mother so close to death made me realize I’m going to
die. And some day all these things I won’t have done. And I’m still here.
I’m still young. I could still do them. So maybe it was like It’s a Wonderful
Life. And I got to come back. With great joy and happiness. And I’m not
sure what happened, but I do feel kind of like him running through [laughs]
with Zuzu’s petals in my pocket.
And I don’t know if that’s how it will be from now on or if it will
subside a little. But I feel the capacity to be part of a larger thing going on
as well as helping my career. Redeeming my career. Because I think I’m a
great writer and an important character in American art. And I’ve had my
career described as a “downward spiral.” And I know I’m a great writer,
and I don’t want to be tossed away. And have my history rewritten by VH1
as a footnote. That’s not true. And those kind of things, maybe people think
they don’t matter to people, but they do.
And I think that kind of stuff that hurt so badly might have made it hard
for me to get up. It did make me finally decide that it doesn’t matter. In the
end you know what you do. You know what you gave; you know what you
did. You do need love from the outside, let’s face it. If I made the record
and nobody wanted to work with me, I wouldn’t have this power that I
have. But getting love from people and people saying, “It’s so good to see
you working. You sound great. Great song.” Then you feel part of the
world. People need that.

Even when you are talking about some dark subjects, you do it with a
lot of joy. The song “Little Mysteries” does that, and it’s great.
I started that before my daughter was born. You know, I read a lot of spy
novels. I was in France, and four little gypsy children ran up to us, a little
boy jumped in front of us and opened up a newspaper and said, “You want
to buy the paper, lady? You want to buy the paper?” While he was in front
of me kids went through my pockets, and it was so fast, so professional. I
was so impressed. Unfortunately they did not get my wallet, which was in
my pocket. And I always worried for them that they got beat very badly
[laughs] when they went back to their gypsy home. But that experience was
so profound—to see criminal children, I think. I had never experienced
organized small criminal children before. And it made for a good text.
So I wrote, fifteen years ago [sings], “Gypsy boy came up to you and he
tried to hide his fingers in your pocket.” That’s what I had. [Sings] “Oh,
little mysteries. Little mysteries.” That’s what I had for fifteen years. Last
summer I went, “I have to finish this.” I was waiting because I didn’t know
if I wanted to write one specific mystery or have a series of mysterious
scenarios. I wanted to tie those together or just leave them untied. So I
decided to write about things that had bothered me.

Your songs have such strong melodies. Do you think people will always
hunger for a good melody?
I think they hunger for a great song they can take home and sing. That’s
what they like. They want to hear a good song. I think one of the problems,
as machines get better, is that they divert us from doing the first things. So
we get really involved with the machines and all the cool things we can do,
but they’re not starting with a great song.
One of the things I liked about the idea of Ghostyhead, which succeeded
sometimes, is I liked the idea of using the wonderful chaotic things you can
do with machines but having a great song in the first place. I think that
would be fun. That was kind of what was fun about Ram. That he did these
little funny cut-and-paste things, in his way, but he had a cool melody.

The song “Lamp of the Body” is beautiful. Musically it’s like ancient
cantorial singing.
Yeah. Yeah it is. It’s one of the more challenging ones to do live because
it’s this droning thing. And it’s a real simple text. It’s him. There’s this
moment when he’s saying about his journey to meet John the Baptist. This
is right out of the book. “He journeyed into the wilderness to listen to John
the prophet, the one they call the Baptizer. He spoke to you with truth: he
was a burning, shining light, and you were willing for a while to follow
him.” That’s me reading from the book.
I think “the lamp of the body is the eye” is also something that he said.
And I just said that over and over. I didn’t even notice. I was just opening
pages and reading them. So it’s very Eastern. It’s kind of like the Islamic
poets. They write their beautiful poems of love to God. These words of
Jesus are so similar to those poems. I never really noticed how they are
before. Before I started reading the poets. And I realized these are just all
poems of love. To God. What a beautiful song, what a beautiful idea.

Did you choose “Chuck E” to be the single from your first album?
They chose it. But I think I probably wanted it. That wasn’t my job, so I
really can’t remember. But I probably thought it was cool as a single
because it was so offbeat. And they were very cool. They chose the most
offbeat, unusual track on the record as the single.

It’s the only hit single ever to rhyme “Pantages” with “contagious.”
Absolutely. [Laughter]

A good Hollywood rhyme. After that was such a big hit, did you
personally have any thought about wanting to do that kind of song
again?
No.

A lot of artists wouldn’t know not to do that.

No, I knew that would be the kiss of death. With such a huge hit, the
only possibility of me having a lifelong career was to absolutely follow my
muse. What I thought I did well on the first record was to tell stories. I can
say this after the fact; I wasn’t thinking this before I did it. What I did well
was tell stories, so the only thing I could do that would resuscitate the
career from the huge heights it was having to fall from was to be an
amazing storyteller. And that’s what I did. And I told these stories in a
really new and unique way.
I think that gave me credibility with journalists. And [Pirates] sold,
right away, a half a million records. Which at the time was an incredible
disappointment to the record company. I didn’t go on tour for about a year
and a half before I toured with Pirates. And I was always still defining
myself, so that a year after making that record, who am I gonna be onstage
doing this stuff? So I was kind of into doing a New Orleans revue kind of
thing. Which is a long way from the impetus of Pirates. So you’re taking
Pirates out in a New Orleans revue. If I would have taken Pirates out the
minute I’d done it, it probably would have been a very different show.

From the first album on, you had a language all your own in those
songs. It wasn’t imitative at all. I remember hearing that line from
“Night Train,” “broken like valiums and chumps in the rain,” and
knowing this was new, this was different—
Yeah. That strange, weird poetry that I remember at the time thinking,
this poetry is strange. But I couldn’t help myself. That’s really the kind of
line I would write. And it showed up again in this record too. You pointed
out that line about the little dance you do before your mother calls you on
the phone. That it was a very Rickie Lee kind of line. Same kind of thing,
yeah.

That’s why your work matters. You’ve never contrived anything to be a

hit. You have always written what is true to you.
It’s so idiosyncratic. You’d think, if anything, that would encumber
[laughs] your ability to have a hit. And same thing about the way I sing.
The strange idiosyncratic faults of my voice are what I find most repeated
by singers who sound like me. The things that were kind of questionable are
the things they picked up most of all. The pronunciation or the no vibrato or
the kind of young-kid tonality. That’s what I hear everywhere. The stuff that
I wouldn’t have done if I could have avoided it.

It’s amazing you didn’t get blown away by that early success. A lot of
your peers, such as Tom Waits, never had a big hit. But you had this
huge commercial success and retained your artistic self. Was it tough to
balance those two worlds?
Well, you know I was a beginner, so I started out with that. If I had been
an artist for a few years and had that happen, it might have been devastating
to me. But I think having it from the moment I began, it was just a
wonderful, kind of ominous introduction to what my life was gonna be like.
It was gonna be unexpected and working with bigger strokes than anyone
else. I can’t answer that because before that record I didn’t have a career. So
I wasn’t in the water yet to get thrown out of the water.

It’s miraculous to me that Warner Brothers was smart enough to leave

you alone and let you write your second album in peace. Nowadays
they would have you out on the road. They were really taking good care
of you.
Yeah. They took really good care of me. I was their girl. They loved me.
Lenny [Waronker], Mo [Ostin].

The business sure has changed a lot.

Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s left there anymore.
Randy Newman told me he wanted to quit during that change-up, but
he didn’t know anyone left there at Warner’s to call.
[Laughter] He’s so funny.

Did you have a lot of time to write Pirates?

I wrote it in about a year and a half. I think so. Wrote a couple songs,
and then nine months later wrote a couple of more.

An aspect that still astounds me about it to this day is that many of the
songs—like “Pirates,” “Living It Up,” and “We Belong Together”—are
more like suites than songs. They have time shifts in them; the tempo
kicks in and out. Hardly any songwriter, except maybe Zappa, has time
shifts like that. Was it hard to get that sound and dynamic with a band?
It’s so delicate.
[Very softly] Yeah, it was. Really hard.

How did you do it?

We just kept coming back again and again until I got it. “We Belong
Together” was recorded about three times, I think. It took a long time. All
of them were hard. We were doing “Living It Up,” and it was going pretty
well. And I liked to talk to [the musicians] about what the story was about
or the feeling of the song. And we were playing that song again, and all of a
sudden, I’m playing away, and I hear a big crash, and [Jeff] Porcaro has
stuck his sticks through his snare! And he says, “Fuck this art shit!”
[Laughter] And he stormed right out of the recording studio. [Laughs]
Yeah, ’fraid so.

Elvis is about as iconic as the image of Jesus now.

I think he is, in many ways. Especially since his death. He provides
solace and hope. And people just love him, idolize him, adore him.

Did you like him when you were a kid?

No. I liked, when I got older, before he died, I saw that comeback film
in the seventies. He was pretty good then. But I didn’t care for him other
than that.

How about now when you hear him?

 No. It doesn’t speak to me. I think he’s an amazing singer. I listen to
“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” That’s pretty amazing. I’ve heard the
original version by Big Mama Thornton. [See Leiber and Stoller, page 26.]
And both versions are pretty great. Her version is pretty cool, but I think his
is better. His takes it to some other places.

That was written by Leiber and Stoller, who were writing rock and roll
but were still part of the tradition of two people writing one song—one
wrote words and one music. And most songwriters, even today, are
better with words or music. But you’re one of the rare ones who is
great with both elements.
[Softly] Thank you. They come at the same time. And as long as they
come at the same time, it’s usually a really good song. But I spend more
time on the lyrics. If I have to hash something out, I hash out the lyric more.
To make sure it has continuity and its delivery is somewhere I want to go.
And I don’t really have to do that musically. Musically I’m always a
pilgrim. So anywhere I go is okay. But lyrically I have a kind of
responsibility.

A lot of songwriters repeat themselves musically, going over the same

patterns. You don’t seem to do that.
No. Each time I make a record, it’s a movie. So some new set of ideas
has come upon me. And this one will be flavored like this. I think I write
movies. If I was just writing songs, maybe they would tend to become the
same. But every one is a whole different film, so it’s a whole different way
of writing. The continuity matters. In “We Belong Together” I was noticing
the line “the only angel who sees us watches through each other’s eyes.”
And in Flying Cowboys, writing about the “Ghost Train.” I’m always
talking about the invisible world. Always. And that’s the continuity that
brings me here. That’s one reason why I think this record can’t be
suspicious, because there’s something about that which is a total
culmination of everything I’ve ever written. Even though it’s different.
What’s new about it is that I’ve challenged myself to improvise, and I’ve
walked into somebody else’s house. So if I had had to write everything, it
wouldn’t have been so new. Because I can only write the way I write. And I
can’t be that raw. It’s not in me to write that way. But I can go there and
find new places to go.
I would be suspicious of me if I said, “I am just gonna do a guitar-
drums-bass record.” Even though I would love to do it. I think I would go,
“If they hated Ghostyhead, I’m not even gonna get this record out.”
Because people start to say what you can do, what they will allow you to
do. And a lot of my career has been to keep pushing those limits.
I think I could have done probably much more work if I didn’t always
have to be justifying everything I did and why it wasn’t like the last thing I
did. If I didn’t have to do that, I probably would have done a lot more work.
And all of it really different. I might have done a cabaret record; I might
have done a country-western record. There’s so much music to be made,
and I love it all. But because of the career—if they like that singer-
songwriter hat, you can just be one voice. [Does quick Dylanish singing]
And you only can sing like that. And if you’re a real singer, they’re
suspicious.
So I just kept defying it. Well, I’m a real singer, and I like a lot of
different stuff, and I’m not going anywhere. And I think, finally, at this
moment in my life I’m being understood and respected and described in
ways I think are accurate. It’s a really great moment. When they describe
my diversity, they describe it with respect. And that feels good. It’s hard to
always be the itinerant outsider. It’s fucked up. And I feel like that has been
one of my main identities, the outsider.

It’s interesting to me what songs stick in my head, and after days of

hearing your songs from your entire career, the song that keeps
returning is “Stewart’s Coat,” from Traffic from Paradise. That melody
is so haunting.
Yeah, it is. I heard that whole. It was in the back of the cathedral of
Notre Dame. And I was walking in back of it over the bridge, and that
melody descended upon me whole. With the lyric [sings] “Walking in the
rain . . .” And it sat like that for many years until Sal [Bernardi] said we
should finish it. But I actually started it maybe in the mideighties.

Does that give you the sense that songs come from someplace else, when
you receive a song whole like that?
 Well, where could they come from but someplace else? Because they
don’t come from here. [Points to her heart, laughs] When they come whole,
it makes it feel like it’s somebody else giving me the work. But I don’t
know. There are so many answers. It could be made of your confidence,
your need to hear it whole. Or it could be being delivered to you. In
performance is when you most feel like you’re a conduit. When I write
stuff, I always go, “Thank you so much.” So if I answer truthfully, I feel
like I’m talking to somebody else. Whether or not it’s my heart that is
setting me free or somebody else’s, it feels like there’s somebody else to say
thank you for what happens.

McCartney said that when he got the melody to “Yesterday,” he was

sure somebody else had written it. Do you feel that?
[Laughter] Yeah, I do. I feel that must already have been written. But I
feel, no, no, you’re just writing it now. But it’s almost like we’ve already
been here, and we already know we wrote it. And then when we do, we ask,
“Did I write that or did somebody else write that?” I’ve had that happen,
yeah. “Saturday Afternoons” was like that. It seemed to be a melody we all
know well, yeah.

Ghostyhead is such a powerful album, with songs like “Firewalker” and

“Howard.” Like some of Dylan’s great albums that even his fans
rejected, this one didn’t seem to get a fair reception.
Two things happened. It got really mixed reviews. And when we went
out on tour we were really exploring improvisation onstage. Really new
stuff. Not so new now. Really new cutting-edge stuff. But my record got
sold to Universal, and they didn’t put it out, so it was only out six months.
So any kind of understanding that could have come to it or sales never had a
chance. That’s what happened to it.

The fusion of your vocals and the acoustic bass with techno is so
beautiful, and one of the first instances of that. A great blend of
humans with machines, of warm and cold.
Yeah. And reading poems and making up tunes to that environment. I
thought it was a fresh idea.
The newest album, The Other Side of Desire, is a masterpiece. I know
you did it more quickly than usual. I spoke to Merle Haggard recently,
who told me that he recorded his song “Mama Tried” and two other
songs in three hours.
So why not? [Laughter] Why not?

Why not? Because the way you’ve always crafted your albums isn’t
that. Yours have layers of vocals and other studio touches you can’t do
quickly. Is that incorrect?
It depends. I did do demos for this one, which makes the process of
recording quicker. I have an impatience now I didn’t have when I’m
younger. I’ve had it for a few years, so it’s one reason maybe that I haven’t
done a record in a while.
In the past I would make myself stay and finish stuff and work stuff out
and do it again and do it the best. On this record I haven’t. The thing of
doing things like Pirates, well, Pirates didn’t really have demos. It was my
second record, and I was recording while I wrote. I had a lot of money and I
had a lot of authority.
For me, right now, limitations are really helpful, because I am really
creative, I have a lot of ideas, and I need somebody just to send me in a
direction and tell me that I’m done.

Though you rely on limitations, you break them all the time. “Jimmy
Choos,” the great opener of this album, is more of a suite than a normal
song. You have a verse and then a bridge and another section before
you ever get to the chorus. As you have done in other suites of which
we’ve spoken. And that breaks the rules. You’re supposed to get to the
chorus quick. For which, as you know, you could go to songwriter jail.
[Laughs] Uh-oh. Wouldn’t be my first time.

[Laughter] But by the time you finally do get to this chorus, it’s like a
Gershwin progression—suddenly we’re in this whole other place and
it’s triumphant and joyful. It’s remarkable.
Thank you. Thank you. [Laughs]
Maybe that’s why I need [limitations] because I find something to do
new, to break out of the form, that that helps me go somewhere new. I think
that you hit it on the head. I am defiant in nature, and if I have some
restriction, I can do that defiance and go somewhere new.
Limitations are like having a tiny room instead of a field. The smaller
the room, the more you can do in it. If it’s really big, you gotta go buy a
bunch of stuff to fill it up, and you’re going to need help. The smaller the
room, the more I can see where it ends and begins. I can do things to it if I
want. I can break the window. That’s how I see giving myself restrictions.
When you go to write a song, anything is possible! You can go
anywhere! And so in order to start, it helps if you give yourself this kind of
framework.

Laura Nyro and Carole King both said the same thing to me, that one
of the best parts of writing songs it that within a song form you can do
anything.
Yeah! Yeah. It’s true.

Part of the greatness of the song and the record of it is your

performance. It’s the essence of being a singer-songwriter in that it’s so
beautifully designed for your instrument. When you’re on that section,
“I know about the Motel Six,” the first time you do it in a lower octave
and then you leap the octave, which is so powerful and visceral. Not
every singer could do that.
Yes. Maybe I automatically do that because I know I’m singing it, so
I’m not thinking about it. But yeah, I’m writing for myself to sing it, most
definitely.

The structure is so powerful, and it’s a great lesson for songwriters

because it’s symphonic. Is that how that song came to be, or did that
chorus come earlier in the process?
Let’s see. I was laying on my bed, I’d just talked to my daughter a little
while earlier, and I started, and I had been working on bluegrass-type of
songs, thinking of Louis Michot, the Cajun guy, and wanting to write things
in his vein.
I started [sings] “Oh cherie, come and take a ride with me, we just need
to clear out your mind.” That was so heartfelt to me, and so I guess the
thing I was thinking of most was the message. Come on, let’s stop doing
this and, you know, the whole wide world is waiting just at the edge of town
—let’s go. I still emotionally am always telling the story of the
disenfranchised, the lost, defying it and trying, because my mind is like the
transvestite on the roof—these people won’t give up, they won’t get in the
car, and now they won’t get off the roof. Holy shit!
I mean, [laughter] get off the roof! Let’s go! No, I’m not going to do it
either, and in my mind, I mean, you know, there’s a lot of story that doesn’t
get written down because I’m with these characters, and you know there’s
whole plays, there’s books, there’s short stories, so that character is running
down the street, and that’s where the “Jimmy Choos” came, because he or
she is running down the street in the Jimmy Choos shoes [laughter] and I
thought these Jimmy Choos are going to save us. The Jimmy Choos shoes.

It’s such a beautiful use of language. Jimmy Choos, up to now, I just

thought of as something rich ladies love, and it had no meaning in my
life. Till now.
I know. [Laughter] I was thinking that when I wrote “Choos shoes”—
of, you know, of this hopeful moment where I might be on stage someday
and the big crowd, like at Red Rocks, would be singing “Choos shoes,
Choos shoes, Choos shoes.” That’s what I eventually felt as I wrote that
“Choos shoes.” I was laughing so hard and didn’t know if anybody else
would laugh. I sent it to my notoriously cynical manager with a note that
said, “Please don’t tell me what you think,” and he said, “That’s a fantastic
song—it’s so funny.” So I knew that if he got it, maybe somebody else
would too. I just didn’t know if it was going to make people laugh.

It made me happy.
Happy laugh. Yeah.

Songwriters often think you’re either writing a song like McCartney,

about a character, or you’re writing it like Lennon about yourself. But
your songs, even about characters like this, are about you as well. You
bring the songwriter into it so gently and beautifully when you add a
little commentary, “You don’t have to tell me about giving up . . .”
Suddenly that brings a whole other dimension to it that this is so
poignant.
 Yeah. That’s right. Thank you.

And it says so much that, that even in your position in life, you’re still
mixing with people like this, characters on the fringe of life. Whereas so
many songwriters seem cut off from humanity and aren’t writing songs
that reflect humanity in the way you still do.
I think wealth does that to people. They get rich and they don’t want to
be bothered. But if you have money, you don’t have to be bothered; you
don’t have to go do your own errands. But when I do my errands I’m going
to meet people. I’m going to interact with people, and when I do that, I’m
going to learn about myself.
I had to pick up my suitcase from the shoemaker, and he was so proud
of his work, and I was looking at the shop he was in, and when I left his
shop I felt good about myself because I could appreciate him and his shop.
So everywhere you go, you know, you’re learning about yourself.
You’re going up or you’re going down the elevator. It’s all there for your
lyrics.

I see that too. People get secluded and afraid of people. Whereas this is
a story of a transvestite on the roof, and your embrace of this person’s
humanity is inspiring and necessary. Whereas most people, I don’t
think, could necessarily love a person like that so openly.
All the characters are me, ultimately. They’re inspired by my life, and
when I put them in the song, like a dream, they’re me. I thought, “Why
must I express my sexuality as a man playing a woman? What are you
doing? Why are you always running out of town?” My favorite scenes in
movies are when they leave at the end and go to start a new life. I love that!

Even the melody of “Jimmy Choos,” which is a bright tune in G major,

is happy. Musically there is joy there, even separate from the words.
Did you write it in that key on an instrument or a cappella?
That’s really perceptive, because I really wanted that song to lift
somebody. I think I picked up my guitar, and I think I was playing it from
the beginning. Most of what I was writing was in A minor, but I think I
went to G for that one. Yeah.
Songwriters often think we need fancy chords to make a beautiful
melody. Yet those chords, even for your songs, are pretty simple, yet the
melody is just soaring. It’s so poignant. Do you have any thoughts of
what makes a melody connect so strongly with us?
I think melodies are our true language. You’re building something. Like
building a little sentence. If you drew it, it would look like an upside down
J. Right? I have been thinking about melody, if you draw the shape of it,
you can see what it does. I’ve been thinking that there are certain melodies,
certain series of tones, that invoke in us an emotion. And they’re picked up
in every culture. I noticed, for instance, that certain tunes are everywhere.
You can find them in China. You can find them in Western music. It’s
everywhere. Hank Williams. Japan.

It’s interesting you said you started out in A major. That key to me has
always seemed maybe the happiest key. And most of The Beatles’ songs
are in A major, as are Buddy Holly songs.
Are they?

Yes.
Well, as we have discussed before, keys do affect the mood. Paul Simon
wrote a little thing on it, and I had never really been aware of it before. But
if I do something in F sharp instead of G, like “The Last Chance Texaco,”
it’s a totally different song. It’s not just because of what’s required for the
other players physically or how they have to stretch their fingers; it’s the
relationship between those tones which is different than it is in another key.
A major is a key I can rock in, whereas G is a key I tend to tell a story
in. I wouldn’t play a rock and roll song in G. I would play a rocking song in
E or A, right? We do it instinctively, even if we don’t know how to talk
about it.
I know you see keys in color. I don’t. I see shapes. But I don’t even
think of it as keys. I just pick up the guitar and whatever the melody,
whatever key it came to me in, I try to play it in that key. At least when I’m
writing it. So if I did a melody early in the morning, it’s probably going to
be really low, because my voice is low in the morning. I might change it
from that key later because I can’t sing as low later. [Laughs]
Some songwriters think it’s easier to write a strong melody in a minor
key.
Interesting. I don’t think that’s true at all. For me the minor chord makes
a moment of sorrow that we pass through.
Often, as you know, my songs are in several keys. I find the difficult
part is to get back to the key you started in. Because you almost end up like
you are in a circle that keeps leading to a different key. If you were drawing
it, you would have drawn a lotus flower.
I think a major key can take you to a much sadder place, whereas if you
start in a minor key, it’s pretty hard to write a happy song. But you can go
anywhere in a major key.

Talking to you about major and minor is like talking to a Cole Porter in
that, like you, he would go in and out of major and minor and change
keys brilliantly. Your songs rarely are about one color.
I sure don’t think of them that way anyway, yeah. But it’s not deep
water. I’m not exhausted when I’m done. [Laughs]

So many of your songs, such as “Infinity,” use music to get us to think

about things beyond words, beyond what language can do. Not all
songs do that.
Paul, that’s really what this record—or this time in my life—is all about.
“Infinity” came from a dream, but I made a decision to make a song out
of it which was purposeful. Because the things I think about—space and
time and the afterlife—can shape a melody. To me those are the most
important things I’d like to say. So I chose to start saying them. I said,
“Why don’t you go ahead and say what you have to say in your song?” And
so I did. I wrote about time and myself.

And the music helps us understand the words much more so than if it
was just words on a page. It wouldn’t get to us in the same way, where
you’re talking to our heart and our mind at the same time.
It’s true. True.

“Christmas in New Orleans” is wonderful. Bringing in the horns at the

end is so haunting and beautiful, whereas other people might have had
those right in the intro, those horns. It’s so touching.
That song was an evolution. I was living next door to a guy who played
a lot of soul music, and it went right through the walls and I really enjoyed
it. I liked waking up to his music, and that was good for me because at
some other time in my life I would have gone, “That goddamn guy is
waking me up with his music!”
But now I went, “That’s so cool. I love that music.” And I just lay there
and listen to it. And I think that the seeds of acceptance got sewn in. So I
started hearing this tune, [sings a cappella] “She’s got her feet on the
ground. Life is a merry, a merry-go-round.” Just right out of old school,
right? And it would not go away. I tried to write some good verses very
much in that ilk.
As time went by, I thought, “This is going to be a little too novel. I have
to find a way to tell this story.” So I had one of those lovely melodies, and I
decided to tell the story of the girl with the lovely melody and then go
ahead and go to the chorus, which sounds more downtown and shifts
tempo.
Thinking of The Beatles, who would have done that, or Neil Young,
they used to change tempo. And that’s part of my vocabulary, to change
tempo. So I allowed myself as much license as I wanted in order to tell you
the story of the girl and these families of drug addicts and what is lost and
what is never found again and what it’s like to wait in line in an office.
There’s one line about it. I ended up having to edit it just to two verses: say
what you have to say. And so that story, clearly to me, is about a drug
addict, but I can’t tell if anybody else can tell that, and that’s okay.

It seems in your music you’ve always, like, felt things so deeply. I used
to think everyone felt things deeply, but sometimes it seems that
songwriters and musicians feel things more deeply, like being a raw
nerve in the world.
Lately I’ve begun to agree with you about that. I’ve begun to realize
that is our part in the collective body. Most people can’t express themselves,
aren’t given the opportunity or numb themselves. I can’t tell if we have an
apparatus they don’t have, but most certainly, for whatever reason, we’re
feeling. We’re feeling and expressing—hopefully expressing—but
definitely feeling [pause] more.
 I’d like to see more deeply.
I think that the thing the performer does is to be an empath, to send it
back to the people. That’s where things get really interesting. It’s wonderful
to write, but when you can actually stand there and send that music out and
see it go back out, it’s exciting.

And you’ve always done that.

I love it.

And all your fans know well, even if you didn’t write songs, you do that
with other songs. To this day “Rainbow Sleeves,” written for you by
Tom Waits, just kills me. You touch an intense level of sorrow, and
having someone bring us that helps us get through.
But you can only feel it if you have it too. It has to be part of your
vocabulary or it wouldn’t hit that button for you.

That is a truth I am only now being able to understand. The songs of

our friend Laura Nyro do that for me, and I never understood why she
isn’t as beloved as Dylan to the whole world. And I know that for you,
like Laura, being an artist in this industry hasn’t been easy. Though
you got Grammys for your early masterpieces, later greatness like
Flying Cowboys wasn’t even nominated.
That was all for nothing. [Laughs]

How do you maintain a songwriter’s soul and connect with great songs
when you’re in an industry that doesn’t necessarily even recognize the
depth of what you’re doing?
Well, it might be the answer that I came here [to New Orleans] to
remove myself from, from the industry. If this record comes out and is
ignored again, it’s going to hurt me a lot. But I had this profound
relationship with people in the world, and for some of us that’s just our lot
in life. We’re not given the flowers at graduation, for whatever reason. I
know I’m loved by God, so if this is what it’s supposed to be, then it is
helping me do better work. It’s leading me.
If I turn around and become bitter, then it was wrong. But so far I feel
like I’m always finding grace. I’m always finding some new thing to
appreciate and love. You know, adoration is really death. If I had too much
of it in the past, I think I’m much more balanced now. But I don’t like to
have too much adoration. Because it’s impossible to live up to it.
So all you can do is turn away from it and not read stuff, and you might
even become secluded. I’m in a place now where I acknowledge gratefully
that I’ve been around thirty-five years, I’ve impacted the world with my
work, I’ve impacted people’s lives, I understand it now. I accept it, and I
really try to check it with humility now. I bow to it, and that’s the only way
you can do it because otherwise you’ll flip your hair and [laughs] say,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” You have to stop and be grateful to those who
take the time to tell you that the work has mattered, but then, when you go
home, you close the door to all that, you know. You’re home with your own
world, and it can’t come in the house, you know. Or it’ll eat you up.
[Laughs]

Too much adoration. That’s a whole subject that I don’t know if a lot of
songwriters can understand. They feel the opposite. But I understand—
Attention and respect are good—I’m not talking about that. I’m talking
about the other thing.

Yes. I also know of some great songwriters who just don’t want to do it
anymore. They don’t even see the point of participating anymore.
Like who? [Laughs]

I’d rather not name names.

[Laughs] That’s when they need to leave their mansions and go live
somewhere else. Or not write anymore. I mean it’s okay to say, “I’m done.”

Is it?
It’s okay to be done, you know.

I’m glad you’re not done, Rickie. Was part of that the reason these
songs seem so inspired, that you took a break from songwriting and you
let something build up?
You mean so inspired to you or to me?

[Laughs] Both!
 It would seem so. It seems to me that until I got to this point, I just
didn’t have this to say, so it would seem so.

Does the process of getting your ideas recorded get any easier?
No. It really does have to do with the producer. I like having a producer.
There are producers who control everything artistically. But for me a
producer is someone to share this responsibility with. I want a little bit of
interesting guidance. I really do. I can do it all myself, but I don’t want to. I
want somebody to help me.
The only confusion happens when people feel they’re not getting their
due. They think, “Hey, you know what? I work really hard and I’m really
talented, and calling me producer doesn’t tell all the things I do here. I want
this credit and that credit.” And I say, “Hey, you know what? Your job is to
do everything you can to make the record great. Wake up every day and be
grateful you have the job. Don’t be angry. This is just a way of being.”
It’s so easy, if you feel you should have had something better in your
life, then everything you do, you’ll try to extract from it that thing you
didn’t get. And you’re gonna be a little angry. And it’s just a hard way to
live your life. Instead, why don’t you wake up and go, “I could be at the gas
station pumping tires—I am so glad to be here every day”?

That gratitude matters so much.

It releases you from your ego. So I really am grateful to be here. The
older I get, I think, what a miracle. What a miracle on every level. What a
crappy life it could’ve been, or I could’ve been married. But how
miraculous to come from where I’ve come from.
It’s a journey. The key is to keep your feet on the ground. Once you’ve
become king or queen, you’re screwed. And when you first get famous, it’s
hard to learn that. People treat you like a rock star. You need to learn how to
deal with fame. You know, famous people go to bed lonely, just like other
people. Everybody needs to know that. Fame doesn’t bring you one thing
other than fame.

Does it make you happy knowing that your songs live on?
Yes. It’s like creating a universe. When we die, those little universes
will be floating around. And people really enter this universe. We are
creating places that people go into, and they go into the songs. It’s
mysterious. I think making songs up might be much more important than
we think.
So when I’m gone, those all will be here. And they’re places all their
own. That’s really incredible. I’m excited about that.

OceanofPDF.com
Daryl Hall
 Of Sacred Songs
Los Angeles, California 1994

Daryl Hall is chain-smoking interviews, starting up a new one even before

the previous one is over. Journalists are being shuffled in and out as he sits
in the darkened end of an LA hotel room, wearing dark shades, drinking
Coca-Cola, and smoking cigarettes.
He’s not a guy who enjoys giving interviews, as he immediately
establishes as we enter and get to work. Yet it’s a necessary evil he endures
in order to promote his newest work, which at the time of our talk was the
joyfully soulful solo Soul Alone. Still, he submitted to not one but two
interviews, and he patiently and carefully answered every question.
Later he sort of apologized, after what became a spirited musical
discussion, for any perceived attitude on his part, which he said stemmed
from the fact that “some guys who write about music, you know, they don’t
dig music. But I get you get it.”
Hall is somewhat of an enigma as a songwriter, capable of writing
almost any kind of song, from the three-minute melodic pop variety that has
catapulted Hall & Oates to the top of the charts, through Philadelphia-
rooted R&B that cooks with the best Philly soul there is, into the Peter
Gabriel/Sting/David Byrne realm of art songs after years of churning out
successive radio-welcome hits in the seventies with John Oates, classic
songs like “Sara Smile,” and “She’s Gone.”
 In 1977 he released a remarkable solo album called Sacred Songs,
produced by Robert Fripp, that had been “locked up in the vault” for two
years. It established what a lot of people already knew: there’s a serious and
very poignant songwriter who, when not writing hits, writes oddly
beautiful, artistic gems. Sacred Songs contains some of Fripp’s most
moving production work and signature guitar treatments (his
“Frippertronics” devised beautifully sustained chordal loops and more
before the world went digital and such sounds were simple to attain), while
it also captures vocals by Hall that are simply unearthly in the depth of their
soul yearning and strength. And the songwriting throughout is funny and
beautiful—and unlike anything we’d heard before. Songs like the
delightfully strange “Babs and Babs” adjoined stunning ballads such as
“The Farther Away I Am” and “Without Tears.”
A few years after the release of Sacred Songs Hall and Oates released
the landmark Voices album, which features many hits Hall collaborated on,
including “You Make My Dreams,” written with Oates and Sara Allen, and
“Kiss on My List,” written with Janna Allen. It also featured one song that
Hall wrote alone, the song closest in mood and color to his solo work on
Sacred Songs, “Every Time You Go Away.” Although, remarkably, it was
never released as a single for Hall and Oates, it did become a major hit as
recorded in 1981 by Paul Young.
He was born Daryl Hohl on October 11, 1946, in Pottstown,
Pennsylvania. Proximity to Philly allowed him the opportunity to play
keyboard in sessions for such groups as The Stylistics and The Delfonics. In
those days he hung out and learned a lot about the art and business of music
from Thom Bell (who, with Gamble and Huff, invented the Philly sound;
see Gamble, page 113) and started his own group, The Temptones, whose
first hit was written by Gamble and Huff, “Girl I Love You.”
Hall and Oates was officially born in Philadelphia at Temple University,
where the two men wound up as roommates, realized they were both “soul
freaks,” and started making music together, a progression detailed in the
following interview.
Songwriting, as it did in the life of many great songwriters, emerged
organically, without a lot of thought. “I started writing songs when I was
twelve,” he remembered. “I was really loving music and wanting to try it on
my own. I’d be sitting around playing other people’s songs on my piano,
then my own music started to come out. I started thinking, ‘Well, I can use
that,’ and try coming up with my own words. It was very natural.”

Do you remember the name of your first song?

Daryl Hall: It was probably some triad writing, like a Philadelphia
dance song or something like that. [Laughs] Like, “Do the Mashed Potato.”

What was it like to grow up in Philly?

Very rich. Philadelphia is a great place to grow up as far as music goes.
It’s always been a very strong music scene. Everything from the school
systems to the radio stations—music was everywhere. WIBG in
Philadelphia was the first radio station in the fifties to have an all rock and
roll format. It was a unique place with a unique sound, and I think that’s
why there is a sound of Philadelphia.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Kenny Gamble [see page 113], who
discussed the magic of the Philly sound. How do you describe,
musically, what makes the Philly sound distinctive?
It’s a certain kind of chord patterns and melodies. It revolves a lot
around piano playing as opposed to guitar. The harmonies are very distinct
and very church oriented.
That sound goes back to the street-corner people. Like Lee Andrews
and the Hearts. Harvey and the Moonglows. All the street-corner groups—
that was the rock and roll that was generated. It came off the streets, and it
was literally people standing around in the group, snapping their fingers on
the corner and singing.

And you were doing that too?

Yes, I was doing that from a really young age.

How long was it before you were writing songs on your own that you
felt were good enough to perform and record?
I was seventeen when I made my first record. Gamble and Huff
produced it. That was a good start. [Laughs] But of course, they were just
kids too. It was on Arctic records in 1967, and the song was called “Girl I
Love You.” Basically it was me copying Smokey Robinson.
What led you to become a duo?
I was going to Temple University, and there’s no campus life there, so
everyone who goes to Temple generally lives in apartments in Philly. John
Oates and I kept finding ourselves as roommates in all these different
places. I would listen to John writing songs over in the corner, and he’d be
playing something, and I’d be sitting playing something. It was just
constant exposure to what he was doing, and it really came together like
that.
We were both soul freaks, and it just kind of came together. We shared
apartments when we were students and became friends before we tried
making music. There wasn’t really any idea of becoming Hall and Oates; it
just developed over time in a very natural way.
We really tried writing and doing all that a long time before we really
seriously got together and thought about doing it as a team. When we first
did say we’ll do it, we said, “Well, you write songs, and I write songs—let’s
share the stage. You play some of your songs, I’ll play some of mine. I’ll
sing harmonies on your songs; you sing harmonies on mine.” That was
really what it was. We didn’t really think of it as pursuing it as a duo, but
people started liking it right away. So we said, “Okay, well, let’s try doing it
together,” and it really sort of fell together that way.

You and John wrote a lot of songs together. How did that work?
Well, he added certain things. We did a lot of collaboration on lyrics
over the years. But there were a lot of songs where he would come up with
part of it and I would come up with the other part. “She’s Gone” is an
example of that. “Maneater.” “Out of Touch.” You could go down a list—
we did a lot of things where, usually, he would come up with some kind of
chorus and I would write the verses.
But at the same time, we wrote a lot separately too. There was always
both things going on. Kind of like Lennon and McCartney, the way that I
always read about how they collaborated.

Thom Bell said his songs often came like gifts. Do you feel that way?
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s there, and it just comes from someplace. I don’t
know where. I think all the notes are up there. You know, everything has
always been there, and these different personalities, different situations, can
cause it to come into reality at that moment in time, and who knows why it
comes. It’s these strange factors. Who knows why?

Have you found, in all your years of writing songs, anything that affects
it? Are there times better than other times for writing?
No, no. You never can tell. I mean, I don’t beat it to death. I don’t try to
write if I’m not inspired to write. I don’t sit down and say, “I have to write a
song today” or anything like that. It usually comes from the excitement of
other people. It can either come from that kind of musical excitement or can
come from an emotional situation that causes me to feel a certain way. Then
I’ll sit down myself, and I’ll just blurt out whatever is on my mind.
Since I’m a soul writer and a soul singer—without being really heavy-
handed about it—it’s a spiritual thing. It really does come from the heart.
It’s just bringing this energy, coalescing this energy into an emotion,
channeling through that emotion and making it come out of my mouth.

Does it feel as if some songs exist before you write them?

Yes. I think everything is there, and it’s a matter of synthesizing through
that moment in time. I don’t think anything is created or destroyed. It just
is.

Have you ever written a song without really knowing what it means?
[Laughs] Yeah, a lot. Right now, in fact.

What makes a great melody?

I think surprises make a great melody. Going someplace unexpected. I
hate the obvious. It could be an interval jump, or it could be just going to an
unusual note in the chord, a note that you wouldn’t expect to go with that
chord.

Do you need to be at an instrument to write?

Not necessarily. I usually do it over my own playing, or if there’s a track
without a melody, I’ll sing over it. Usually just takes one run-through.

Do you write all the time, or do you just write for an album?
I go in bursts. I don’t write constantly, but in certain periods of time I
write constantly.
 When it feels like it’s time for a new project to come, it just kind of
happens. I’ll start thinking about things, and as I start thinking and listening
to what’s going on, environments as much as anything wash over me. I
don’t listen to the radio hardly ever. I like to have music and clubs down the
street and just soak it in that way. Then when I sit down at the keyboard or
with the guitar, things just pop out very naturally.

Do you actively look for song ideas, or do you let them come to you?
I let them come to me. I do sit down sometimes and woodshed, but I’m
passive about it. Passive-aggressive really. I let it wash over me, then I
jump in and do something.

Is it important to have a good title at the outset?

Not necessarily. A lot of times it’s just a good chord pattern, and then I
come up with some kind of melody. Once I’ve got that, I’ll start thinking
about what it sounds like and then start blanking my mind and letting things
come in. Letting whatever is subconsciously in my mind come out. I don’t
know what I’m going to say. I just open my mouth and let things come out.

Do you sometimes start with a dummy lyric?

Yeah, usually just nonsense at first, then I’ll start fleshing them out. And
what happens is that I’ll just kind of riff and scat and sing nonsense
syllables, and I’ll turn those into words sometimes. I listen back to write the
lyrics. Sometimes I’ll find I’ve written about half the lyrics without ever
thinking about it.

Do you do much recycling of old ideas that you hadn’t finished?

Not really. I may pull an idea out from the past I never used, but most of
the time it’s new stuff. I tend to let things lay if they’re not working and
move on. I do have boxes and boxes of tapes, [laughs] millions of tapes
with ideas on them, which I should probably listen to at some point or give
it to someone else, because I’m sure there’s a lot of great ideas that were
never used.

How do you define soul music?

 Soul music is a state of mind. It’s bringing things down and being real
and singing and playing from the heart, and that can be any kind of music.
Bluegrass is soul music; folk music in general is soul music because it’s
people talking about their lives and writing about experiences.

Do you remember writing “Every Time You Go Away”?

That was a song that came very much from a real experience, and if the
person I wrote it about had been in the room, I wouldn’t have written the
song. So there you go.

That was one of your rare songs that was a major hit for somebody
else, Paul Young.
That’s really the only one. That was pretty much forgotten as a B-side.
[Laughs]

You said earlier that you wrote “Sara Smile” with John, correct?
Well, his name is on it, but I have to say honestly he didn’t really do
anything on that song. I mean, there are certainly a lot of songs that he did
do at least as much, if not more than me. On that song I think he was just
pretty much in the room, because I think back on that song, and that really
came from me, 100 percent. I can’t even remember one lyric line that he
threw in, so I don’t know why his name is on that record! [Laughs]
Actually two songs that have his name on them that he really had
nothing to do with. One of them was that song, and the other one was “No
Can Do.” I pretty much wrote that song myself.

How about “She’s Gone”? Did he have much to do with that one?
Oh yeah, absolutely. He had everything to do with that song. He really
came up with the song. It sounded very different because he had written it
on acoustic guitar. But he came up with the melody of both the verse and
chorus. I really just kind of added my thing to it and wrote the lyrics with
him. But that was really, musically, more generated by John than by me.

How about “You Make My Dreams”?

I wrote that one myself. All I remember about that is just getting a good
gospel feel on the piano and just goin’ for it and blurting out the first line
that came to mind: “You make my dreams come true.” [Laughs] Then, of
course, I thought, “Is that going to work? Is that title too trite?” Then it
seemed like it wasn’t because it kind of said everything in its simplicity, so
I kept the title.

Sacred Songs is a wonderful album. We all loved it so much, and it

seemed like a secret, which added to its charm.
It was a different record. That was me really trying to put myself in a
context that was very out of what people would expect out of me. I knew
Robert Fripp for a few years before that, and we’d become friends. We were
trying to figure out how to work together, because whenever I’d mention
this to anybody, they would say, “You guys are going to work together?
What the hell does that mean?” But I knew it would work. I knew it would
work. I knew we’d do something with a unique sound if we did it, and it
was a really easy thing to do, to work with Robert, because we didn’t think
about it too much. The Sacred Songs record took three weeks to make.

Did you write the songs for Sacred Songs specifically for that album?
Yeah, wrote them right at the moment.

Now I understand all your songs were coming from one songwriter, but
at the time it seemed like there were two Daryl Halls.
Yeah, well, there weren’t two Daryl Halls. There was the Daryl Hall
who is immersed in kind of a rock and soul tradition with John Oates, and
then there was the Daryl Hall who does different kinds of things.
I mean, if you listen to the melodies that I choose and the chords, you
can tell it’s all coming from the same person. I’m not a chameleon in the
way David Bowie is, where I completely change styles and sing different.
You know, I carry this kind of baggage around with me and put it in
different contexts. That’s kind of the way I look at what I’m doing.

Why was Sacred Songs in the vault for two years?

It was in the vaults for two years because RCA didn’t want to release it,
to tell you the truth. They were scared of it. What I wound up doing, Robert
and I got the tapes and started giving them to people, saying, “Here, listen
to this. Review this.” Of course, it didn’t sell anything—they didn’t push it,
they didn’t do anything. They just put it out. But at least it got out there,
which is what’s really important.

It’s amazing to me you could write all those great songs so quickly.
That happens to me all the time. That’s the way most of my songs come.

Do you find that times of turmoil are good for your writing?
Yes, that helps. Complication in your personal life is always good.
Anything that stirs up your emotions and brings them to the surface is going
to help. It’s easier to get it outside of yourself and externalize it. When
you’re just sitting on the beach in the Caribbean or something, I don’t think
as much about writing songs as I would if I’m going through a particularly
busy or complicated point in my life.

What’s the most important advice for songwriters?

Say what you mean, and try to find the right way to say it. Be proficient
on an instrument so you can express yourself. And don’t compromise.

OceanofPDF.com
Patti Smith
 Still Dancing Barefoot
New York, New York 2010

Since she was a kid she knew she was an artist. And not any artist. A
serious one. One willing to go the extra mile. As early as eleven she
approached her own art with a remarkable singularity of purpose that has
persisted ever since. “When I was a kid I wanted to write a poem about
Simón Bolívar,” she said. “I went to the library and read everything I could.
I wrote copious notes. I had forty pages of notes just to write a small
poem.” Decades later the process persists. She spent months reading every
book she could find about Ho Chi Minh before spontaneously improvising
“Gung Ho.” She relies on her ability to shamanistically channel songs and
poems—but never blindly: she deepens her well with information before
delving into it.
Of course, she’s more than a songwriter; she’s an artist who recognizes
that art needn’t be restricted to any one means of expression. Like her great
friend, the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, about whom she wrote
the beautiful memoir Just Kids, she’s always been devoted to making art
itself—whether a poem, a memoir, a novel, a record, a series of drawings, a
play (with Sam Shepard she wrote Cowboy Mouth), or a song. As a child,
art for her was both a refuge and a means of escape from the monotony of
the everyday world. “I did not want to be trapped,” she said. “I grew up in
the fifties, when the girls wore really bright red lipstick and nail polish, and
they smelled like Eau de Paris. Their world just didn’t attract me. I hid in
the world of the artist: first the nineteenth-century artists, then the Beats.
And Peter Pan.”
Unlike Mapplethorpe, however, fame was never a goal. When she made
her debut album, Horses, which remains the most visceral fusion of poetry
and rock ever recorded, she never intended to be a rock star and was happy
to return to her job at the bookstore, writing poems and doing drawings. But
she also recognized the unchained potential of rock and roll to speak not
just to an assorted few at a coffeehouse poetry reading but to forty thousand
people or more in an arena, all united by song. Although she certainly never
left poetry behind—she’s written twelve volumes of published poetry and
several more books of poetry and memoir that are unpublished—she
embraced the electric promise of speaking to the whole world. “Even now
it’s an opportunity to have a universal voice,” she said, “because everybody,
all over the world, loves rock and roll. It’s the new universal language. Jimi
Hendrix knew that. The Rolling Stones knew that. We knew that. People of
the future will know that. What they do with it is up to them.” Speaking to
Patti was a fun challenge, as her mind is so agile, she was onto other
questions often before they were posed, and it felt like we were having an
ancient conversation, one we’d had several times over the centuries. A
timeless talk of art and song and the human condition. Our talk about
songwriting started with a discussion of how hard it can be to talk about
songwriting.

Patti Smith: Talking about songwriting is complicated ’cause there’s so

many kinds of songs. And so I might seem like I’m contradicting myself,
but I’m not. When I wrote “Frederick” I tried to write a song that everybody
loved and everybody danced to. It was consciously written to be a dance
song. When I wrote “Radio Baghdad” that was the last thing on my mind.
For me that has always been such a conflict because I love natural songs. I
love that song “Get in the Groove.” [Sings] “Hey, get in the groove.” I
mean, what’s that about? It’s such a great little song to dance to. It doesn’t
mean to say much of anything.

Which is a great thing about songs, that they hit us on different levels
at once—our hearts and minds and bodies.
 Yeah. And I think that is the thing why songwriting, to me, has been
such a mystery and still something that I haven’t completely cracked. How
a poet—going back to Jim Morrison—could write such complex lyrics and
complex poems and then say, “Hello, I love you. Let me jump in your
game.”

Yes. People often compliment songwriters by saying they are poets. As

if that is a higher calling even in modern times. You are one of the best
to explain this to the other humans. How is writing poems different
from writing songs?
Poetry is a solitary process. Songs are for the people. When I’m writing
a song I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It’s a different aspect of
communication. It’s for the people.
We always write a certain amount of poetry for the masses. When Allen
Ginsberg wrote “Howl,” he didn’t write it for himself; he wrote it to speak
out. To make a move, to wake people up. I think rock and roll, as our
cultural voice, took that energy and made it even more accessible.
When I’m sitting down to write a poem I’m not thinking of anyone. I’m
not thinking about how it will be received. I’m not thinking it will make
people happy or it will inspire them. I’m in a whole other world. A world of
complete solitude. But when I’m writing a song I imagine performing it. I
imagine giving it. It’s a different aspect of communication. It’s for the
people.
I write songs when I’m by myself, like walking along the beach, and a
song comes in my head. Or I wake up from a dream, like “Blakean Year.” I
often write songs out of dreams and take them to my musicians to help me.
Sometimes I write melodies that are too complex and I can’t find them on
the guitar because I only know about eight chords. So I take them to Lenny
[Kaye] or Tony [Shanahan, her bassist], and they transcribe them into a
song.
“Free Money” came to me walking down St. Mark’s at three in the
morning. It was predawn, but it was so light in New York City, and it came
to me, and I sang it to Lenny. He structured it and found the proper chords,
and we made a song. It was one of our earliest songs.
Other songs, they just come in my head and I sing them out loud, and
the band finds the place, and they adjust it. For myself, the simpler format
the better. “Gandhi” is nine minutes on one chord. It’s an improvisation.
“Radio Baghdad” was completely improvised. I didn’t know the lyrics, but
I knew I wanted to speak out against the invasion of Iraq. Being a mother, I
freely entered into the mother consciousness of the mothers of Baghdad
who were trying to comfort their children as they were being bombed. So
these lyrics that come to me are self-perpetuated.

It’s miraculous that you can spontaneously come up with such amazing
work—
It’s easier for me than to sit and write verse-chorus. Writing lyrics
sometimes is torturous. Because I make them too complicated and
sometimes burden a song with complicated language. But it’s just how I
work. So for me it’s freedom just to go and focus myself and see where my
horse takes me.

Are there times you didn’t get there?

I have never been unsuccessful.

How do you explain that?

It’s a channeling. Burroughs always called it a shamanistic gift.
Sometimes I feel I am channeling someone else. Part of it is experience
from performing and understanding that, as a performer, one has a mission,
like Coltrane, to take your solo out to talk to God, or whoever you talk to,
but you must return. So it has structure.
That’s one way that I write. Others take quite a bit of labor. Often the
simplest song is the hardest to write. “Frederick” was very hard to write
because in its simplicity I also wanted it to be perfect.

Yes. And when people hear them, they think they came out perfectly.
But to get to that place is a lot of work?
Yes, a lot of work. But I find, in the past decade, I don’t struggle with
lyrics as much as I did in the seventies. I think that’s partially because, you
know, I came out of nowhere. I wasn’t a songwriter. A lot of Horses was
based on poems that I had written. For instance, “Jesus died for somebody’s
sins but not mine” came from a poem I wrote when I was twenty. I had
written it, like, perhaps in ’69, and we recorded it in ’75. “Redondo Beach”
I wrote in 1971 as a poem. But I struggled.
I always thought when we did Horses I would do a record—and I was
really honored to do the record—but then I’d go back to work, working in a
bookstore, writing poems or doing my drawings. It didn’t occur to me that
I’d be doing more records. Because I felt like I had said what I had to say.
Horses was based on five years of work and performing and thinking about
things, and suddenly when we had another record I found it very, very
difficult because I wasn’t skilled in writing songs. And Horses was such an
organic process. So I was learning as I went along.
But now I understand the songwriting process, and it’s not so difficult. I
mean, it is difficult, but it’s not as difficult as it was. I remember writing the
lyrics to the songs on Radio Ethiopia. At that time I had performed so
much, I felt a loss of language and just got very involved with playing
electric guitar and making sonicscapes. I was much more happier playing
feedback than I was in spewing language. But the language came back.

“Because the Night,” which you wrote with Springsteen, is a good

example of poetry and song merged. It has beautiful poetic lines and
then a very catchy, simple chorus. How did that come together? Did
you write the words first?
I got a tape of it, everything completely produced, and the chorus was
done. He needed words for the verses, which were mumbled. I listened to it.
I sat up with it all night writing a song for Fred, who was supposed to call
me from Detroit. And I’m the kind of girl who waits for the call. I listened
to it over and over, trying to distract myself from waiting for Fred. And I
was so agitated and so antsy that I just took the tape out that I was given to
explore the song—Jimmy Iovine gave it to me, and Bruce had given it to
him—and I listened to it over and over to try to distract me from waiting for
Fred. And that’s why the lyric says, “Have I doubt when I’m alone / Love is
a ring, a telephone.”
I’ve always wanted to write a song that everyone could love. That’s the
one thing that I feel I haven’t achieved. Writing a song that when you hear
it, everybody is happy. When we’re in Italy and we break into “Because the
Night” and there are twenty thousand people singing, it just brings me to
tears. So I know that people must experience a certain amount of joy. When
it comes down to it, I might write poetry for myself or poetry for the gods
of poetry. But I write a song for the people.

I had always assumed—wrongly, I see—that your poetry and

songwriting was intertwined. That you’d write a poem that would
spark a song and maybe vice versa—
Well, that can happen. Anything can happen. I have started poems that
seemed best served as a song. But that’s just one of those things that
happened totally organically. It would be false to say everything is black
and white; it’s either one or the other. It’s just that my process is different.
My mind-set is different. And I’ve destroyed many poems, [laughs] just lost
the thread on a poem and then went back to them and found that it could be
the germ of something else. But the initial process is a different process.

Why is songwriting sometimes torturous?

Because I had so much responsibility to others. If I was writing lyrics to
someone’s music, I had responsibility to that musician. I had to project
beyond myself and beyond my world out into the greater world. Allen
Ginsberg told me, “If you have trouble writing, just write what you mean.”
[Laughs] And that’s a good lesson when you’re trying to write a song.

As an artist who has expressed yourself in so many ways, how is it to

have written songs which reach so many more people who might never
read poetry or books?
I think of my work as relatively obscure. When you look at a poet like
Jim Morrison, who is able to write very complex lyrics like “Texas Radio”
but also write “Hello, I Love You,” this to me is a real gift, to be able to
have a span like that.
I think contemporarily Michael Stipe is one of our greatest lyricists, to
be able to write such complex lyrics like “E-Bow” and so many other lyrics
—the song that ends with “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I
feel fine”—and yet write songs that completely tap into the universal
consciousness.
With my own work, when I wrote the lyrics for Horses I had a particular
body of people who I was speaking to, and that was the people like myself,
who I felt were disenfranchised. The more maverick person. I wasn’t really
addressing the masses. I didn’t even think I had anything of interest to share
with the masses. But I felt that I had something to share with people like
myself. So my early work was really written to bridge poetry and rock and
roll and to communicate, as I said, with the disenfranchised person. And I
think in that way it was successful. But in the eighties, when I stopped
performing and I got married and had a family, I became more empathetic
to social issues and the humanist point of view. And I think my lyrics had
changed. I was speaking to a larger body of people. As a mother, you want
to speak to everyone. Because everyone is potentially a son or daughter. So
my goal shifted. A lot of that came from my husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith,
who was very political and very concerned with the human condition. So a
song like “People Have the Power” came from Fred. It was Fred’s concept.
Even though I wrote the lyrics, he wrote the title, and the concept was his,
because he wanted to address all people. So I would say there has definitely
been a shift in who I am speaking to, at least in my mind.

That shift seems to have come with the Wave album, with a song like
“Dancing Barefoot”—
“Dancing Barefoot” begins the shift. That album, Wave, came from
falling in love and opening up my perspective: “Frederick.” Wave addressed
the fact that I was here, I did my work, I hopefully contributed. And I found
somebody who I loved, and now I was embarking on a new life. So, you’re
right, it’s really the album Wave which starts that shift.
It took me a while to understand you have license to have abstraction in
a lyric. As a kid, I loved dancing. It’s very funny I should wind up a
songwriter and have to write lyrics. Because as a kid I wasn’t so involved
with the lyrics; I just loved to dance. Hearing “Gimme Shelter,” I didn’t
really break down what the song was about; I just loved to dance to it.
In the eighties, when I stopped performing and got married and had a
family, I became more empathetic to social issues and the humanist point of
view. And my lyrics changed. I was speaking to a larger body of people.

I just read Just Kids, and it’s a beautiful book. I understand there are
books you’ve written that aren’t published.
Yes, I have about five of them. I have always considered myself as a
writer. I wouldn’t categorize myself as a songwriter. I have written lyrics to
many songs, and I work really hard on my lyrics, but it’s not the thing that
comes most easily to me. In any event, it’s just one of the things that I do. I
do so many things. I just spend my time on whatever way I’m trying to
communicate, whatever it calls for.

With the songs on Wave, were you working toward writing a more pure
song, that is more a song than it is poetry?
All of the songs that I write, I wouldn’t consider anything that I record
as poetry. You know, poetry is a very solitary process. And when I’m
writing poetry, unless it’s an oral poem, I’m not really thinking of it in
terms of communicating it to anyone; I’m just writing my poetry, and
sometimes it’s obscure or complicated. But one does not write poetry for
the masses or with thoughts of who’s reading it. Poetry is a very self-
involved, lofty pursuit. I feel embarrassed to call myself a poet. I do write
poetry. But it would make me very happy to be able to write songs that are
universally appealing. But I think that my language is often—because I am
a poet—sometimes my language, perhaps, doesn’t speak to everyone. It’s
not an intentional thing; it’s just the way I am. I don’t set about to write a
song that is obscure. It’s just in my genetic code, it’s in my blood. But the
subject matter is not. A song like “Blakean Year” could almost stand as a
poem. But really it’s basically a song to remind people that in times of
strife, we have our imagination, we have our creative impulse, which are
things that are more important than material things. They are the things that
we should magnify.
So “People Have the Power,” the language is somewhat biblical. But it’s
simply saying that every individual is important, and as a corrective, we
have the power to make tremendous change. So the messages are not
complicated; it’s just that my language, sometimes, might be a little
complex.

When I interviewed Dylan he also said he didn’t consider himself a

poet. He said, “Poets don’t drive cars. Poets drown in lakes”—
[Laughs]

But like you, he’s combined poetic language with song.

Oh, absolutely. I know Bob Dylan has infused poetry within his work—
As have you—
I believe I have, and Michael Stipe has. And I know that Bob feels,
when he was young, he used to sing the praises of Smokey Robinson. And I
know exactly why he’s done that. Because Smokey Robinson could distill
the things that either one of us might talk about in a way that every teenage
boy or teenage girl could completely identify with. So it’s just kind of our
fate that we express ourselves in a certain language. But I think, for
instance, [Dylan’s album] John Wesley Harding has some of the greatest
poetic images in our cultural voice.

And in Dylan’s work and yours, unlike most modern poetry, we get this
language in meter and rhyme, like Romantic poetry—
Well, both of us, I’m sure—I can’t speak for Bob Dylan—but I know
for myself the oral poets, whether it was Vachel Lindsay or Oscar Brown Jr.
or, of course, the beat poets, Allen Ginsberg and Ray Bremser and Gregory
Corso, the energy and the language of these poets, the energy that they
infused in poetry, really set the stage. We have, chronologically, the beat
poets, who were tremendous performers, and then you have the emergence
of rock and roll. Beginning with Bob’s generation, which is just a beat
before mine—I mean, we’re only a few years apart—the fusing of poetry
with social consciousness and, well, with our cultural voice. He opened
things up like no other. And so that paved the way for many of us.

And that opening of the song form, as you said, was to infuse it with
poetry. So my question to you is, when you would write a song, was it
always a conscious choice that you were working on a song and not a
poem?
Absolutely. How I write songs usually is when I’m by myself, like
walking along the beach, and a song comes in my head. Or I wake up from
a dream—like “Blakean Year,” I dreamt it, and I quick wrote it down. I
often write songs out of a dream. And I take them to my musicians to help
me. Because sometimes I write melodies that are too complex and I can’t
find them on the guitar ’cause I only know about eight chords. So I take
them to Lenny [Kaye] or Tony, and they transcribe them into a song.

But do you have the melody first?

 Oh, always. Sometimes a melody that Lenny would help me with and
find the chords.

When he would do that, would he always come up with what sounded

right to you, or would you suggest that he change a part?
Well, we work very organically. We work various ways. Sometimes
someone has a song, and I just sit there, and the band plays it over and over
and over, and I sit until I feel drawn to it and just go up to the microphone
and just start improvising. That’s one way we write a song. There’s a lot of
songs I can point out that were written like that—a song like “Jubilee” or
“Cash.” A lot of songs are written like that.
Other songs, they just come in my head and I sing them out loud, and
the band finds the place, and if we adjust it, sometimes I have to bring them
more to where I want to hear it, and sometimes they open it up. They say,
“Well, that’s very nice, but if you shift it here or add a bridge . . .” Because I
tend, for myself, the simpler format the better. I’m really happy to do a two-
chord song. And I had it on one chord. And that the band could take it
anywhere they wanted, but all based on this one chord. That’s another way
we write songs. It’s completely improvised.
“Radio Baghdad,” as I said, was completely improvised over Oliver
Ray’s chord structure. He had the chord structure, the band played it over
and over again until it was a long instrumental, and I just said we’ll go into
the studio and I’ll improvise over it, ’cause I knew what I wanted to do.

Your work always seems to be more than channeling something from

beyond you—it’s channeling it through your intelligence and mind.
What do you think is the source of these songs?
I don’t know. Sometimes I know they’re coming from myself. Other
times I feel definitely I am channeling someone else. In fact, when that
happens—for instance, when we did “Strange Messenger”—I felt very
taken over by another being. And afterward I got a horrible migraine. And
that happened also with “Memento Mori.” I can’t explain it. I don’t try to
break those things down; they just happen. When I’m performing live I
know I’m channeling the people. I remember once we were in New Orleans
I felt like I was channeling the young girls of Storyville. This is something
that is a spiritual thing, a mystical thing, and, as you said, some part is
coming from one’s own intelligence. And I don’t feel it’s healthy for me as
an artist to try to break it down.

I understand. But do you think anyone else could have channeled the
songs you channeled? Or are they specific to you?
[Pause] All of the songs that I have channeled for myself—you put it
better than I did—I think are for me. Because I prepared for them. I read
huge amounts of things and writings by Ho Chi Minh to do “Gung Ho.” It
was just that the moment I get myself focused, I merge with the music, and
I do the song. Part of it is experience from performing and understanding
that as a performer one has a mission—like Coltrane [laughs]—to take your
solo out to talk to God, or whoever you talk to, but you must return. So it
has structure.

It was Coltrane’s birthday yesterday—

I know. We celebrated.
You know, when we did “Radio Baghdad” I thought deeply about how I
felt emotionally about what happened, and what I didn’t want to do was
some political rant. I wanted to speak against what happened but from a
humanistic point of view. And so being a mother, I just freely entered into
the mother consciousness of the mothers of Baghdad who were trying to
comfort their children as they were being bombed through the night. So
these lyrics that come to me are self-perpetuated. But I am also inspired by
the music. The band is inspiring; the setup is very specific.
But as I said, that’s one way that I write lyrics. Others take quite a bit of
labor. Often the simplest song is the hardest to write.

Yes. And when people hear them, they think they came out perfectly.
But to get to that place is a lot of work?
Yes, a lot of work. A song like “Frederick,” which is a simple little
song, was very hard to write. Because in its simplicity, I also wanted it to be
perfect. But I find in the past decade I don’t struggle with lyrics as much as
I did in the seventies. I think that’s partially because, you know, I came out
of nowhere. I wasn’t a songwriter. A lot of Horses was based on poems that
I had written. For instance, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”
came from a poem I wrote when I was twenty. I had written it like perhaps
in ’69 and we recorded it in ’75. “Redondo Beach” I wrote in 1971 as a
poem. But I struggled.

Dylan spoke about having to learn to write songs consciously after

writing them unconsciously at first. He also made that kind of
transition.
Yes. Well, there are songs that I have in me that are always happening,
are very simple songs, like Appalachian-style songs. Most of my songs that
I write myself around A minor are like Child Ballad songs. But I couldn’t
call myself a songwriter by vocation. But I certainly would say that Bob is
one of our greatest songwriters.

You mentioned A minor. And I noticed many of your songs are in

minor keys. Do you choose a key, and does each have a different color
or mood for you?
[Laughs] I just naturally gravitate toward minor keys. It’s a playful
argument that I have with my bass player, who is a musician’s musician.
And he’s always trying to encourage me to sing songs in different keys and
be a little more diverse. But I don’t even know that I’m doing it. I’m not a
musician. I can play enough chords on acoustic guitar to write a song. But
when I’m singing, I don’t know that I’m singing in any particular key. I
think my natural voice is sort of in A minor. When I was young it was in A.
And now my voice is lower, and I seem to want to start every song in A
minor. But I am encouraged, and we sometimes change the key. But it has
to be within my range. You can’t just choose a key, because my range has
its breadth and it has its limits. So I have to sing songs in the key that fits
well with my voice.

A major is a very happy key—many of The Beatles’ songs are in A

major—and now A minor—
I had a higher voice when I was younger—

But A and A minor aren’t in different ranges.

Well, I don’t know why. Maybe because I gravitated to old rock and roll
songs and R&B songs, and that’s what I felt comfortable in. Even in the
song I wrote myself, “We Three,” which is a song about going to see Tom
Verlaine play guitar when he was in Television, going to CBGBs, because I
was very taken with Tom. It says, “It was just another Sunday, and
everything was in the key of A.” I was singing about when Television and
my band played at CBGBs, and it was in reference to that most of my songs
were in the key of A.

You said how you felt some of the language in your songs was too
complex, and yet you—and other poetically infused songwriters—
stretched the potential of what a song can do by using that kind of
language.
Well, I think we’ve had our contribution. One thing I’ve really been
impressed with in new generations is what interesting lyrics they write. I
was a kid brought up on the Animals and the Philly sound and the Ronettes
and R&B and figuring out how to write a song like that. It was natural for
me to listen to those songs but unnatural for me to write them. It took me a
while to figure all of that out. There’s such a huge [laughs] history now of
our cultural voice. I didn’t have Jim Morrison to listen to. I was just
learning to filter these people. I mean, I did have them, but what I’m saying
is I was living within history as it was happening. So now new generations
have this huge evolution of rock and roll, and they just keep going. I listen
to songs sometimes, and a lot of the ambient music and the lyrics, from My
Bloody Valentine to The Decemberists, or whoever I might hear, and their
language is so interesting.

It seems, though, that the greatness of your songs is when you have
combined poetic language with a great simple chorus, as in
“Frederick”—
I just know that sometimes it seemed, from the past, a hindrance. But it
isn’t anything that I can choose. I just write things the best that I can. I’m
not a calculating person. I just do a song. If someone says, “It shouldn’t be
that way. It could be more appealing,” I just have to do things my way.

Have you found ever that a song could not contain something that a
poem could, or is the potential of a song limitless?
Well, these days a song doesn’t even have to be a song. That’s what’s so
great. At this point I feel like I can do anything. For our new record there is
a musical field on one song where I wrote a poem for Tarkovsky, and I’m
reciting it. I don’t even bother worrying whether it’s a poem or not a poem.
It’s not improvised. It’s classic—it’s a poem. And I feel the freedom to do
whatever I want. Things have opened up, and I would hope our band has
contributed to that space. That’s one of the things that I wanted to do with
our records, was to create space for future generations and to open things
up. And now I feel that, really, one can do anything. Now with CDs,
everything’s changed. It used to be you only had eighteen minutes per side
of an album, so if you had a very long song, it was something you had to
fight for. Now you can have a forty-two-minute song [laughs] if you want.
So it’s interesting the things that you can do. You can be much more
cinematic, and that’s acceptable; it’s something that’s been embraced.

Was there ever content or ideas that you couldn’t get into a song?
Well, [laughs] I can’t think of anything specific. I’ve always wanted to
write a song that everyone could love. That’s the one thing that I feel I
haven’t achieved was writing a song that when you hear it, everybody is
happy. At the same time. Like the feeling I got when I was hearing Maureen
Gray or some great song when I was young. But of course maybe one
cannot hear their own song.

Yes, because at your shows, when you start “Frederick” or “Because

the Night”—
I know that people must experience a certain amount of joy. Really,
when it comes down to it, I might write poetry for myself or poetry for the
gods of poetry. But I write a song for the people. I don’t write songs for
myself. I don’t write songs to be intentionally incommunicative. I write
songs with the exact same desires as I write a poem, with the exact same
energy and commitment. It’s just that the true difference between a poem
and a song is I write a song for the people. Whatever the song is, it’s for the
people. And even if it’s a very obscure song, it’s for the people; it’s not for
myself.

That crystallizes the modern difference between songwriting and

poetry, in that poems used to be directed at the masses and written in
rhythm and rhyme, but they aren’t anymore. Yet songs are.
When you said songwriting was torturous, was it that way because you
were aiming at the masses?
It was torturous because I had so much responsibility to others. If I was
writing lyrics to someone’s music, whether it was my husband’s or Lenny
Kaye’s—whoever—Bruce Springsteen [laughs], I had a responsibility to
that musician. And so I had to somehow meld with their music. And, as I
said, I also had to project beyond myself and beyond my world out into the
greater world. One of the things I learned is something Allen Ginsberg said:
“If you have trouble writing, just write what you mean.” [Laughs] And
that’s a good lesson when you’re trying to write a song.

Whereas some songwriters, such as Paul Simon, told me the opposite,

that he actively steers clear of thinking too much about what he means
because then he’s too conscious.
Well, I understand that as well. I think if you’re overdiligent about that,
the song can become didactic. That’s not what I meant. I meant that if
you’re trying to communicate a certain thing, at least understand what
you’re trying to communicate.

OceanofPDF.com
Chrissie Hynde
 On the Chain Gang
London, England 2009

“Mine is the last act of a desperate man,” she says. “I just didn’t want to be
a waitress.” She’s in the midst of trying to convince me she’s not a great
songwriter. But I’m not buying it. This is Chrissie Hynde, after all. But
perhaps because it just doesn’t jive with her self-image to affect any
pretension, any sort of “and then I wrote” songwriterly pride, she repeatedly
deflected praise through our conversation, pausing to exclaim, “This sounds
so lame . . .” She’s an antidiva in a sense, the last to adopt any pomposity.
When our conversation was interrupted the second time by someone at her
door, she came back and said, “You’re gonna think I have a life—I don’t.”
She is, of course, the writer of not one but several songs that have
become rock standards, beloved and undisputed rock hits. So let’s face it:
the market has spoken. Yet her profound reticence to take herself too
seriously as a songwriter spoke to a fear that any light shone too directly
into that mysterious realm from which songs emerge might destroy it. And
like many songwriters, when songs spill out easily without much work,
she’s got a hard time taking credit for them. Songs such as classics “Talk of
the Town” or “Brass in Pocket” captured her essence of rock swagger and
bravado, this American in England. She also deflects praise toward her
bandmates, especially James Honeyman-Scott, who died of a heroin
overdose in 1982, by saying, “Oh that’s all him. That’s his riff.”
 Yet as we all know, songs that come quickly through a songwriter,
almost like gifts, are often the most powerful. But could only have come
through an instrument that has been finely tuned for years by all the hard
work in the songwriting trenches. Of course, she wouldn’t hear about any of
this. Too pretentiously precious for her. Which is why she’s who she is.
And it’s undeniable that her songs have stood the test of time. She has
written standards. Although she emerged in an era when people were
leaning toward booming drum machines and synth pads, she beautifully
steered the Pretenders always with a purist’s respect for the traditions of
rock and roll. She wasn’t here to rewrite the rules; she was here to write
great songs, songs a great singer can sink her teeth into, songs that have
lasted far beyond the era in which they were written. Whether she wants to
admit it, she’s not only a great songwriter, she’s a hit songwriter. But every
now and then, due to my polite persistence, she gave in and talked about
how she’s done it. She even indulged my desire to name many of her songs
for her immediate response, demurring at first before saying, “Okay,
whatever. Go ahead and do your thing.”
So I did. And she gave a wonderfully expansive answer to “Brass in
Pocket” that was beyond expectations, proving so poignantly how deep
these songs do go in her psyche and her history. All songwriters tend to feel
that their songs are children—though most don’t say it out loud—and it
became evident that for Chrissie, taking credit for these songs was like a
parent taking credit not only for the child, but for its self-generated success.
It’s the kid who is great, not the mom.
An Akron native, she was born in 1951. Her dad worked for the Yellow
Pages. She wrote her first song at the age of fourteen after learning two
guitar chords, recognizing even then that limitations create possibility. “You
only need one chord to write a song,” she explains. “Look at all those James
Brown songs.” She hated high school and all it entailed, partly because her
eyes were already set firmly on a musical future: “I never went to a dance. I
never went out on a date. I never went steady,” she remembered. “It became
pretty awful for me. Except, of course, I could go see bands, and that was
the kick. I used to go to Cleveland just to see any band. So I was in love a
lot of the time, but mostly with guys in bands that I had never met. For me,
knowing that Brian Jones was out there and, later, Iggy Pop, made it kind of
hard for me to get too interested in the guys that were around me. I had . . .
bigger things in mind.”
She went to Kent State to study art and was there when the Ohio
National Guard tragically shot students. Jeffrey Miller, one of the victims,
was her friend. She wanted out of Ohio, out of America. Discovering the
Brit music mag NME, she saved enough money to move to London. She
landed a writing gig with NME, but it didn’t last long—her next job was in
Malcolm McLaren’s Sex shop. It’s there she met Sid Vicious and tried—
according to legend—to persuade him into marriage so she could become a
British citizen. He passed.
She joined a series of bands, first as singer in The Frenchies, then
guitarist in Masters of the Backside, and then the Johnny Moped band.
Mick Jones invited her to join a nascent pre–Joe Strummer incarnation of
what would be the Clash, and they went on a British tour together, but
Chrissie wasn’t happy—she wanted her own band. But it would take time.
Her visa ran out and she had to go back to Ohio, but she returned as
soon as possible. At last she succeeded in realizing her dream and formed
The Pretenders in Hereford in 1978 with three Brits: James Honeyman-
Scott on lead guitar and keyboards, Pete Farndon on bass, and Martin
Chambers on drums. Everyone in the band sang. Their first single was the
Nick Lowe–produced “Stop Your Sobbing,” a Kinks song. In 1980 came
the eponymous debut album, a critical and commercial success both in the
United States and the UK, which led to a great succession of amazing songs
penned by Chrissie: “Brass in Pocket,” “Kid,” “Back on the Chain Gang,”
“Middle of the Road,” and so many more. But tragedy hit the band fast and
early: first Honeyman-Scott’s death and then Farndon’s subsequent bathtub
drowning after being fired from the band. Here was one of the greatest new
bands on the scene, launching the eighties with the promise of great rock to
come, and suddenly half of the group was gone.
But Chrissie was never derailed for long. She also never had any desire
to establish a solo career and chose instead to reinvent the Pretenders many
times over the years, even replacing Chambers—but later bringing him
back, as on the recent tour. “I know that the Pretenders have looked like a
tribute band for the last twenty years,” she said at their Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame induction, “and we’re paying tribute to James Honeyman-Scott and
Pete Farndon, without whom we wouldn’t be here. And on the other hand,
without us, they might have been here, but that’s the way it works in rock
and roll.”
The ostensible purpose of this interview was to discuss The Pretenders:
Live in London, a DVD of a passionately joyful live show with the current
lineup: Martin Chambers on drums, James Walbourne on guitar, Nick
Wilkinson on bass, and Eric Heywood on pedal steel. Her punk ethic still
comes across when talking about it: as opposed to her peers, who involve
themselves in all angles of marketing and commercial calculations, she had
no inclination to even view the DVD. But when she finally did view it—as
required—she was happy.
“You have to keep digging deeper over the years,” she says today in
regard to parenthood’s tendency to soften the edges of a rocker. Nearing
sixty, remarkably, she’s still one of rock’s most fiercely gifted songwriters,
and as evidenced by the solid songs she wrote for 2008’s Break Up the
Concrete, she’s still very much at the top of her game. Of course she won’t
cop to it and admits she still feels like a sham—a pretender, if you will—
who someday might be found out. “Compared to Dylan and Neil Young,”
she says, “I’m still in the minor leagues.”
Yet few songwriters have talked about the sad suburbanization of
America with more poignancy than Chrissie, who often returned to Ohio—
even opening a vegan restaurant there—and yet found her homecomings
laced always with increasing sorrow at the sight of her hometown’s
decimation. It’s a subject that has recurred many times in her work, most
notably in “My City Was Gone” but also in more recent songs like “Break
Up the Concrete,” a great example of outrage being projected, not unlike
Neil Young’s “Ohio” about the Kent State massacre, with the assist of a
great rock groove.
She did acknowledge at one point that if her fans hear too much
negativity from her, they might believe it. But it’s her way, and it makes
sense. Perhaps it’s a clue to her consistency and success. After all these
years she’s still hungry and still aiming high. Considering the list of classics
she’s penned, a dimming of her torch by now is understandable. But when
you hear “Boots of Chinese Plastic” from Concrete, with its distinctive
blend of Buddhism, bravado, and a taut Buddy Holly beat, you hear a
songwriter engaged, as inspired and inventive as she was back when the
Pretenders first emerged.
 In conversation she’s sharp and funny, suffering fools with a distinctly
derisive wit. Asked if her music would have been vastly different had she
never left America, she said, “Yeah, because I would have killed myself.”

Your most recent songs are as exultant and great as your classics. Do
you enjoy writing songs as much as ever?
Chrissie Hynde: Yeah. When it’s getting somewhere, it’s really
enjoyable. It’s fucking awesome. It’s the best thing in the world. But when
it’s not getting somewhere, you want to put a gun in your mouth.

When it’s not going somewhere, do you force it, or do you walk away?
I don’t know. [Laughs] I just don’t know what to say. It depends on how
much pot I’ve been smoking, how many bottles of wine I’ve drunk. It’s
usually just in a puddle on the floor in the morning and is a waste of time.
But once in a while it works.

By that do you mean you try to not be too conscious of the process
while it’s going down?
It’s more in my head. So if I don’t remember what I had in my head two
weeks ago, it’s gone forever. So I just keep going over it and over it in my
head. And if I do pick up a guitar, I’ll go back to that song. It could happen
really fast. Or it could take thirty years, like “Boots of Chinese Plastic.”
When it started out, it was kind of like a Mose Allison song.

I love Mose.
Well, everyone does. The Who and The Kinks—all their songs were
Mose Allison songs. That was the way they structured all of them.

Interesting you mentioned Mose, because he told me that, like you, he

just remembers ideas and figures if he didn’t remember them, they
weren’t worth remembering. Whereas many songwriters feel you can
lose great stuff that way.
Well, he’s really sharp. He’s one of the greats. I don’t think we’re all in
that class.

Yet the truth is that you’ve written songs that are beloved to way more
people than Mose Allison has.
 How do you know that? That could be wrong. Look at how Mose
Allison influenced the Kinks and The Who and how many people that
reached.

I don’t mean to put down Mose. I love him—

Of course. I know you’re not. I appreciate you’re trying to say
something nice.

But you don’t find you have lost a good idea ever?
The worst thing is when you’re in that twilight moment, when you’re
kind of falling asleep, because for some reason that seems like a really
fertile moment creatively. And I’ll be going over a song arrangement or I’ll
have an idea for a song. It’s happened to me quite a few times, where I’ve
thought, “Well, that’s just the best thing that I’ve ever, ever thought, ever.
But I’m just too tired to get up and find a pen and a notebook and turn the
lights on and get the guitar.” I believe in it so much and I think I’ll just
remember it in the morning. And I wake up and have no recollection of it.
And that’s bummed me out a few times. But, you know, fuck it. They’re
only songs.

Seems like that twilight time is fertile because you’re away from the
everyday world. Do you find it’s necessary to get away from the world,
or can you write while on tour or during times of great activity?
No. But all those mundane activities are kind of informing the songs
anyway. Like “Break Up the Concrete,” that was obviously while I was on
tour and I just couldn’t stand seeing any more concrete. That was an
obsession. And then my tour manager told me that something like the size
of Hoover Dam of concrete was poured every day. Or some ridiculous
statistic that he came up with. That became almost a mantra when I was in
my tour bus. So I thought I’d better make a song out of this because
otherwise it was a complete waste of energy.

How did that thought come together with that rhythm, that Bo Diddley
beat?
Yeah, it was supposed to be Buddy Holly, but it’s all the same thing.
That whole project happened pretty quick. I had those songs knocking
around in my head for a while, and when I got in with the band we had one
day of rehearsal without the drummer, and I just said, “Well, here’s roughly
how the songs are.” And then we went in with the drummer the next day,
and we recorded everything in about ten days. So we didn’t even know the
stuff. I just said, “Here’s how it goes.” And we did two a day.

I love how on that song, in the breaks, you sing the drum pattern before
the drums kick in—that funny “dat dat dat-dat-dat . . .”—
Well, that’s because I was just trying to run them through the song and
tell them how it went. But then when we went back to listen to it—well, I
was producing it, though we wrote “Produced by The Pretenders.” But I
was the only one who knew [laughs] how it was supposed to sound.
On the end of one song on the album you hear Jim Keltner, who is
obviously one of the gods, and at the end of the song [laughs] you can hear
him going [in a low voice], “Oh, I’m just getting worse and worse now.”
And I laughed my ass off when I heard that, so I insisted that that had to be
on the record. Of course, Keltner was horrified. But then when we came in
and listened to “Chinese Plastic” and you can hear me going “dat dat dat dat
. . .” of course I was mortified listening back to it. And everyone else was
laughing and said we have to keep that in, and I was, like, “Oh, give me a
break,” and they said, “No, no, no, we have to keep it in.” Because I had got
my way. So at that point it became sort of a lurid free-for-all. Like you can
hear me clearing my throat and coughing and stuff, and I said, “Just leave it
all fucking in.”

And it sounds great. And probably wouldn’t have sounded that good if
you had intentionally put that in.
Well, I don’t think anyone would intentionally put that kind of shit on a
track.

Also, Keltner’s so solid that you don’t need much else on that track. His
drumming is so good—
Awesome. And Martin Chambers is like the best live drummer and the
most entertaining drummer ever. I mean, to turn around onstage every night
and watch him. If I turn around, he’ll always do something. He’s like a
comedian too.
It’s one of the most touching things about the new live DVD you put
out, to see you onstage with him right behind you, all these years later.
The core of the band is there.
Yeah. Weird.

It’s exciting to see that you seem as in touch with the source as ever—
and the new songs as great as old ones—as opposed to a lot of people,
who seem to be repeating themselves—
Well, I hope so. If you’re not, then just get out of it, I guess. It’s like
bring a prizefighter. You got to know when to get out.

But like prizefighters, most songwriters seem to peak young, in their

twenties. It’s impressive when someone goes beyond that, as have you.
A new song like “Boots of Chinese Plastic” is as inspired and inventive
as your best work.
I don’t know. I kind of don’t think of myself as a songwriter. I don’t
know. It’s a moment. I picked up my guitar last night, and I was just shit,
and I thought, “Ah, I’m just a phony.” You know, I go through those down
periods of thinking.

Why is it you never wanted a solo career? So many of your peers made
a point of leaving their bands and being a solo artist, but even with
many different musicians, you’ve always wanted to stay with The
Pretenders.
I like working with a band. I’ve never joined a club, but I definitely love
bands. And as a singer, my place in life is to set up a guitar player and make
them look great. And I guess that’s how football works. I mean English
football. You’re always setting up the other player.

Well, you could be Chrissie Hynde with a great backup band—

Yeah, but who wants to see that shit? [Laughter]

All your fans.

Yeah. They’ll take what they get.

There’s something beautiful about that it’s The Pretenders.

 It is a band. I need those guys. It turns me on to be standing onstage
next to a great guitar player. And watching James [Honeyman-Scott] was a
fucking riot. He was always different; he always pulled something out that
you’d never heard. And if one of these guys makes a mistake, it’s always
fucking great. Because they’re all musicians. I make mistakes all over the
place. But if one of them makes a mistake, they’re so mortified. And I enjoy
that so much. It’s so much fun. How can you not have fun in a rock band?

Well, I guess if you didn’t have great songs. You have great material
each night—
Well, that’s a nice thought. But I’ve got great players around me too.

I do think it would be a lot of fun to play those songs. Your songs, like
Dylan’s, have so much going on lyrically. Yet they are still great songs
—great grooves, melodies.
Well, I think music should make you dance. But, like I said, I’m still
working on that. I feel like I haven’t done anything that great yet, and that’s
what still motivates me. I look back on some things and I think, “God, that
was shit. I’d better do something good to make up for it.”

But in truth, among songwriters and civilians both, you’re known as

someone who has never put out anything that sucks. As opposed to so
many people.
I won’t name any names of the moments of work of mine which I’d
rather you weren’t aware of.

I do know some of your fans who only want you to rock out. They don’t
want ballads from you or any kind of tenderness.
Well, they can go fuck themselves. [Laughter] Yes, I have been
criticized. Frankly, no one wants a lot of ballads, let’s face it. When people
go through their householder years and start having kids and stuff, it does
ruin the mix for a while. You’re in a nice place, and you’re preoccupied.
And it all goes a little soft—it’s not very rock anymore. You have to keep
digging deeper over the years. Because when you’ve got youth and you’ve
got a lot of drugs and a lot of sex and alcohol and stuff, it’s a no-brainer.
Anyone can do it. But when those things start to fall away, and you try to
clean up your act and not be addicted, you just have to dig deeper. And
unfortunately that’s hard to do with rock and roll.
Sometimes I’ve gone onstage with the band and we’re so horribly
hungover that we’re all shaking and actually afraid to go onstage. And you
think, “I’ll never ever do this again. This is horrible.” Then you come
offstage and one of your more ardent fans who were at the show collar you
in the parking lot and say, “That’s the best show you’ve done in the last four
years.” And then you think, “Well, maybe we do have to go out and get
completely wrecked—for the sake of our art.”

Mose said a similar thing, that some nights he feels so terrible and then
is shocked when he hears a tape of the show how good it was.
Yeah. Well, none of us wanted to go watch that DVD. In fact, we were
in New York, and the filmmakers from Canada came down to show us the
film so that we could approve it. Because they can’t put it out till we
approve it, of course. I was so hungover that I called my manager and said I
can’t face it. Because I can never watch myself back or even listen back—
I’ve learned how, because I have to do that to make records. But I can never
watch a performance, television, anything—I just can’t. And I was so
fucked up in the morning, I called my manager and said, “Look, I just can’t
watch it. I don’t think I can face it. I just can’t watch myself. I can’t do it.
I’ll just get too depressed.” And she said, “Well, you have to.” And I was
like, “Oh, can’t you guys just watch it? I’m sure it’ll be fine. There’s
nothing I can change anyway now. It’s already done. So why do I have to
watch it?” She said, “You have to approve it or they can’t put it out.”
Anyway, then I met the guys in the lobby and we walked over to this place.
And everyone else is looking pretty green around the edges like I was. And
I could see that everyone else was dreading it. And we thought it was
fucking great!

It is great.
That was a big surprise. So that’s like your Mose Allison story.

That’s funny, ’cause I assumed—wrongly—that you watched many

films of many shows and chose this one ’cause it’s so good.
 No. In fact, I only watched it that one time. So maybe it wasn’t that
great. I think we were all so horrified and not wanting to see it, the only
way we saw it was from how we were feeling that morning.

Even the guys in the band?

No, everyone was too fucked up. You know, a day off.

Normally, do you start a song with an idea of what you want it to say?
I don’t know. I’m all fucked up at the moment. I think I might lay off
the pot and not get too fucked up. It happens all different ways. Sometimes
with my limited guitar skills, I just want to hang my head and cry. And then
other times I come up with something that is just a couple notes, and it
sounds great. It’s always changing.

When you write a song, do you finish the music first and then fill in the
words?
I don’t know. I can’t say. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle, and it doesn’t
make any sense until you find that last piece. I hate to make it sound so
pretentious or airy-fairy. But it is like that.
[Pause] It has to make sense, though. I know that much. It has to make
sense or it doesn’t work. When people will say, “What’s that song about?”
the first thing I’ll think is, “Oh fuck, they don’t know what the song’s about,
so the song was a failure if it didn’t make itself clear.”

Yet you don’t want it to be too obvious—and you want it to be singable

—
Totally. That’s the beauty of a song. It’s only three minutes, and yet you
can pack everything into it. The great songs that I like. “You Sexy Thing”
by Hot Chocolate. I mean, why is that song so absolutely fucking likeable?
You know, his voice is just perfect. It’s just great. It’s like the perfect pop
song.

Much of it is a good groove, and your songs are very rhythmic—

Yeah, I always feel like you couldn’t dance to Pretenders records. That’s
one of my secret shames.

I don’t think that’s true. A lot of them are very danceable—

 Oh, I hope it’s not true.

You’ve mentioned drugs. And so many people were destroyed by drugs,

yet you have survived. How did you?
That’s the $64,000 question. Who knows? Thank my lucky stars. I don’t
know. How can anyone answer that? You know, I just didn’t quite OD.

I know you loved Brian Jones. Did part of you romanticize that lifestyle
—and the thought of dying young?
Dying young? No, we just loved bands. Dying young was really not the
thing. I mean, Jimmy Scott, my guitar player, died when he was twenty-
five.

I know. Do you enjoy making music as much as ever?

Not really. I get really down on myself, and it actually worries me. I
listen to stuff, and I think that I just don’t like anything that’s out there, and
then I start to think that it’s just me. And then once in a while something
really great will come along, and I’ll realize maybe the other stuff just
wasn’t that good and that’s why I didn’t like it.
Also, my age. You know I was fourteen when the first Beatles album
came out, so if you do the math, I just had all the best music at all the right
times in my life. I was there with Hendrix right from the start. Otis
Redding. All the greats. I went out and got the albums when they came out.
It wasn’t like I was looking back. I was there right at the right time. You
know, we haven’t produced another Jimi Hendrix. You know, Prince was
not Jimi Hendrix. And we haven’t produced another James Brown. And we
haven’t produced another Bob Marley.

I came up at about the same time, and popular music changed so

profoundly from just 1964 or so to 1970. And as a kid I remember
thinking that it would continue to evolve as quickly—
It was really an interesting time. Also, because of coming to London
and being in Paris right before the punk time happened here, I kind of
learned how to really recognize when you’re going through a transitional
period. When people are going through a transition, you don’t know you’re
going through a transition. It feels like you’re on shaky ground and you
don’t know why. And when the transition is over, then you see that it was a
transition. What I’m saying is that I can recognize them now. And we’ve
been going through one for some time. I mean, the whole industry has
collapsed. No one knows how to sell records or where it is anymore. And
everything’s gone on the computer.
But this seems to go in cycles. People keep buying guitars and people
keep being in bands.
The last time I saw a really fertile, exciting musical scene was actually
on television the other day. It was a documentary on the year that changed
jazz, 1958. It was all Lee Morgan and Ornette Coleman, Coltrane—all the
greats. And that was really, really exciting music.
Music’s also been informed very largely by the drugs everyone’s taking
at the time. That’s always had a lot to do with it. And I’m always trying not
to take drugs and not to drink. Like everyone else, I’m trying to get
unaddicted. But you know, we worked hard at those addictions to get
addicted, and it’s really hard to undo it.

Even Dylan’s been talking about that, writing without any drugs. He
said, “Try writing with a straight mind.”
Well, when I’ve done it in the past and I’ve gone straight, and I
remember thinking, “What is this feeling?” And I felt like I did when I was
fourteen, before I started getting loaded. That was the last time I felt like
that. Well, it’s kind of a youth pill.
So that’s what Dylan said, “Try writing with a straight mind”?

Yeah.
Well, it’s always been the drugs that have informed the music. But
ultimately everyone comes to the same conclusion. If they live through it.

When we were kids all our rock idols did drugs—and attributed much
of their greatness to drugs. It was as if they said, “If you want to go on
this road, drugs is a part of it.”
Well, it was part of it. It was part of that mind-altering place, which has
been part of every art and music scene ever. Always. It’s fucked up, so there
you have it. Where would Lucinda Williams be if it were not for the
hangover? We all write songs when we’re depressed and crying and all
fucked up. So if you don’t get depressed and fucked up and you’re not
crying or maybe you’re even in a good relationship, what the hell are you
gonna write about?

And it makes sense why a songwriter would turn to drugs—to get away
from the everyday world and get to that place where songs are.
Also, I think songwriters and people with that creative way of dealing
with the world—I mean, I think that sounds pretentious, so I try to avoid
that—but I think artists want to go there. It’s only in my recent years I’ve
really taken onboard that some people really just aren’t creative. I mean,
you meet people who say, “Wow. you can draw. I can’t draw. You can sing.
That must great to be able to do something.” And you look at them and
think, “What are you talking about?” And the truth is some people can’t
sing or draw. And I don’t think I ever really understood that. I thought
everybody could sing and draw and do stuff like that. I think it was in a
karaoke bar one night that I realized, “Wow, some people can’t sing.” It was
pretty shocking. You hear girls at check-out counters at drugstores. They’re
singing, and they have the most beautiful voices—they’re better than
anyone on the radio.
Senses are imperfect anyway. Who knows if anyone sees green the same
way I do? Obviously they don’t. Some people are color-blind. So it’s hard
for an artist to understand that not everyone has an artistic way of seeing the
world.
It might seem to you, when you see me onstage or on this DVD, and
there’s a collection of songs that I’m largely responsible for, that I’m
prolific and I know what I’m doing. The truth is that I’m not very prolific.
And I feel like a half-assed songwriter and a phony most of the time.
Sometimes I paste something down when I’m writing a song, just be
shouting. But sometimes I get there in the end. I don’t know.

I know other songwriters who feel the same thing, and it seems that
need to still prove something is what propels them forward to good
work.
No, I just got away with it, man. Come on. There’s not anything that’s
original. I’m just trying to get through it. Mine is the last act of a desperate
man. I just didn’t want to be a waitress.
Yet you’ve stretched songs by doing things nobody else has done. And
you’ve written songs that have stood the test of time, which is a major
accomplishment. In terms of songwriting, it doesn’t get better than
that.
Well, I can’t wait for you to hear the JP stuff. This is a really interesting
album we’ve done, because it’s just the two of us.

And isn’t this the only non-Pretenders album you’ve done?

Yeah. I’ve always said I’d never go solo. And this isn’t a solo project.
And The Pretenders, I love them. The band is on fire. I love them. And I
wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m not interested in them. But that’s kind of
a hard slog to come up with stuff for them. I have some ideas. Of course, I
do. The songs I can do with The Pretenders are more get-them-off-my-chest
kind of songs. Like I still haven’t written songs about barbecues and stuff,
so there’s still plenty of stuff I can moan about.

Are you living in Akron still?

No, I’m in London. I still do spend a little bit of time in Akron, maybe a
week or two every couple of months. Which is a lot more than I ever used
to.

I read a few things about you that said you moved back there to stay,
but that’s not true at all—
No, that’s not true at all. Maybe I kind of implied that. I don’t know. I
think that was misconceived somewhere along the line. I bought a place
there and I have a restaurant there, so it looks like I’m living there more
than I am.

It’s interesting how much your Ohio roots have colored your music,
even though you’ve lived in England for so many years. Many times
you’ve returned to the theme of seeing how much has changed in
America and how much is gone since you were a kid.
Yeah. [Sighs] It’s kind of weird isn’t it? It’s kind of been my obsession
all my life. And I’ve tried to go back to the Midwest and rebuild those
downtowns. I’ve thought about it for hours and hours. I’ve thought about it
for years, what happened to America. Then I finally concluded that the way
we got that land, that’s where we went wrong. We stole that land, and we
built our cities on burial grounds. So those cities had to go. Karmically we
committed an act of genocide. And what you put out came back. So those
cities just couldn’t live. Akron and Washington, DC, were two of the
largest-growing cities at one time in the States. I mean, Akron was thriving.
It had all this industry and all these people. But you know, America had all
these problems—with the slaves, with emancipation, and all that. I don’t
think that people like my parents—who were very hardworking, they’d
been there for a few generations, like Welsh coal miners, and they were just
real ordinary Americans at the beginning—I don’t think my parents were
racist or anything, but I think that clash of cultures frightens people. You
see it all around the world. It’s more than racism. Racism, you see it
obviously in the South. There was a real problem and there always has
been. But people are afraid of other cultures. I live in the most multicultural
city in probably the whole world, in London. And you can see people can
get along, but there’s a real conflict when what is considered blasphemy and
what is considered totally unacceptable in one culture is something you’re
getting your nose rubbed in every single day on the streets where you live.
But then blacks started moving into the urban center, and the whites
fled. They went into the suburbs. I’m not entirely hopeful that we can
retrieve our Zokolows or our centers. ’Cause it’s all gone into that kind of
strip-mall mentality. You can’t even walk across the street. And what
happens is that you lose your youth culture. ’Cause when kids grow up and
they get out of school, they want to move out of their parents’ house and
move downtown and get an apartment with some friends and do something.
Well, if there’s no downtown, there’s nowhere for them to go. So they have
to leave the city. What kind of an eighteen-year-old wants to get a job so
they can get a mortgage and a car? They usually have other things in mind.
Well, that’s the story of American cities. For all sorts of reasons, they have
collapsed.

When you go back to Akron, is it sad for you to see what it’s become, or
do you find joy in connecting with what it used to be?
It was sad for me in the seventies when they razed downtown. And I
milked it for all I could. No, I just stood there and cried when I went there. I
used to walk downtown with my friends. And it would take us hours. But
there was nothing to do in Akron, so we’d walk downtown. There were
only two department stores, but that was the downtown for us, and we loved
it. But they just knocked it all down and made great big inner belts. I grew
up with it all my life. The house that I was first in, my grandmother’s house,
you know they picked it up and put it on rollers and moved it up the hill.
And that’s when the inner belt came through. All the streets got cut up.
Yeah, I have obsessively talked about it. Even on this last album.

You say “when the streets got rearranged.”

Yeah.

That theme permeates your work, that so much has changed. But there
are some things that don’t change. And songs are that way—in that a
great song, like “Message of Love” or “Chain Gang,” they’re
unchanged and as powerful and redemptive now as when they first
came out. That’s why it’s hard to understand when you say you’re half-
assed as a songwriter, ’cause you’ve written so many timeless and
beloved songs.
Well, that’s just the way I look at it. I enjoyed being on that last tour, the
one you see on the DVD. It was a fucking blast. I love playing with that
band. But every year you think maybe you’re coming to the end. I’ve
always felt that way, even before The Pretenders. By the time I was twenty-
four I thought I was too old to be in a band. Because it used to be a real
youth culture.

When you started writing songs, did you write alone?

Yeah, because I had my little guitar. And I wasn’t good enough to play
along with records, so I had to write my own songs to have something to
play. I learned two chords, and I loved singing. So you can get a lot of
melodies, and the least amount of chords, the more melodic possibilities
you have. If you’ve got seven chords, you’re stuck with those chords. James
Brown, some of his best songs were just one chord. It would have sounded
odd if you played a second chord.

How old were you when you wrote your first song?
Fourteen.
That’s an understanding a lot of songwriters don’t have, that it doesn’t
take a lot of chords to write a good melody.
Well, yeah, that’s why we have limited skills. It really frustrates me that
I’m not a better guitar player. I’m good at the one thing I can do. [Laughs]
But I can’t just listen to something and then just play what I want to play. I
am a rhythm guitar player, and that’s what I always wanted to be. Ever
since I heard a James Brown, I wanted to play rhythm guitar.

Your songs are deceptively simple in that when I play them, they seem
more complex than they are. Or a song like “Boots of Chinese Plastic,”
it’s only three chords, and yet it’s such a great song.
Oh, well, less is more, I guess. That comes from having very little
technical skill. Not counting anything or knowing the names of the chords
helps. Up to a point.

You said you started with two chords. Do you remember which they
were?
Probably A and D.

A lot of your songs are in A. Is that a favorite key?

I don’t know. I don’t know where I sing the best. I don’t know what
keys my songs are in. I don’t know which side I photograph well on.

[Laughs] But your best side to be photographed, that’s a lot different

than what keys your own songs are in—
But you would think after being photographed for thirty years,
somebody would have figured that out. And the rest of it is I just go by the
gods.

When you sit down to write a song, how do you avoid going to the same
musical patterns you’ve gone to before?
Well, I don’t avoid it. I think I am going to the same patterns. Which is
why it’s great to write with someone else who is also of that kind of limited
skills on guitar. He has great ideas, but he also can’t pick up the guitar and
express himself the way that James Walbourne can. Or Patrick Murdock,
who is in the Fairground Boys, which is the band we’re using for this album
I’m doing with JP.
You could get three of the best rock musicians in the world, or any
musicians, but you’ve got to have that one focal point to kind of distill it all.
Or it’s just gonna be lost in space. They might enjoy it while they’re playing
in their basement.

And so many of the greatest songwriters have not been great

instrumentalists. Do you think limitations can sometimes create great
stuff?
Yeah, I think so. I think you find that even if you’re decorating a flat
and you have a low budget. Just look at kids. Look at teenagers. If you go
on a high street sometimes and you see the kids in a rich part of town,
they’re wearing designer clothes and stuff and they look like shit. But if you
go into the really poor part of town, you’ll see kids—ones that are into
music, anyway—they have a look. And the more limited is your budget,
often you’re more creative. That’s what I think. If you have unlimited
resources, sometimes there’s just too many choices. It’s all about hunger,
isn’t it? When you really want something badly, you’ll get it. When you’re
satiated and you’ve had too much, there’s not much creative possibility, is
there?

You still sound hungry in your work—a hunger to still do something

great or even greater. A song like “Boots of Chinese Plastic” is really
inventive and inspirational. People at your level of success often don’t
write songs like that anymore.
Well, I don’t know. It’s a song about philosophy, basically. And if
you’re not thinking about philosophy at my age, you might as well just put
a gun in your mouth.

In that song and so many others, you have always been able to balance
philosophy and spiritualism with rock and roll. George Harrison did it,
but—
Well, I try to keep it hidden. You know, because certain things you just
can’t express to the light or to the public. My philosophy and where I’m
coming from and why I do this has always been exactly the same. And it’s
all ultimately about child protection and what you might call animal rights.
That’s something I’ve had with me since early.

That consistency of message became really clear to me preparing for

this and listening to your whole body of work from the start to now.
And the message of “Message of Love” and “Boots of Chinese Plastic”
is the same. You said how you keep that message hidden, and a friend
told me she likes you ’cause you “sneak spirituality” into your songs.
But I don’t think it’s that hidden if someone pays attention. The
message is out there.
It couldn’t be any more out there. I’d be bearing a cross if it was any
more out there. [Laughs] The thing is, it’s weird. It’s very, very literal. And
I did quite a lot of press for that album, and you know, nobody ever asked
me about that song, and I thought that was really kind of far out. Chanting,
“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama,
Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare, Nam myoho renge kyo.” Talking
about Jesus Christ. And nobody ever asked anything about it, which is very
strange. Certain things, you have to keep a veil on. And I thought maybe I
didn’t on that song. But I seem to have got away with it. Not that it’s gonna
change anyone’s life. But nobody came to me and said, “What are you
talking about?”

Well, maybe the sneaky part about it and why people missed the
message is that it’s a great rock and roll song—has that cool Bo Diddley
beat—so maybe people got into that groove but didn’t pay attention to
the words.
Well, that’s good.

Is it?
Sure, if they’re still chanting Hare Krishna, if they’re still thinking
about Jesus Christ and saying, “Nam myoho renge kyo,” it can’t be a bad
thing, can it?

I read that the line you repeat in the song—“every drop that runs
through the vein makes its way back to the heart again” is a translation
of “nam myoho renge kyo.” Is that so?
 No. In fact, that line is from a song I wrote when I was trying to get the
Johnny Moped band together, called The Unusuals, and that was from
before I was in The Pretenders.
Nam myoho renge kyo, I don’t even know the literal translation.

It’s a beautiful song. I love that line “I see you in the birds and in the
trees.” I think that’s the heart of many of your songs, recognizing God
in nature.
Well, that’s what I mean. That will be the continuity in my songs—other
than heartbreak and fucked-up relationships and that kind of stuff. But I
really roll with the punches in my life. I don’t get traumatized. But it’s the
philosophy that can keep you on your path. Otherwise, you’ve got nothing.

In that song I am not quite sure when you say, “You sure look fantastic
in your boots of Chinese plastic” if that’s sincere or a statement about
the cheapness of much of our lives—
No, I think they’re great because they’re not wearing leather. [Laughter]
I guess I snuck that one in.

I thought it was about the disparity of the beauty of nature which

surrounds us while people are getting excited by plastic boots, a symbol
for disposable culture.
No, it’s just part of my endless quest to find the nearest Payless. ’Cause
I don’t wear leather. Actually, that’s a lie, because I actually can afford
Stella McCartney boots. Of which I have many.

I thought of you when I heard that the Pope attacked the movie Avatar
for promoting a “new divinity,” that nature is God. An idea which
actually precedes the Judeo-Christian idea of a paternal God. Showed
me there are always forces working to keep us from the spiritual
understanding that’s in your songs.
Well, yes. But there’s more value in the creator. In the one who created
it. So I understand where the Vatican is coming from. I mean, this is only
the material world. I mean, if you’re not beholden to who created it, then I
don’t know what you’re looking at, really. And of course it’s beautiful.
Yet it seems it’s that kind of idea, that what is sacred is beyond this
world and not of this world, that leads some people to feel fine in
destroying the earth and killing animals because they do not consider
anything of this earth to be holy.
Well, they’re living with a false doctrine then. They’re living with an
imperfect idea. People will gravitate and be born into and find their own
level of their own understanding—they always will. There’s not any
religions that promotes or condones the killing of animals. What they say in
these Halal meat and Kosher laws is all bullshit. But nowhere in the Koran
or the Torah or the Bible, it never says anywhere to kill or eat animals. In
fact, on the first page of the Bible it says, “I give you herbs bearing grain.”
And “Thou shalt not kill.” And yet we’re killing billions and billions of
animals a year. So we’re doomed, ’cause that is murder. That’s unlawful
killing. Because what we’re doing in factory farms, it’s Nazi Germany. And
anyone who is paying for that and turning a blind eye to it, doesn’t matter
how much you don’t see it, you are responsible for it, and you’re gonna get
it in the teeth. And that’s what we’re getting.
All the people who, in the name of their religions, are butchering
animals, they are butchers. They’re not holy people. Because if you read
through the world religions and read those things, they’ll make concessions
if you have to kill, how not to cause unnecessary suffering to the animals.
But believe me, that is not what’s going on in these slaughterhouses. So
they’re liars. They’re all fucking liars. My world is a world on a battlefield.
As far as I’m concerned, I am a warrior and I’m engaged in a way, which I
am very willing and happy to die fighting. And that is my war against meat
eaters and that’s why I’m in music.

That’s why?
Yes. And it always has been. And I don’t say that in the songs. But what
I can do is at least get this a little attention, have some fun, and hopefully
encourage people to stop that.

You have expressed much of what you believe in songs—your

philosophy, your horror at the death of our cities—so why haven’t you
directly put that animal rights message into a song?
 I don’t know. I guess I just haven’t figured out how to do it well yet.
Morrissey had that beautiful song. I just haven’t managed. I’m also mindful
of never wanting to preach to anyone. Because unless someone invites
advice, they’ll hate you for it. Nobody, nobody, nobody wants advice or to
be told what to believe or what they should be doing. Nobody. Especially
me. People told me I should be using e-mail for fifteen years and I wouldn’t
open a computer. I don’t like being told what to do. Fifteen years later, after
saying, “Oh, you’ve gotta get e-mail. It’s so great,” and now they’re saying
how lucky I am that I’m not using e-mail. I don’t know where I got lost in
that arc of “you’ve got to have it” to “you’re lucky you don’t have it.”

But some songwriters who have gotten so involved in nonsongwriting

pursuits—working for causes—lose touch with their songwriting—
A lot of animal rights people do that. They lose their human
companions. But we’re not going to save the world; we’re only going to
save our own souls. Our job on earth is not to save the world. So if you
think that’s your job, take your Messiah complex and do what you have to
do with it.

In “Message of Love” you say our job is to take care of each other. Is
that how you feel?
Yeah, I do. I think we’re social creatures. We have to look after each
other because if we were supposed to be alone, there would be only one
person on the planet. It is obvious, isn’t it?

How have you been so passionate about animal rights without letting it
get in the way of your work?
Because I know I can lend myself more to it by having a famous name
than actually being on the front line. And that’s just the way it worked out.
You know, I’ve got stacks and stacks from animal charities and stuff. And
it’s a creepy society. It’s a celebrity society. People are more interested in
what someone that they’re never gonna meet is wearing or who they’re
dating than their own lives. It’s so voyeuristic.

Why do you think that is?

 Because people don’t know who they are. They don’t know who their
real self is. They’re confused. They think that they are their body. So they
become obsessed with things just related to their body. They stop eating
meat because they don’t want to put that into their body. It’s all about their
body. They’re confused. There are different levels of consciousness. And
very few people are fully conscious. I’m sure I’m not. There’s a stunted
consciousness. Which is more like the consciousness of a tree. And there’s
a budding consciousness, which is beginning to open. A fully opened
consciousness—not very many people have those. And you can’t have it
when you’re clouded over with meat eating and all these other practices
which prevent that.

I understand. When I listen to your songs there’s a sense of an old soul

looking at this world with some sadness.
Well, you know, the soul’s eternal, so how old is that?

It seems some are further along than others.

Well, who knows? They say there are 8.4 million species, and we
transmigrate through all of them.

Do you think that’s so?

Yes.

Among songwriters, if someone writes one song that lasts, that is

beloved by the masses, it’s huge. And there are some of you who have
written many—and that’s a great accomplishment.
Well, I haven’t written that many. Come on, I’m not like Dylan or Neil
Young. I’m still in the minor leagues.

But Dylan is an exception—

Right. No one can compare themselves with him.

But just in terms of hits—and hits are the way many songwriters
measure their worth—you’ve had a lot more hits than most songwriters
around.
I could use one now, but you know, I haven’t had one in years. You
know, I wrote “I’ll Stand by You” with Tom [Kelly] and Billy [Steinberg],
and that was a cold-blooded mission to get on the radio. I was ashamed of
it, to be honest. But then some people who I really like said they liked it, so
that made me like it.

I know Steinberg and Kelly, and I remember hearing you were working
with them and being really surprised. I didn’t expect that you would
want to work with them. Not because they’re not great, but so different
from you.
The thing is if you’ve been in the game for a long time, you do all the
things you never wanted to do. You thrive on change. And I do like change.
And I like traveling and moving a lot. And then you actually start running
out of things that you haven’t done. And the only things left that you
haven’t done are the things that you never really wanted to do.

So you wrote “I’ll Stand by You” to be a hit?

Yeah, and I was ashamed because I’d never done that before. I’d never
made an attempt to be commercial and get on the radio. And it started to
hurt, that I wasn’t getting on the radio. And I love radio. To me, radio is
everything. Always has been. I grew up on radio. And the radio’s always
there for everyone. Although that can be changing now with computer.
Everything’s changing now. It’s kind of exciting. I’m not saying it’s better.
I’m under no delusions whatsoever that things are getting better or we’re
progressing. We’re definitely not progressing. You know, the dumbing
down of this society—I don’t know how much lower it can go. But that’s
definitely the direction it’s going in. If we didn’t have these factory farms
and slaughterhouses, we might have a little chance to have a little bit of
peace.

Interesting you wrote that to be a hit, as that seems so unlike you.

I’d never done that before. It was only when I talked to Noel Gallagher
and he said, “I wish I’d fucking wrote it.” And then Jeff Beck loves it. And
then I thought, “Fucking hell, if he likes it.” And melodically it’s got some
nice stuff in it. It’s a good song. It was just a cold-blooded attempt on my
part.
Did you do something different that you normally would in that one to
make it a hit?
No. Not particularly. Just writing with Tom and Billy, who are hit
makers, it was a step in that direction. But I have to say it was a blast, and I
loved writing with them. It was really, really fun.

Did you all sit in a room together and write at the same time?
Well, mainly it was like me and Tom ganging up on Billy and trying to
torture him. [Laughter] I’d kind of just drink tea and go out and buy
chocolate and hang out and keep thinking of things I had to go out and buy.
You know, I’d stay at the Chateau Marmont and drive to Encino every day.
I hated that drive.
Then Billy would arrive with his little poems. And he’d show them to
me, and I’d just pace and eat and drink and get more chocolate and just
goof around for hours. And then you could tell that Billy was getting really
nervous. And Tom would say, “Billy, can’t you see she’s trying to surround
the moment?” We even hid from him once behind some curtains with
knives and were gonna attack him. But my dog gave our hiding place away.
So that was some of the most fun times of my life, trying to torture Billy.
But I make no secret of my kind of sadistic tendencies. And Tom, I just
loved working with Tom. And Billy. They’re fantastic. I’d just love to work
with them again. It was so much fun.

Would Tom be at the piano?

Yes. And I’d be right in the middle of them, so I would put in musical
ideas and change lyrics. And bastardize Billy’s sentimental little offerings.

Were you playing guitar?

Sometimes, yeah. We wrote quite a few different songs together in all
different ways.

It is true you are working on a duo album with JP Jones?

You know, I just finished an album with him. He’s a Welsh singer-
songwriter that I met a few years ago. It’s a total divergence from what I
was doing. I was on tour with the Pretenders, and I came back, and I was
sitting here in a bar, and he sent me a song when I was on tour. He just sent
me a few songs, and I thought they were good. Really good. And he said we
should try writing some songs together, so we did. So we just finished a
whole album. So that was a complete out-of-the-blue for me. That’s never
happened to me. I usually have to wait until I get ideas and then go to my
band. We’ll have the record finished this weekend. Not sure yet what it’s
called. We both sing. It’s pretty awesome. It’s really unusual. And it’s a
whole other band, different than the people I usually work with. It’s just
great.

Would it be okay if I named some of your songs randomly for any

thoughts you might have?
Yeah, is it okay if I throw up? [Laughter] Yeah, whatever. Do your
thing.

“Brass in Pocket.”
Well, I said that would go out over my dead body. That was my famous
quote.

You didn’t like it?

I didn’t like it because I didn’t think it knew was it was. I thought it
sounded like it was trying to be a Motown song, but it didn’t quite get it.
Didn’t quite make it.

You wrote it together with James Honeyman-Scott?

No, he had that little riff [sings opening repeated guitar notes], he was
playing that in the studio, and I thought, “Wow, that’s awesome,” and I just
happened to have a little tape recorder and I taped it. That’s the one time I
did that. I wish I’d done it more. That’s how I did it with him a few times.
But now I like that song because [pause] it’s one of those songs that
served me well. I didn’t like my voice on it. I was kind of a new singer, and
listening to my voice made me kind of cringe. I shouldn’t be saying all this
negative stuff, because if people hear me saying all this negative stuff,
they’ll start to believe it too.

Exactly. We love these songs. As far as this song, one time you said that
people think you are that character in the song, and you’re not.
 Although I loved the anti-establishment nature of rock and roll—that’s
why I got into it, because I didn’t want to be part of the establishment—I
still have this thing. See, the thing about rock is there’s rules but there’s no
rules. There’s a kind of tradition, like Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’
“The purpose of a man is to love a woman.” So I wrote “Message of Love,”
and I took the title “Message of Love” from Jimi Hendrix. Like “2000
Miles” came from Otis Redding. I always want to pay tribute to my heroes.
And I always think everyone’s gonna see that straightaway, and then when
no one mentions it, I think, “Fuck, someone out there will think I just
plagiarized this person and tried to get away with it.” I think they’re so
obvious when I do that.

Or maybe they don’t have any idea that it didn’t start with you.
Maybe. It wouldn’t occur to me that somebody wouldn’t know that.
Anyway, “Brass in Pocket,” it’s all right. I like it.

It’s an interesting title. Why did you call it that instead of “Make You
Notice Me” or something like that?
Because I heard a guy from a band up north who had taken his suit to a
dry cleaner, and I can’t do the accent, but he said, “Was there any brass in
pocket?” I hadn’t heard that before, and I thought it was a good turn of
phrase.

I know you said you worried that sometimes you weren’t clear enough
in songs, and yet we love that mystery. It’s exotic.
It’s got “bottle” too in it. Bottle is Cockney rhyming slang. It means
bottle and glass. And the way Cockney rhyming slang works is the word
you’re really saying rhymes with the second word. So bottle and glass
rhymes with ass. In England to say somebody has a lot of ass it to say they
have a lot of funk. So you say, “That guy has a lot of bottle.” There’s also
reference to Robert Crumb in there where I say, “It’s so reet.” Another one
of my heroes, Robert Crumb. And, well, this is just fucking me rambling.
Like I said, I got away from it in that song.
And the other thing about “Brass in Pocket,” the tradition of it is that
you’re supposed to be kind of cocky and sure of yourself. You’re not
supposed to go onstage and say, “Oh, I’m small and I have no confidence
and I think I’m shit.” Because you just can’t do that onstage. You’re not
supposed to. And probably you don’t have much confidence and you do
think you’re a little piece of shit, or else you wouldn’t have gotten together
a rock band in the first place. The nature of the stage—where you’re
already seven feet higher than everyone and they have to look up to you—
you have to use that to your advantage. And so, hence, “Brass in Pocket” is,
I guess, a big lie. Name another song.

You mentioned “Message of Love.” Musically it’s interesting, the way

in A you go to C for the chorus—kind of a Beatlesque thing to do. Were
you thinking in those terms, that we should go somewhere else here?
I can’t remember. [Pause] Again, like I said, it was kind of my response
as a woman to “The purpose of a man is to love a woman.” It was another
rock tradition to address.

How about “Kid”?

What about it?

A thing I like about it is that you have a tough veneer, yet that song
seems unafraid to be pretty.
I don’t know. That’s an odd song, because I’m not really a storyteller.
God, I feel so fucking lame talking about this shit. I’m more sort of
autobiographical and more expressing my real experiences, and that was
more of a story about a prostitute that her little kid finds out at the end that
she’s a prostitute. It doesn’t say that in the song, but if you listen to it, you’ll
find out that’s what it’s about. Maybe that song doesn’t work because you
don’t know that. But then we don’t know what Otis Redding was talking
about when he said, “I’ve been loving you too long and I can’t stop now,
and your love’s become a habit to me.” Is he talking about heroin, or is he
talking about a woman?

Right. But I think “Kid” does work, even not knowing the subtext. The
emotion of the subject comes through.
And I use a lot of English expressions that, when I think about it, I
know as an American is almost a different language. Like in that song it
says, “Your tears are too dear.” “Dear” means expensive—they cost too
much. But I know from an American point of view, “too dear” might just
not make sense or sound really stupid, so fuck it.

Yet from listening to British songwriters all these years, we know a lot
of these terms. But would your music have been vastly different had
you not gone to England?
Totally. Well, it would have been different because I would have put a
bullet in my head. So it would have been very different. It would have been
played on harp.

How about “Back on the Chain Gang”?

That was a song I was writing, and I had shown Jimmy Scott some of
the chords, and I was working on this song which he liked, and then he
died, and it turned into more of a tribute to him.

You made such a great record of it—the guitars, the chain gang vocals.
Do you think in terms of the record when you write the song?
No, that comes later.

That one has such a great riff. Do you come up with riffs?
More the guitar player, I suppose. Which is why I don’t use my own
name on the thing. ’Cause their contribution is so great, that I always keep
it as a band thing.

That’s unusual to do that, to give writer’s credit to the whole band.

Why?

Because a lot of people want all the credit for themselves.

A lot of these cunts, they take credit for stuff they haven’t even written.
It’s shameful, really. Horrible. There’s some who will say, if someone sends
them a song, “I’ll only perform your song if you give me half of the
songwriting.”

Right. That’s kind of an unfortunate American tradition. Al Jolson,

Elvis Presley. They wanted their name as writer.
Well, that’s stealing. I don’t like cheaters. This year I have a thing about
cheaters. People who cut you off when you’re driving. People who try to
get to the head of the line. I don’t want credit for anything else. I don’t even
want my name as producer or anything, necessarily. Because, hey, I’m a
rock star. You can’t get any higher than that. Why put yourself down by
saying you did the artwork or are the producer?

Yet it’s so common. Some people have a really hard time giving any
credit, even when it’s due.
Well, I have other things to worry about.

“Popstar.”
Oh yeah, “Popstar.” I like that song. I don’t think anyone else really got
it. I was trying to write a song like “Get Off My Cloud.” It’s a very literal
song too. People thought it was my take on the new generation of singers. It
was very literal. It was me going out with a guy, and when we broke up he
found a younger, prettier version of me who wanted to be a pop star. As
they always do, of course. So it’s really literal. I like that song a lot. David
Johansen’s on it. He’s playing all these ad libs on it. I should have had him
play harmonica—he’s a much better harmonica player than I am.

I think you sound great. I was kind of surprised how good you are on it.
I never practice or play it. I should play more. I like it a lot. I’ve been
doing that since I was a kid. I’ve never put “Harmonica by Chrissie Hynde”
on it. [Laughs]

But we know it’s you.

Well, yeah, the inimitable sound.

How about “Middle of the Road”?

That’s a real rip-off. That’s a total Stones rip-off. I probably shouldn’t
say that, but fuck them. They ripped off so many people in their time. That
was kind of my version of “Empty Heart.” Same chords. But there’s only
four chords anyway. And that’s another one about exploitation. “The
Middle of the Road” is referring to the I-Ching, the middle way. Always
stay in the middle. Another one of my philosophical comments.

It’s interesting how differently we can understand those thoughts—

Yeah, well, like I said, I like to keep a veil over them.
It’s a powerful song because you’re saying things in rock nobody has
ever said. You’re saying, “Hey, I’m thirty-three now, I have a kid.
Don’t jump on me.”
[Laughs] Yeah, I like singing that now, “I’m thirty-three,” now that I’m
fifty-eight. But at my stage I can say what I want. Actually at the time I was
only thirty-two, but it didn’t rhyme with the word I was looking for. So I
said I was a year older. I used to always say I was older than I am anyway.

I’ve interviewed Randy Newman many times, and he always says how
much he loves you as a songwriter—
Wow. Awesome!

He said he told you that once, but you thought he was joking.
[Pause] Wow.

And he’s quite like you. He’s very reticent to ever celebrate his own
greatness as a songwriter.
Well, come on. It’s not the Sermon on the Mount, is it?

Maybe more important to many people. Certainly to me. Songs are one
of the few meaningful parts of our lives that aren’t just part of our
disposable culture. Even now people are constantly walking around
listening to songs. It seems that songs do matter.
It is true. No, I agree, I agree. It’s just that I feel I’m not worthy. Like,
“How did I get here?” Like it was just something that I got away with, like
a scam that I pulled off. But I agree with you about songs, because songs
inform your whole life. And they really do. And there’s no way of telling
what’s going to turn you on in a song. That’s so subjective.
Recently some of my friends who are around thirty were telling me
about this one artist. They all just love her. I’m not gonna say who she is,
because I’ve met her and she’s a really lovely person. But they were just
going on about how great she was. And I was really excited to hear her.
And I got the CD and I put it on and I didn’t like it at all, and I thought,
“God, what’s wrong with me?”
OceanofPDF.com
John Prine
 Mailman of Miracles
Nashville, Tennessee 2008

Straight from the streets of Maywood he came, a mailman with a chain of

masterpieces. It’s Chicago, 1970, and word starts circulating around this
close-knit folk music scene that there’s a new guy who must be heard to be
believed. A songwriter who seems to have emerged fully formed with a
voice like Hank Williams and songs that resound like some miracle
collaboration between Woody Guthrie and Hemingway. His name’s Prine.
And almost as soon as the Old Town denizens of the Windy City learned of
him, the secret was out, and John Prine belonged to the world.
He was then and remains today a genuine songwriter’s songwriter, in
that he’s written the kind of songs other songwriters aspire daily to write.
Evidence of which is the vast array of covers of his songs by his peers,
including Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Rickie Lee Jones,
Willie Nelson, and so many others. Even Bob Dylan, since the first night
Kristofferson brought Prine and Steve Goodman into their Greenwich
Village fold, has been awed. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,”
said Dylan. “Beautiful songs . . . I remember when Kris first brought him
on the scene. All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone,’ the soldier junkie daddy, and
‘Donald and Lydia,’ where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody
but Prine could write like that.” Kristofferson, despite unleashing Prine’s
genius on the world, admitted to being intimidated by him. “He’s so good,”
Kris said. “We’re gonna have to break his fingers.”
When Prine and Goodman returned to Chicago after landing their deals,
a celebration ensued for our local heroes, the entire town welcoming them
with warmth and open arms. Unlike other big cities that reject locals who
leave to make it big, Chicago has nothing but pride for those who come
from our streets and take on the world. “We were like astronauts coming
back from the moon,” Prine said. “They might as well have thrown a parade
for us.”
Prine’s lines are so evocative, so purely precise and finely etched, that
they linger in our hearts and minds like dreams, separate from the songs.
There’s the rodeo poster from “Angel from Montgomery,” the hole in
Daddy’s arm and the broken radio (from “Sam Stone”), the old trees that
just grow stronger (from “Hello in There”). The kinds of lines you carry
around in your pocket, knowing they’re in there when you need them. His is
a prodigious gift for capturing intangibles with language, such as the
anomalous texture of Sunday nights he translated into “The Late John
Garfield Blues” or the ennui expressed so purely with the flies buzzing
around the kitchen in “Angel from Montgomery.” Whether writing about
old folks so sorrowfully isolated that people call “Hello in there,” like
talking to a kid in a well, or taking on the phenomenon of celebrity through
the unlikely subject of Sabu the Elephant Boy, Prine has melded his
staggering penchant for detail and his proclivity to be both hilarious and
deeply serious (and often in the same song) with a visceral embrace of roots
music. And in doing so he’s made the kinds of songs nobody ever dreamed
of before—or since.
As a kid his first musical love was country, which kept him endlessly
spinning the Roy Acuff and Hank Williams 78s in his dad’s collection and
tuning into WJJD out of Chicago to hear Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizell, and
others “back to back, all night long.” Roots music with stories to tell, the
kind of songs he’d become famous for writing. And then a new kind of
music arrived: “I was coming of age just as rock and roll was invented,” he
said like a kid on Christmas, and along with his country heroes he added
Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and the one he loved the most, Chuck
Berry, “because he told a story in less than three minutes,” Prine explained.
“And he had a syllable for every beat. . . . Some people stretch the words
like a mask to fit the melody. Whereas guys who are really good lyricists
have a meter so that the melody is almost already there.”
He started playing guitar at fourteen, mostly old folk tunes taught to him
by his brother Dave, who gave fiddle lessons. He quickly surmised he could
take the same three folk chords and, with a little rhythm, play Chuck Berry,
but his limitations then, as they have ever since, led him to his own songs.
“I learned to write because I’d learn to play a Fats Domino song, say, and it
wouldn’t sound nearly as good as Fats Domino. So I’d just make up my
own melody and write my own words. And anything I made up came out
sounding like a folk song because that was the kind of guitar I learned. If
my brother would have been into Chuck Berry, then maybe I would have
written all those songs as rock and roll shuffles.”
When he was old enough he got a job as a postman, which he loved
because he could write songs while walking the familiar blocks. “It was like
a library with no books,” he said. “When you’ve got your own mail route,
day after day, it was an easy place to write.”
For a string of consecutive Sundays he started coming to the open-mic
nights at the old Fifth Peg, a folk club on Armitage in Old Town. When he
summoned up the courage to perform, he played his handful of unheard
classics—“Angel from Montgomery,” “Hello in There,” and “Donald and
Lydia”—and the audience was stunned speechless and forgot to clap. He
figured he’d failed: “They just sat there. They didn’t even applaud, they just
looked at me. I thought, ‘Uh-oh. This is pretty bad.’ I started shuffling my
feet and looking around. And then they started applauding, and it was a
really great feeling. It was like I found out all of a sudden that I could
communicate. That I could communicate really deep feelings and emotions.
And to find that out all at once was amazing.”
And the word spread like wildfire. When Kristofferson heard Prine and
Goodman he pulled some New York strings and landed them both record
deals. The rest is singer-songwriter history. It was 1971, the dream of the
sixties was over, and Goodman and Prine emerged with a new kind of song,
eschewing the lyrical abstractions of the past to write instead story songs
about real people—“Midwestern mindtrips to the nth degree,” as Dylan put
it. Songs with the concrete details and imagery of a novelist but
compounded, like Prine’s hero Chuck Berry, into three-minute
masterpieces.
 He loves red interiors. He told me this about himself, and it has
resounded in my memory ever since, like one of the haunting lines from
one of his songs: when he looks in and around Nashville for old cars to buy,
as he often does, he starts exclusively looking for cars with red interiors.
That, to John Prine, outweighs any concern for how the thing looks from
the outside. A red interior, especially one in good shape, speaks volumes. It
speaks of America, of our recent past so recently gone, and about his love
for the odd, arcane detail. And it points to something beyond words, as he
struggled to explain. “Not even sure why,” he said, looking skyward. “I just
know it makes me happy.”
I spoke to him on a sun-bright Tennessee morning, his voice a low,
raspy whisper since his recent bout with cancer and subsequent surgery. But
his stories were punctuated with frequent laughter—laughter at himself and
at the sad folly of a world he’s written about so well for decades. Perhaps
recognizing that things he’s put off forever, like doing this kind of
interview, were worth doing now or never, he took a long time to
generously delve into his personal history from the streets of Maywood to
Germany to the Chicago folk scene to the nightclubs of New York and
beyond. Though talking wasn’t as easy as it once was, he enjoyed
rummaging through the rooms of his own memory, which he found easier to
do than recalling what happened last week. “I just gave a long interview
yesterday to PBS,” he said, “so I might get confused. Sometimes it’s hard to
separate yesterday from today.”

I’m so happy to finally speak to you. When I was growing up in

Chicago, you and Steve Goodman were my heroes.
John Prine: [Laughs] Man, it was a great place then. I love going back
to Chicago. Man, it was a good amount of fortune. That Steve and I came
along when we did and got into the Chicago folk scene. It was kind of all
ready for us.

It was a great scene for songwriters back then.

It really was. It was just great to see all that blossom. All the people
coming from all over and playing at the open stages at the Earl [of Old
Town]. Then Goodman took me to New York and showed me all this stuff
that I read about—the clubs, the coffeehouses, that whole scene. And that
all sprang both me and Steve’s record contracts. It was really exciting times.

I remember well hearing about you—this mailman from Maywood—

and then the first album came out, and every song was a masterpiece. It
was a stunning debut. Did you have those songs for a while before
recording?
I really started writing when I got out of the Army in 1968 and went
back to the post office; I had done a couple of years in there before I got
drafted. So I went back there to work. Especially when you’ve got your
own mail route, day after day, it was an easy place to write. It was like
going to a library with no books. You’re afforded to just go do your job, and
you don’t really even have to think about it. You know you’re on the right
street and you’re at the right house, and you’re putting the mail in the right
box. That’s where I wrote a lot of the early songs, walking on the mail
route.

When you were growing up, what kind of music did you listen to—and
who were your musical heroes? Did you write your first song after you
were in the Army?
No, I wrote a couple early on. I learned to play the guitar when I was
fourteen. I learned three chords and didn’t bother to [laughs] learn much
else. It got to where, if I wanted to learn a song and it had a minor chord in
it, and I really wanted to learn that song, then I’d learn it and the first thing
I’d do is take the odd chord, as I called it, the one I had never played before,
and put it in a new song of mine. Just to see where it would fit. See where
you’d have to go emotionally for that to work. People would always tell me
about minor chords: when you’re writing a song, to put a minor chord in.
For me, it’s like doom, you know. You know somebody’s gonna be
extremely sick or die if there’s a character in the song. If it’s a first-person
narrative, that you’re gonna go off to war or something. [Laughs]
Something bad is gonna happen when the minor chord hits.

That’s funny, ’cause throughout all your songs there’s hardly one
written in a minor key. They almost always start with a major chord.
 I wrote in a minor key a couple of times over the years. Mainly just to
experiment. Because I always felt that if you start something in a minor key,
then you’re already down in the mine. [Laughs] You don’t have to go to the
mines; you’re already there. [Laughter] Because you’re in the minor
chords.

Do you remember what your first three chords you learned were?
Probably G, C, D. It may have been A, D, E because they’re easier. I
shied away from B7 for a long time because it took too many fingers.
[Laughs]

“Hello in There” has that C major 7 chord in it and has more chords
than you ever use.
I remember specifically when I wrote it, I think I had learned recently
“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” It had about nine
chords to it. I learned the song more or less as a lesson so that I could sing
and change chords quickly at the same time. And once I did that, I thought,
“Gee, I’m gonna write a song with every chord in it I know.” And that’s
“Hello in There.” And I’m still surprised to this day that the chords came
out that well and sound as pretty as they do.

“Hello in There” is about old folks, yet you wrote it as a young man
with a lot of insight into what it’s like to be old. Do you remember
where it came from?
I just always felt, even when I was a young child, I felt really close to
my grandparents. And later when I was a teenager I just felt like a kinship
with older people. And I remember for a short time I had a best friend when
I was about eleven, he had a paper route, and he’d give me a couple bucks
to help him with the route. And one of the streets I had had the Baptist old
people’s home on it. And you’d have to park your bike and go inside with
about twenty papers to the room where the people subscribed to the paper.
And some of the people, I guess, they didn’t have many visitors. And to
their other friends in the home you were like a nephew or a grandson. I
picked up on that and it always stuck in my mind. I guess that’s what it’s
like inside of any kind of institution.
Just the title, “Hello in There,” is so evocative, as it implies that the
person is deep inside himself, hard to reach.
I do vaguely remember that I tied it somehow to the first time I heard
John Lennon sing “Across the Universe.” He was already putting a lot of
echo on his voice on different songs, you know, experimenting with his
voice. I played that song over and over again, and it sounded to me like
somebody talking to a hollow log or a lead pipe. With that echo. And I was
thinking of reaching somebody, communicating with somebody, like “hello
. . . hello in there . . .” You know? When I was writing the song I thought
that these people have entire lives in there. They’re not writers, but they all
have stories to tell. Some are very, very down deeper than others. See, you
gotta dig, you know? And that was all going through my mind when I wrote
“Hello in There.”
I didn’t know what the song was gonna be about, actually, when I came
up with “Hello in There.” I knew it was gonna be about loneliness and
isolation. I was still very much into using names [in songs]. I was a big fan
of Bob Dylan early on, and his song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie
Carroll” was a big model for me. I modeled “Donald and Lydia” after that
song. As far as telling a story and having the chorus be the moral to the
story, a wider moral than what the story’s saying, like where the chorus is
all-consuming and a much bigger subject than what you’re detailing. Yeah,
that was much in the same way that any upbeat song I modeled after Chuck
Berry, I modeled a ballad after specific songs, and that song of Bob
Dylan’s, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” to me was to be held up
as a real model for songs, as was a lot of Hank Williams Sr. songs.

It’s surprising to me to hear the influence of Lennon and also Dylan to

some extent, in that many of their songs were quite poetically abstract
and surreal, whereas your songs tell clear stories with precise imagery.
Yeah. I don’t know how I made that decision. It’s what I was good at,
but I might have thought it was a fault at first. I might have thought I used
too many words to discuss a minor detail. But I soon found out that the
reason that was on my mind is because that’s what I wanted to hear. I
wanted to hear what was in somebody’s purse. I wanted to hear that at the
time of this emotional thing. I wanted to hear what paintings were hanging
on the wall. I wanted to know whether it was a cheap refrigerator. [Laughs]
I just did. It was kind of detective work.

You’ve always been one of the best at using pictures as symbols, like the
old trees that just grow stronger in “Hello in There,” or the rodeo
poster in “Angel from Montgomery.”
[Pause] Yeah. I’m not sure where that came from. But I’m glad it did.

Was “Angel from Montgomery” also one you wrote during your
postman years?
Yeah. That was almost a cowrite. With a guy named Eddie Holstein.

I knew Eddie. And his brother Fred.

God, sure. I knew Fred since I was fourteen and was first going to the
Old Town School, Fred used to work part time in the store. Every time I
wrote a song Fred would turn on his really good high-class tape recorder,
reel-to-reel, and record it. So he’s got recordings of me on guitar singing all
my songs in his apartment long before I ever recorded for a recording
company. I never found out what happened to the tapes.
But Eddie and me, we used to go to lunch together because I used to
like to watch Eddie eat. He’d eat for hours. And he was just a little skinny
guy then, and you’d wonder where the food was.
Eddie said, “Why don’t we write a song together?” And I said, “Jeez,
I’ve never written with anybody. But I guess we could try.”
So we went over to his apartment, and I said, “What do you want to
write about?” And he said, “I really like that song you wrote about old
people. Let’s write another song about old people.”
I said, [laughs] “I can’t, Eddie. I said everything I wanted to in ‘Hello in
There.’ I can’t do it.”
So I thought for a while and said, “How ’bout a song about a middle-
aged woman who feels older than she is?”
And Eddie goes, “Naw.” [Much laughter]
But the idea stuck with me, and when I went home I started “Angel
from Montgomery” that night. With the words “I am an old woman named
after my mother.” I had this really vivid picture of this woman standing
over the dishwater with soap in her hands and just walking away from it all.
So I just kept that whole idea image in mind when I was writing the song,
and I just let it pour out of that character’s heart.

That song was like a lesson for so many of us songwriters about how to
write in character. I can remember hearing the song the first time with
that opening, “I am an old woman,” and thinking what an
extraordinary way to start a song, especially written by a man.
Again, I didn’t realize all this at the time, but if you come up with a
strong enough character, you can get a really vivid insight into the character
that you’ve invented. You let the character write the song. You just dictate
from then on. You stick to it, and whatever the character is saying, you have
to figure out how to keep that in the song, you know? That’s how I do it. I
almost go into a trance. Once I’ve got an outline, a sketch in my mind, of
who the person was, then I figure I’d better let them speak for themselves.
Rather than me saying, “Hey, so here’s a middle-aged woman. She feels
she’s much older.” It wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.
I got asked years later lots of times how I felt I could get away with
writing a woman’s song first-person. And that never occurred to me
because I already considered myself a writer. And writers are any gender
you want. You write from the character, and how can you go wrong?

But there aren’t a lot of songwriters, outside of Broadway, who write

effectively in character. You do it, and Randy Newman does—
I love the way Randy does it. The character stuff, so determined that
they believe what they’re saying. I got to tour with Randy a lot early on. We
did a lot of shows together, just him on piano and me on guitar.

You’re similar not only that you’re great at character songs but also
can be funny in songs, which isn’t easy. You’re both very serious and
very funny.
Yeah. For me, I find humor in just about every situation. Even the most
serious situations. And I find if you use it right, it allows the listener not to
feel so uncomfortable. Or to even empathize with that character.

With “Angel from Montgomery” do you remember where the title

came from or why you placed it in Montgomery?
 No, I can only guess like other people. I’m so far away from myself.
I’m removed when I’m writing.
Eddie always kidded around and told people, “Yeah, I wrote half of that,
and John just bought me lunch.” [Laughter]
Eddie thinks I got it from the angel down on Michigan Boulevard [in
Chicago]. There was evidently a gargoyle that came out from the
Montgomery Ward building. But I’m prone to think that it’s because I was a
huge Hank Williams Sr. fan and I knew he was from Montgomery. And I
think that’s where I thought the woman was from in this image that I had,
this woman with the soapsuds on her hand. She lived in Montgomery,
Alabama, and she wanted to get out of there. She wanted to get out of her
house and her marriage and everything. She just wanted an angel to come to
take her away from all this. And her memory of this cowboy she had once
—or whether she had him or not—it doesn’t matter now.

Yeah, you’re not only in her real life, but in her dreams, in what she’s
yearning for.
Yeah. Man, they did a book of the famous poster people here in
Nashville, the ones who did those giant posters of Hank Williams and the
Grand Ole Opry and everything. They’re still going today with the original
presses. It’s a great place to go. It’s not far from the Ryman Auditorium.
They put a book out of their famous posters. And the poster on the cover is
a poster of a rodeo, a guy with a bucking bronco, and it’s got the words to
the beginning of “Angel from Montgomery” on it. And it’s a really good-
looking poster. I asked them to give me a copy of it. It looked very much
like whatever I had in mind when I wrote it.

I remember as a kid listening to that song and learning so much about

how you set the mood—instead of saying she’s bored, you say, “There’s
flies in the kitchen / I can hear ’em there buzzin’ / And I ain’t done
nothin’ since I woke up today . . .”
I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better. The
more they become part of the song and they fill in the blanks. Rather than
tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. Like what
color the ashtray is. How far away the doorway was. So when you’re
talking about intangible things, like emotions, the listener can fill in the
blanks and you just draw the foundation. I still tend to believe that’s the
way to tackle it today.
Whenever I cowrite with people—and it’s very difficult to dodge
cowriting in Nashville [laughs]—I tell people I’m just trying to write with
myself right now, and it’s very difficult to jump back and forth between the
two. Because I enjoy cowriting when it’s with the right person. I can go into
a different head with a cowriter. Let them take the song on, and I’m just
helping them with their idea. But if I’m gonna write my idea, I want to stick
with it myself. I usually won’t be the one to initiate a cowrite.

The old cliché for writers is “write what you know.” Yet you seem to
reach beyond your own personal experience often. A song like “Sam
Stone,” about a man who comes back from Vietnam a junkie—is that
someone you knew?
Well, I had just gotten out of the service myself. I got drafted with about
six of my best friends, and some of them got sent to Vietnam. Everyone I
knew, they got back, they came back. I knew two kids I went to school with
who didn’t come back from Vietnam. In fact, they didn’t last a week there.
But my own personal friends, they all came back. But there were big
changes in their lives. And there are still to this day.
I remember when they first came back, whenever it seemed appropriate,
I would question them about how it was there. I pretty much got the same
story from everybody, that it was pretty much a wait-and-see situation over
there. You could be in a place in Vietnam where there seemingly wasn’t
much action; you weren’t anywhere near the front. But it soon became
evident that there was no front. There was always a front as far as if we
made an invasion or they did and there was a battle going on, there was
that. But the whole place was the front. You could be walking over to the
officer’s club for a drink some night and step on a mine. Or nothing would
happen for six months, there wouldn’t be a sound, and all of sudden you’d
be walking around and they’d come over and bomb. And that kept you on
edge, I guess, all the time.
I always thought one of the great mistakes they made in the service, I
don’t know if they even tried to correct it with the guys coming back from
the Middle East, but if they spent half the time that they do getting you
ready and the intensity that they put you through in basic training for
combat, if they spent half that time bringing you down and teaching you
how to be a civilian, it would make a big difference. I would liken it to a
person who has done prison time. They all speak of, especially if they’ve
been in for a very long time, of how difficult it is to be back on the street.
And how difficult it is to accept freedom once you get used to living
incarcerated. So all my friends that were over there were affected, like I
said. I wasn’t writing about anybody specific. I made up the character of
Sam Stone, obviously, just ’cause he rhymed with “home.”
But I remember a story in the papers about some soldiers coming home
from Vietnam, in San Francisco they landed. And some people at the airport
—I don’t know if they were protesters or hippies or what—but they were
spitting on them. Saying they shouldn’t be over there killing babies and
stuff. And I was totally repulsed by that. And here, mainly, I was against the
war, and I was for all the hippies and didn’t mind burning the flag and stuff,
you know? [Laughs] I mean, to blame a soldier—maybe because I was one
—I felt like, “Gee, you don’t know what you’re talking about. To blame the
guys who are going over there. Because they didn’t run to Canada and say
they’re not gonna fight for their country.” But that just seemed really
awkward and stupid to me.
So I wanted to explain through a fictional character what it might be
like to come home. Not to be there, because I was never in Vietnam. I was
stationed in Germany. And I was drafted at a time when most people were
being sent to Vietnam, and I thought I was going there for sure. But when
the day came that they gave me orders to go overseas, I was thankful for it.
Whereas other guys who got sent to Germany, as soon as they got there,
they put in for Vietnam. They didn’t want to be in Germany; they wanted to
be in combat. And I’d just say, [laughs] “You guys are nuts.” [Laughs] It’s
not John Wayne time.
I had my guitar over there, though I didn’t do much writing. I was about
three bunks down from a guy who sang beautiful Lefty Frizell songs. He
could sing just like Lefty. And he and I became fast friends. I sang Hank
Williams songs and he sang Lefty songs. I think “Aw Heck” might have
been the only song I wrote while I was over there.

Songs like “Sam Stone” and “Angel from Montgomery” are such
mature, sophisticated songs for a beginning songwriter to write. Any
idea how you were able to write at that level so early on?
No, I don’t. I was very nervous about singing the songs in public for the
first time. Because I thought that they would come across as too detailed,
too amateurish. Because I hadn’t heard anybody being that detailed. And I
thought there must be a reason for that. I must not be doing it the right way,
whatever the right way is. But I knew the songs were very effective to me.
And they reached me. And I was very satisfied with the songs. But I didn’t
know how they would relate to other people because I didn’t consider
myself a normal person. [Laughter]

Did audiences take to them right away?

Right away. They were very effective. The first crowd just sat there.
They didn’t even applaud, they just looked at me. I thought, “Uh-oh.”
[Laughs] I thought, “This is pretty bad.” I started shuffling my feet and
looking around. And then they started applauding, and it was a really great
feeling. It was like I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate.
That I could communicate really deep feelings and emotions. And to find
that out all at once was amazing. Whereas it would have been different if I
would have written a novel or something and waited two years for
somebody to write me back and said, “I think we’re gonna take a chance
and publish it.” That must be a whole different feeling. But mine was
immediate. It was there before other people. Nobody knew me from Adam.

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

Yeah. I think I wrote two at the same time. I had a girlfriend whose
father was a janitor. And the reason I’m telling you that is because he had
access to a tape recorder, and nobody else I knew had one. They were really
rare. A reel-to-reel. He got it from the language department. It was broken,
and he fixed it and had it at home. And I sat down and taped three songs for
this girl and her sister. And the three songs were “Frying Pan,” “Sour
Grapes,” and “Twist and Shout.” And I know I didn’t write “Twist and
Shout.” [Laughter] Those were the three, and I made her a present of them.
Years later I ended up marrying that girl. She was my first wife. She
found the tape. It was after I had made the first album, so I put two of those
songs on Diamonds in the Rough. And those were the first songs I
remember writing.
You said you wrote “Sam Stone” and “Hello in There” when you were
working as a mailman—
Yeah. That was only six months before I first got up and sang, and six
months after that I got a record contract.

When you started writing those songs was your intention to become a
professional musician?
No, because I didn’t think that kind of thing happened to people like
me. [Laughs] I thought that people that you heard records by were from a
whole ’nother world. No matter what their biography says, they’re either
French or from Britain or had rich relatives. [Laughter] And therefore I
wrote the songs more for myself.
I was surprised that the songs connected as well as they did when I first
sang them for an audience. I think I was more surprised than the audience. I
just got the nerve up behind a couple beers one night to stand up onstage
—’cause it was an open mic—and the competition, the bar, was very low.

Which club was it?

The Fifth Peg, which was across the street from the Old Town School
when it used to be on West Armitage. Before that it was on North Avenue.
And there was always a club that the people from the Old Town School
frequented. When they were on North Avenue it used to be the Saddle Club.
Which was a couple of blocks from the Earl. And when they moved over to
Armitage, this club, the Fifth Peg, opened up across the street and featured
folk music, and that would be the club where the people would gather after
the classes. But the link was always the Old Town School.

So becoming a performer was not something you had considered—

Right. I was writing these songs totally myself not thinking that
anybody was going to hear them. And I went from that to being a very
nervous public performer. Who had no voice whatsoever. I would kind of
speak the words. Very fast or very slow, depending on how the melody
went. And I’d hold certain notes [laughs] to let people know I was going to
the next idea. And that’s about how limited it was. It was very painful for
me to stand up in front of people and sing.
 Meanwhile I enjoyed singing. I would sit for hours just by myself and
just bellow out and beat on the guitar. I loved the actual act of singing. But
to listen to myself on tape or to sing for other people was really painful.
And the first time people heard me, [laughs] evidently they felt the same.

Steve Goodman was such an astounding performer—

He certainly was. I think Steve had arrived, except for timing. He really
worked hard, and he was entertaining. He and another friend who played
piano for me had an act before Steve was a single act. It was almost like
Chad Mitchell Trio stuff. Steve did everybody else’s songs before he ever
wrote “City of New Orleans.” I read the entire Clay Eals book [Steve
Goodman: Facing the Music], so I should know.

I did as well. Clay’s a good guy, and that’s a wonderful book.

No kidding, man. The amount of people he interviewed for that book
was amazing.

Yeah. He did Steve justice.

He sure did.

Did you learn much about performing from watching Steve play?
[Pause] Jeez, the way he handled an audience, you couldn’t help but
pick up things. I might not have thought about it like that at the time. I
developed my own thing from my own mistakes. What I considered my
mistakes. My own nervousness. I made it an asset. That’s how I started
talking between songs. And I found out that people liked the stories I was
telling—they were just totally out of pure nervousness: I was trying to kill
time till I had to start singing [laughs] those painful notes again. I put the
two together—the talking and the singing—and noticed that worked.
You just find out things from your own shortcomings. It’s easy to say in
hindsight, of course, and I never would have said this at the time, I didn’t
think so, but that’s what I did—I gathered all my shortcomings and made
them into the stronger points, you know, the points I could stretch ’cause
they worked. You find out real fast when you stand just in front of twelve
people what’s working or not. Sometimes it’s just the way you present it
that makes it not work. It’s got nothing to do with the material.
Do you generally have an idea in mind before you start writing a song?
Yes. Because otherwise I don’t see any reason in sitting down [laughs]
to do it. A lot of time I’ll have the song written, and I only write it down so
I don’t forget it. I could write behind a steel mill. But it’s easier to get
behind a guitar.

You said that sometimes when writing it feels like a trance. Do you have
experience of lines just coming to you, almost from beyond?
Yes. Sometimes they come so easily that you check yourself, you know?
And the more you travel, the more I’ve been around music—like when
you’ve been around forty years around other songwriters’ music constantly.
I go down to the grocery store and people drop CDs in my pocket. And so
when I do get something, I got to check and make sure I didn’t hear that
somewhere. And when I’m sure, I proceed, and I take whatever the image
or the line is, I take that and I don’t try to fix it. I check it like a diving
board, you know? And it’s like I’m gonna go swimming in their pool today.

Is it easy for you to get to that place where songs start coming?
No. It’s very elusive. Patience. You gotta learn patience. I know that I’m
basically a very lazy person. At everything, including writing. As much as I
enjoy writing, I would rather do anything in the world but sit down and
write. But once I get into it, I’m into it. I mean, if you said, “Let’s go get a
hot dog first,” I would always go for the hot dog. I wouldn’t go, “No, let’s
finish this song.” [Laughter] I’d say, “Sure!” [Laughter] And I know that
about myself. So I have to balance out my patience waiting for the right
thing to come along with my laziness, knowing I’m trying to avoid
working.

So you never force yourself to write—

No. [Laughs] No. Unfortunately a lot of your best first-person songs
come from a person’s relationship, from something awful happening, like in
your life, to someone you love very much. So you wouldn’t want to force
those things. Not for the purpose of a good song. Some guys I’ve met, I
wouldn’t put anything past them. [Laughs] Some people, for a good song,
might go through all kinds of changes to get to that.
Your songs seem to suggest you are having fun writing them, with the
rhymes and the rhythms—
Once I get into it. And I almost need, not someone standing over me—I
do need some prodding. I have to realize, “Jeez, okay, it’s been long enough
without a record.” Because I can afford just to go play my songs for big
crowds. I play in some of the nicest places in this country. And they got
nice dressing rooms. I’ve moved up to where the dressing rooms actually
don’t have rats running around in them. It’d be very easy to just keep doing
that. But every once in a while I’ve got to write and get myself into a fresh
state of mind. And I have to look forward, ’cause I know it’s gonna take a
couple of years to process.
I don’t write ten songs in two weeks and go into the studio. I just don’t
do that. I’ll write three songs and love them, and I’ll go sing them for a year
and then write the next three. I just know how I am. Like I say, there’s
nobody standing over me. I’ve got my own record company, my own
publishing. I try and make a place for myself to write that I want to go to.

Having written such amazing songs right from the start, was there a
sense after your first album that you had a lot to live up to?
Only after so many people told me that so many times. [Laughter] And
then I got to remember that the gift I have, I only owe it to myself to honor
that gift. I don’t have to compete against myself. Because that’s crazy. Why
try to write a better song about old people or a better song about a veteran
coming home? Why try to update “Sam Stone”? There’s no reason to. So I
try and stay true to wherever the writing comes from. And it comes from
the deepest well of emotion. Whether it’s something political, something
humorous, something that might break your heart—if that’s what’s down in
the well, that’s what I’ll come up with.

You said you write songs in your car. Do you mean that you write music
too, or just words when you’re away from the guitar?
To me the melody usually comes along hand in hand with the words.
It’s very rare that I’ll get a little piece of music that I keep playing over and
over, like something I’ll do at a sound check that I can’t get rid of. And in
order to get rid of it, I’ll write a song to it. But usually they start with the
idea or the image, and I want to say one thing. Just one sentence. And I’ll
figure out who would say that and how can I build a song on that.

Do you collect titles and think of titles before writing?

No, but funny enough, when I first started cowriting, at first I only
wrote with really close friends who also happened to be songwriters. Just
because I knew I liked spending time with that person, so I didn’t really
care if I came out with a song or not. As long as we had a good time
together.
One of the first people that I wrote with when I first moved to Nashville
was somebody I didn’t know but I just wrote with because of all the great
songs that they’d written, Bobby Braddock. He wrote “We’re Not the Jet
Set” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
So when Bobby and I got ready to write, we wrote “Unwed Fathers.”
The night before we got together I said, “Do you like to start any particular
way, Bobby?”
And he goes, “You know, if you feel like it, bring a little list of song
titles. Just as a way to get started. We can go, ‘Naaaah . . .’ [Laughs] And
that must mean we got a better idea.”
I was watching the Super Bowl and I wrote down twenty titles. And I
used five of those titles in the song. I used the title “Children Having
Children.” And I pulled different ones I liked to go with that subject that I
liked of “Unwed Fathers.” Sometimes there’s not titles; they’re just random
thoughts you can associate with something else. I don’t like to waste paper.
[Laughter] I don’t like to write and throw it away. I don’t like starting over.
Usually I write because it’s already kind of written in my mind. I may not
know the words, I may not know the character’s name, I may not know any
of that, but like I say, I get the picture. It’s a matter of me transferring it to
paper.

You said it almost feels like it’s dictated to you from somewhere else?
Any idea where that is?
No. None. I don’t know what the rules are. I don’t know if I ever
cheated at the game. I don’t like to get so close to it. Every once in a while
it’s safer to go for a hot dog. [Laughs]
 Some of the songs come so fully, it’s like they’re prepackaged. There
have been a couple that came in the middle of the night. And I thought,
“Jeez, I’ll never forget that” and went back to sleep and it was gone. You’ll
hear something years later that another songwriter that you respect writes,
and you go, “Jeez, I think that was the remnants of that song that got sent to
me.”

Your songs seem so distinctive to you. Do you think someone else could
pick up one of your songs?
Just the basic part. Like I’m saying, I get the picture and the emotion.
And if you don’t grab that and pull it down and start drawing your drawing
so you can show it to somebody else to see if they can recognize it, you can
lose it. That’s why I say it’s like taking dictation. But like I say, where it
comes from, I don’t know and I don’t care. [Laughs] I don’t care.

Many songwriters feel that songwriting is more a sense of following a

song than leading it—
Exactly. Because if you approach it the other way, it seems that you are
outguessing it. Like people who are trying to write hit songs are guessing
what the public wants. Or, worse, what the record executive wants.

One of your most beautiful and poignant songs is “Souvenirs.”

I wrote that in my car. A ’65 Chevelle. Driving to the Fifth Peg. Like
the fifth or sixth time playing there. I used to play there just Thursdays after
they hired me. They hired me from that open stage the very first time I sang
for the crowd. They invited me back a week later, and I did it again for an
open stage. And that night the owner asked me if I wanted to sing once a
week. I didn’t know I was auditioning. I didn’t know what to do, how long
you’re supposed to sing or anything. So I went home and wrote a bunch of
songs to fill in the time. They told me to do three sets of forty-five minutes.
So about the fifth time I was driving down there I thought, “God, the same
people are gonna be sitting there. I better have a new song.” So I wrote
“Souvenirs” in the car on the way down. And then I thought I’d come up
with a melody. And I thought I had come up with a pretty sophisticated
melody in my head, and I was surprised to find out it had the same three
chords that all my other songs have. [Laughter] Really surprised. I thought I
had written a jazz melody.

You’ve written several songs like that one, really poignant songs about
time passing and what we lose in time—
Yeah. Where any of that song came from, I have no idea what the start
was.

Was there someone in mind you wrote it to?

I have three brothers—two older, one younger. And one of them was
asking me about “Souvenirs” once. He was five years older than me, and I
remember once we were at a carnival and we were very small, and he got
lost for a while, and I got very, very scared that I would never see my
brother. I remember that. It was a different kind of scared than I had ever
experienced before in my life, like being scared by ghosts or creepy stuff.
And I kept that emotion buried somewhere, and it came out in “Souvenirs.”
How, I don’t know.
I told him, “I remember you standing there holding a little plastic horse
that you either won or somebody gave you. I put it all together in a picture,
and that’s what came out.”

Is it true that “Bruised Orange” is a title you had long before you wrote
the song? You also named your publishing company that.
Yes. When I was still a mailman I had about eight songs, and somebody
told me if I wanted to sing them in public, I should think about copyrighting
them. And another fella told me that if I just copyrighted them all under one
title, as a musical, then I could do it all for five dollars instead of five
dollars per song.
So I found this music professor from Northwestern, and he would make
the sheet music for a couple bucks per song. He’d write it out in music, and
I’d include a cassette and lyric sheet and mail it to myself, get it
postmarked, and that was considered a legal copyright. I put it all under the
name “Bruised Orange.” [Laughs] Which I used many years later. That’s
what I called the imaginary musical. They were all songs like “Sam Stone,”
“Blow Up Your TV,” “Paradise.” I had them all under one title. I found it
not too long ago, the envelope. I finally opened it. I had to. [Laughs] I
figured it was safe to do now. [Laughter].
I thought, “Jeez, I’m supposed to come up with a title for my musical.”
And I thought, “I’ll just pretend.” ’Cause I knew I could put all the songs
under one name. Later somebody explained to me that all they do is give
you a number. You could write “White Christmas,” and they just give you a
number. I thought when you sent in a song to the government to be
copyrighted that there’d be a thousand guys with a thousand pianos in a
warehouse [laughs] and they’d play about eight notes of your song and go,
“Sorry, man. That’s ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’” [Laughter] and then stamp it
“reject.” But when I found out you could put them all as a musical, and
[Bruised Orange] was just a name I came up with off the top of my head.

I listened to the song “Bruised Orange” last night and realized that
someone might normally call it “Chain of Sorrow,” as that’s the most
prevalent line. How come you chose that title for that song?
I liked the title and the image, and I wanted to do something with that
image without saying anything about an orange or a bruise in the song.
It was based upon something that actually happened. I was an altar boy,
and the Northwestern train tracks were not far from the church that I went
to. I was going down there one day, and there was this big ruckus going on
at the train tracks. I had to go shovel the snow off the church steps before
Mass. Because they’d sue the church if people fell and broke their legs.
So I was going down there to get the snow and ice off. I went over to
the train tracks. A kid who had also been an altar boy at the Catholic
Church, I found out later, was walking down the train tracks. And evidently
the commuter train came up behind him. They were taking him away in
bushel baskets—there was nothing left of him. There were a bunch of
mothers standing around, trying to figure out—’cause it was Sunday
morning and all their kids were gone and they didn’t know—they all hadn’t
located their children yet, and they didn’t know who it was.
I told that story on TV once—I was asked about that song when it first
came out. And the family of that son lived near Madison, Wisconsin, years
and years later—twenty years later—just wrote me the nicest letter and told
me they recognized the subject. They gave me the date of when it happened
and that would have been around the time when it happened. And so it was
just a vivid memory that I had, and I put it together with how I felt about
my job as an altar boy. I was supposed to be the maintenance man at
church, and they were short an altar boy. They baptized me and confirmed
me on a Saturday, and Sunday I was wearing a robe, lighting a candle. Then
I had to go early and shovel the snow as a maintenance man or cut the lawn
in the summertime. And that’s when I bought my first guitar.

Listening to your songs, including great early ones like “Sabu Visits the
Twin Cities,” it’s evident that you can write about anything in songs,
using content nobody else ever has. Was that something you felt?
[Softly] Yeah. [Laughs] Definitely. [Laughs] If I could get away with the
song about the veteran coming home and a chorus like “there’s a hole in
Daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” even as powerful as it turned out
to be, that I could write anything. But when I wrote it, it was very odd.
When I’d sing that chorus, I’d be nervous, and by the second time around
there’d be dead silence. And I just figured, “Yeah, you can write about
anything. Anything at all.” As a matter of fact, the less familiar, the better.

Many songwriters feel you have to write about yourself. Yet you’ve
shown that isn’t the case—unless you feel you’re writing about yourself
all the time?
There’s a certain amount of yourself in it, I’m sure. But as a writer you
don’t need to be writing about yourself all the time. Maybe you’re not that
interesting, really. Without an outside thing.

Was there ever content or an idea for a song you couldn’t get into a
song, that wouldn’t work?
Yeah, definitely. More often than not I can’t jump into a song too quick.
Because there’s always the danger of painting yourself into a corner.
There’s no tougher corners to get out of than the ones that you paint.
Because you can’t change the rules if you made up the rules. And then you
get to the third verse that needs to be there, and you can’t define that line
where you can just repeat the first verse. You can’t get out of it that way—
so how are you going to get out of it? Especially if it’s a story song. You’d
better be going somewhere. [Laughs] I think that’s what the listeners are
always thinking, that “Hey, this is precious time I’m giving you, so you’d
better be going somewhere. [Laughs] This joke better be funny.”

Do you generally write more and then cut stuff out?

No. I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a
typewriter even to a computer. I don’t like it—there’s no noise on the
computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist, I edit as I am
committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me, and I go, “Yeah,
that’s it.” They appear before me, and they fit, you know, and I can see that
the line fits with the previous line and the line after it. I can see the inside of
the song as well, not just rhyming the last word so that the song sounds
right. I pretty much do that as I go. I don’t usually take large parts out. If I
get stuck early in a song, I would take it as a sign that I might be writing the
chorus and don’t know it. Sometimes you’re writing the first verse or
second verse and you’re actually writing what you want to repeat. And you
gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you’re doing.

Do you write a song from beginning to end?

I guess now I do. I’m not sure if I always did that. Sometimes I feel it
from the middle out. Where I realize that perhaps I wasn’t starting at the
beginning. I just start with a character and I have to develop it more, so I
have to go back and write a first verse or an introduction.

You said that in “Hello in There” you used all the chords you knew at
the time. Have you ever done that with other songs?
Yeah, I still haven’t used that many. I think when I wrote “Storm
Windows” somebody had just taught me the Elvis Presley song “That’s
When Heartaches Begin.” And it had a C minor chord. And I really wanted
to learn the song, so I learned a C minor. And I know how that chord feels.
It’s the one chord that with a G, I know how it feels, what the emotions are
there. So I felt I wanted to write a song that goes there and gets out of it,
and that was “Storm Windows.”

When you’re at the typewriter working, do you use your guitar?

Sometimes. And sometimes when the melody is so apparent I can just
sit with just the words.
Do you remember where the idea of writing “Sabu,” a song about the
famous elephant boy, where that came from?
I know it was from somewhere else. Because it took me several weeks
before I would play it for anybody. And the whole song came at once, just
like it is, fully written. [Laughs] I didn’t know whether to show it to
anybody or what, whether it was an ugly baby or what.

Being from Chicago, I always loved that line about “the land of the
wind chill factor.”
[Laughs] Me too. I know what gets me and I know what I like, and
usually in the end I’ve got to go with that.

We were talking about funny songs, and there aren’t really that many
funny songs that work over many years. The joke wears out. But your
funny ones are still funny. Is that hard to do?
I never know until the years pass. [Laughs] I’m surprised as anybody. I
pulled the song “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore”
out of mothballs. I stopped singing that when most of the thing with
Vietnam was over. People asked me about it after we were in Iraq. I thought
that if George Bush kept tinkering so much about patriotism, that if you
talked out against that war, you definitely were a Lefty. When he started
with that bullshit, it really got under my skin. So I thought one night I
would pull that song back out and start singing it again. I had no idea if it
would work as well. And it felt really good too.
I have a lot of songs I haven’t touched in years. I need to be prodded to
bring them out. I only have to play them once or twice to see if they work.
It’s not even so much the crowd reaction; it’s more how I feel when I’m
singing the song. I can just tell if I stopped singing that for a reason. Maybe
I’ll feel that I didn’t get everything right in that or everything I could have.
’Cause I’ll never go back and change a song. I just feel that would violate it.
But I’ve had an amazing track record of my stuff working—at least for me.
Not only do I not get sick of it, but still for a large part I appreciate it.

We were talking about “Souvenirs,” and you said Steve Goodman used
to play on that song and—
 Yeah, I can still hear him playing it. He played a back melody so that
you could barely hear the difference of who was playing. On tape or when
we did it live. And I realized a large part of what he was doing was making
it sound like I was playing the good part. [Laughs] And that’s basically the
kind of guy he was. The kind of guy who wouldn’t need to shine the light
on him, even though he could ham it up with the best of them.

He produced your Bruised Orange album. What was that like to have
him produce?
He was definitely doing me a favor. I had made the record already, but I
didn’t have it. I worked with Cowboy Jack Clement, who was a huge
mentor to me and the reason why I moved to Nashville. I moved there, and
we worked for three to four months, solid. And through all kinds of outside
forces and things that shouldn’t have been going on in the studio, we didn’t
get the record that we were playing every day. We really enjoyed making
the record, but we didn’t get it on tape the way we were hearing it in the
studio.
This was the first one I was doing for Asylum Records, and they kept
spending money on it. And Jack was on Asylum as well, and his record was
about two years late. [Laughs] So these were both of our first records on
this label, and here we were working on mine. And we were having a great
time. And listening to music too. It was a very musical summer we spent.
Then I got involved with somebody, and it got to be a very sticky affair.
What I’m saying is that I had a record that I put my heart and soul into with
the songs and gone ahead and made the record, and I didn’t have anything
to show for it. I had to walk away from the whole thing.
So I went out to LA, and I talked to, Christ, twenty different producers,
really great guys, great producers. Big-time producers. And I just didn’t
want to do it. I just didn’t have the heart to do the record again. And
Goodman said he would do it. And I said, “Well, just don’t look to me to
approve or disapprove. I’m just totally . . . numb.” I said I’d come in and do
anything—you just tell me what songs to do today and I’ll do it, and if you
say it’s done right, I’ll believe you. I totally put it in his hands.
And he handed me back a beautiful record. So that’s the way that one
went down. It was no fun for Steve, I’m sure. I was not a fun guy to be
around. [Pause] Anyway that’s the name of that tune. [Laughter]
 Funny how things turn out. Steve, he was a tough producer to work
with.

How so?
Very stubborn. I think because he knew me so well. If someone doesn’t
know me, they kind of keep at a distance. Which is fine with me. [Laughs]
But he knew me. So he would push me. Some nights at the studio I’d say,
“Steve, get off my back, man.” But he knew what he was going for.

Do you remember the first time you met him?

Yeah, I met him briefly the first time with Fred and Ed [Holstein]. He
came to check me out. He didn’t stay long enough to say hello after. They
just kind of ducked in and ducked out and went back over to the Earl. And I
started going over to the Earl to check it out on the nights I wasn’t playing
at the Peg.
Goodman came up to me one night, walked up to me—this is the first
conversation we ever had at any length—they were already playing a tape
on The Midnight Special [a beloved Chicago folk music radio show on
WFMT], a cassette of Steve singing “City of New Orleans.” From that
night I had Goodman pictured in my mind as a tall, skinny banjo-playin’
guy with a little beard. [Laughs] That’s who I thought was playing “City of
New Orleans.” He was actually about all of five foot one. He’d poke you in
the chest when you talked to him like Edgar G. Robinson. [Laughter]

As a kid I used to play the open mics at his club, Somebody Else’s
Troubles, and he’d walk in and just barely clear the bar—
Right. But onstage he was ten feet tall.

He could be a tough critic too. Once he heard one of my songs and he

said, “That’s good, but I could’ve written the whole thing in two lines.”
[Laughs] Yeah.

Would he criticize your songs?

Yeah. The first time Kristofferson introduced Bob Dylan to Steve and
me—this was back in the Village in Carly Simon’s apartment, 1971—my
first record wasn’t coming out for a week. And Kristofferson said, “Come
on over” and gave us Carly’s address. Carly was opening for Kristofferson
at the Bitter End. He said, “I got a surprise for you guys.” So we come over
and we’re sitting in Carly’s place, and there’s a knock on the door, and in
walks Bob Dylan. At this time Bob Dylan was not doing any shows—yet. It
was after the motorcycle accident, years after, in the early seventies. He had
just written “George Jackson.” You familiar with that song? “Lord, Lord,
they cut George Jackson down / Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground.”
So we’re passing the guitar around. Kris sings one. I sing one. Bob
takes the guitar and says he’d like to play something he just wrote, so he
sings that. Goodman looks at him [laughs] and says, “That’s great, Bob. It’s
no ‘Masters of War,’ though.” [Much laughter] Man, I’ll tell you. “It’s no
‘Masters of War.’” [Laughs]
And I sang “Far from Me,” and Dylan sang with me. He had an advance
copy of my record that Jerry Wexler had sent him. And he already knew a
couple of the songs. So he showed up at the Bitter End and played
harmonica behind me on “Donald and Lydia” and “Far from Me.” It was
like a dream.
So, yeah, that’s Goodman criticizing. It wasn’t just your song.

Another great song you wrote with previously untouched content is

“Jesus the Missing Years.”
I wrote that in a total state of inebriation. I was afraid to look at it for
about a week. I knew I had written it, and I was totally surprised that it was
as together as it was. I didn’t change too much at all. I think I’ve still got
the original transcript, if you wanna call it that. With arrows here and there
moving lines around.
On the original record I went all around town trying to find the best
recording of a lightning bolt. So I could start to sing with a big clap of
thunder. I bought nature albums [laughter] with the sounds of rain and
hurricane, till I finally found a clap of thunder. Put a bunch of echo on the
voice just for the title where it goes “Jesus the Missing Years.” Then I play,
boom-boom-boom, and go into this talking thing. I think it was mostly
about Hank Williams’s “Luke the Drifter.” I was just trying to emulate that,
though I knew Hank Williams would never talk about Jesus that way.
You and Steve Goodman wrote the song “The Twentieth Century Is
Almost Over” together—
Stevie actually had that. I thought it was a complete song. He just didn’t
have enough verses. I wrote a couple of verses. In other words, it was his
baby, and he wanted to cut me in on it. He wanted me to help him with it,
and I said, “Here” and came up with some fresh ideas. And next thing I
know he’s in the studio and he’s got Pete Seeger singing. And it was the
first time I had ever met Pete. He’s really something, man.

I agree. Another unusual collaboration you did was with Phil Spector
on “If You Don’t Want My Love.”
Right. The writer for the LA Times, Robert Hilburn, was trying to get
together a book on Spector. He was interviewing him at length over a
period of time. I came to town, and Hilburn was a big fan [of mine], and he
would mention my name at the drop of a hat. I mean, if he was doing a Led
Zeppelin review, he’d somehow fit my name into it, you know? I was
amazed at how much press he’d give me.
I ran into him—I think it was when I was out there interviewing all
those producers I told you about for Bruised Orange before I settled on
Goodman. And I wasn’t talking to Spector about producing, but Hilburn
told me he was going out to his house a lot and said, “Would you like to
come over? He likes your songs a lot, you know.” I said, “Yeah.” He said,
“He’s a big fan of ‘Donald and Lydia’” and mentioned a couple of others. I
said, “Yeah, I’d love to meet him.”
Yeah, and you know, wow! He is out there. Met him a couple of times
since then. And now this whole deal went down [Spector’s trials for the
death of Lana Clarkson], and I don’t know, I’m surprised but I’m not.

Did you see the gun?

Oh yeah. He had the gun. He always had it. You’d always see it before
the end of the evening.

How did you write a song together?

It happened on the way out the door. We’d been there for seven hours,
jokin’, drinkin’. And by the way, when you go in the house, he’s got two
bodyguards on his shoulder. It was just craziness, you know. This chick
came down to say good night and he goes, “Who is the king of rock and
roll?” And she said, “You are, Daddy, you are!” [Laughs] I’ll never forget
that.
So I was leaving around four in the morning, and all of a sudden Phil
sits down at the piano as I was getting my jacket on and he hands me an
electric guitar unplugged. And I sit down on the bench next to him. I played
him “That’s the Way the World Goes Round,” and he really liked it.
He said, “Let’s do this,” and he played the beginning notes of “If You
Don’t Want My Love.” And we came up with the first couple lines, and he
insisted that we repeat them. Over and over. He said it would be very
effective. And we took “That’s the Way the World Goes Round” and took
the melody and turned it inside out and used that as the basis of “If You
Don’t Want My Love.” And he played it on piano, and I just strummed back
on the guitar, and we just wrote the thing in less than an hour. And that was
on my way out the door. And as soon as he sat down and had a musical
instrument, he was normal.
That’s the way he was. He was just a plain old genius. He’d just
finished the Leonard Cohen album [Death of a Ladies’ Man], and it hadn’t
been released yet. He played it for me in his billiard room and turned the
speakers up so high that the balls vibrated across the table. And this is the
Leonard Cohen album! [Laughs]
And I went back playing the song. Didn’t know I would do it for the
record, but I played it for Goodman, and he said, “You oughtta do that for
the record. That’s great.” And I said, “But I don’t know if it’s done.” He
said, “It’s done. Believe me. I’d tell ya if it wasn’t.”
So I cut it for Bruised Orange. Went back to his house after I cut the
record to play it for him. Said he liked it. Said he would’ve produced it
differently, but he liked it. [Laughs] I said, “You can take that up with
Goodman sometime.” [Laughs]

Do you remember where “The Late John Garfield Blues” came from?
It was originally called, on paper, “The Late Sunday Evening Early
Monday Morning Blues.” There was a sort of movie that you’d see on
Sunday night that you would not see the rest of the nights of the week. And
I believe it was on WGN. They’d show these old black-and-white flicks.
And a lot of my favorite ones were John Garfield movies. I put the two
together—the image of him and that kind of odd Sunday time, the Sunday
funnies would be laying around and Parade magazine. Probably had a big
dinner at some point. Your typical Sunday, which was not a typical day at
all. It was always different. Lonelier than the other days. And there was the
feeling that you had to go to school the next day or to work.
So late Sunday night would always be a different time to me. I wanted
to try to pinpoint that, so I chose a John Garfield movie, and I didn’t
mention the movie at all, I just called it “The Late John Garfield Blues.”
There’s an old Jimmie Rodgers melody-wise song that I was using. Just the
chord change. “Treasures Untold.” It’s a really pretty ballad that he wrote. I
learned that song early on, and I always wanted to use that G to the B7.

Do you have a favorite key?

G.

Yeah, you play a lot in G.

I can fingerpick really good in G. [Laughs] I can pick “The Star-
Spangled Banner” in G. I can pick out just about anything I want in the key
of G.

I’ve seen you play a lot in G but with a capo on.

I use the capo up and down the neck and play in G quite a bit. I only get
out of it out of sheer boredom.

Do you use the capo while writing the song, or does that come later?
Usually later. No. When it’s more comfortable to sing in a higher or
lower key.

Do you feel different keys have different colors or moods?

Yeah. Definitely. It makes a big difference. After I had my throat
surgery I had to drop the key on a lot of my older songs. And I was still
singing them in the same key I wrote them in. My voice had changed
anyway before the surgery. My voice was very nasal; my nose was a more
comfortable place to sing out of than my throat. [Laughter] But my voice
dropped quite a bit, and some of my songs, to me, just blossomed in the
new key, and I got to actually enjoy them as if they were brand new. Which
was a really amazing thing. I had no idea changing the key would make
such a big difference.

Your song “Donald and Lydia” is your only one I know of which is
really about two characters with separate stories who you then bring
together. Did that come together naturally, or did you plot it out?
Well, like I say, my guide for the song was “Lonesome Death of Hattie
Caroll.” Just in terms of the character and what the character’s doing. And
then the chorus could be a moral for the whole thing. I had the characters in
my mind, but I brought them together. Somewhere in boot camp I’d seen
the character Donald. And in an Army town where I was stationed, I think
Louisiana, I’d seen Lydia. And mostly they just formed together in my
mind.

You’re a writer who has written about loneliness effectively—

Yeah. And the more I sing about it, the more I realize I’m not the only
one. [Pause] I think it’s great therapy to sing about the stuff that’s goin’ on
inside you. And other people say, “Gee, I didn’t think anybody would ever
write about that particular emotion.” And they tell you that you nailed it
right on the head. That’s a really great feeling.

I think of your song “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which is kind

of a later version of the same theme.
Yeah, that came out all at once. From a broken relationship I was in. I
could not understand what went wrong, and I had to explain to myself, and
I did it through this song. The next day I thought, “Jesus, that’s beautiful.” I
didn’t recognize it at the time—it was just pouring out of me.

Very cool title.

Yeah. Yeah, I really liked it. I guess it must have been a play on the
words of “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Probably. I’m
guessing. [Laughs] When it was all said and done I don’t know where it
came from, but I’m thinking that’s maybe that’s where I got the idea to use
“loneliness” like that. ’Cause it was a long title and kind of abstract, and I
guess I’m attracted to stuff like that.
You’ve written a lot of songs out of heartbreak and turmoil. Can you
write songs as well when you’re happy and things are going well?
Yeah, but usually when you’re happy you don’t have time to write a
song. ’Cause you’re enjoying your life. But when you’re not happy, you
have all the time in the world to go and write a song.

OceanofPDF.com
Michael Smith
 Tulips Beneath the Snow
Chicago, Illinois 1992; Alta Dena, California 2013

When Amsterdam is golden in the morning

Margaret brings him breakfast
She believes him
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow
He’s mad as he can be but Margaret only sees that
sometimes
Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes
From “The Dutchman,” Michael Smith

Hearing the songs of Michael Smith in this day and age is like reading a
novel by Fitzgerald or Hemingway after a lifetime only of comic books. It’s
a realization that songs can hold a lot more than they’re usually expected to
hold, that they can possess a genuine sense of place and time as evocative
and magical as the finest literature. He not only paints beautifully detailed
images in his songs; he also suggests the emotions underneath that imagery
—the tulips beneath the snow, the unborn children in the Dutchman’s eyes.
His songs are so resonant with layers of myth and magic and so perfectly
enhanced by the genuine beauty of his melodies and instrumental
arrangements that you can listen to a single one over and over for a whole
day and feel happy. Each line and nuance of each of his songs is so
completely realized and rendered that a day spent with only “Demon
Lover,” for example, would be a day well spent. As I know well.
In Chicago, where I’m from, Michael Smith has been a local hero for
many years, ever since the late great Steve Goodman made him famous by
recording—and beautifully interpreting—many of his songs. “The
Dutchman” was the first one, the opening cut on Goodman’s now-legendary
second album, Somebody Else’s Troubles.
Michael Smith’s songs entranced Goodman the first time he heard them
in a Miami club and began regularly attending his shows. Steve quickly
memorized many of Michael’s songs—though never perfectly, a
characteristic we discuss in the following—and started adding them to his
own repertoire and making them his own.
Besides “The Dutchman,” he also recorded Michael’s beautiful “Spoon
River,” inspired by the anthology of stories by Edgar Lee Masters. Also
“The Ballad of Dan Moody,” which unfolds like one of John Ford’s great
Westerns.
Goodman was one of the most emotionally committed performers ever
to sing on stage. When he sang funny songs, as he often did, he was
hilarious. When he played rock and roll, he was as exultant as Buddy Holly.
And when he played one of Michael Smith’s beautiful ballads, he would
tear your heart out. I’ll admit I idolized the guy. To this day he remains the
greatest solo acoustic performer I have ever seen. And it was through
Goodman that I came to Michael Smith.
“Spoon River,” for example, opens a window into America just past the
Civil War that is so real, it is haunting. His use of tender but historic details
combined with melodies of great grace and beauty have led to successive
masterpieces. To this day few other songwriters have reached the places he
reached—and surpassed—in his songs.

All of the riverboat gamblers are losing their shirts

All of the brave Union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
But you know and I know there never was reason to hurt
When all of our lives were entwined to begin with
Here in Spoon River
 (“Spoon River,” Michael Smith)

I started doing “Spoon River” myself in shows when I was a kid and
have done it so many times for so many years, it feels as if I wrote it. And I
wish I did. It is a perfect song. But many of his songs have that feeling—
that they are so seamlessly conceived, so poignant and yet unforced, that
there’s just no doubt they are things of providence. Songs meant to be,
without which the world would be a lesser place. John Prine’s “Hello in
There” is such a song, as is James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” “Spoon River”
and “The Dutchman,” along with many of Smith’s songs, belong in this
category.
Michael Smith was born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and
went to high school in Little Falls, where the local references from “Demon
Lover” originate. His first song was written in 1956, when he was fifteen. It
was an imitation of the Everly Brothers and Harry Belafonte, he
remembered, and was called “The Lonely One.” “There wasn’t too much to
it, musically,” he said. “It was basically C, A minor, F, G.”
Two years later, when Smith was seventeen, his father committed
suicide. Having to contain this tragedy while only a teen instilled a darkness
in his psyche that might explain the emotional depth of his songs. “I’ve had
some unsettling things happen to me in my life,” he said, “so when it comes
time to make art, I come at it from a strange angle. It’s kind of like the
oyster with the pearl.”
He’s lived in many places, from Florida to California, and presently
resides in a Chicago apartment with his wife, the singer Barbara Barrow. He
and Barbara were a team for many years and recorded albums together. On
his own he’s recorded several albums for Chicago’s Flying Fish label. One
of my favorite treasures is a combination of two of his albums, Michael
Smith and Love Stories, which collects so many of these masterpieces,
including “Panther in Michigan,” a vivid and vital account of real darkness
in the Midwest; “Three Monkeys,” an excursion into the Tropic of
Capricorn in which unmentioned evil is everywhere; “Loretta of the
Rivers,” a love song set on the line drawn between two worlds; and “Sister
Clarissa,” an evocation of a child’s world embodied in the character of a
nun we first see from the perspective of the child: “Sister Clarissa is eleven
feet tall / Her rosary hangs and it clatters and it clangs . . .”
 Another miraculous song that he wrote from the perspective of a child is
“Crazy Mary,” which Goodman often performed but didn’t record but was
beautifully recorded by Chicago legend Bonnie Koloc. Like “Sister
Clarissa,” it’s about a real character from his past, which gives the song
haunting resonance. It’s also about the way we remember our lives.
This conversation combines two talks, the first from his home in
Chicago, and the second in Alta Dena, California, where he came out to
perform at the Coffee Gallery Backstage.

Was “The Dutchman” a story you thought about before writing it?
Michael Smith: No, it started with the first line: “The Dutchman’s not
the kind of man who keeps his thumb jammed in the dam that holds his
dreams in.” Those lines sounded so of a mood that it was a challenge to
figure out where you would go to make it work. So then it was a question of
making a second line and then sailing out into this story. I was in the middle
of the song, not knowing what the ending would be. And I was conscious of
trying to make a verse for the morning, a verse for the afternoon, and a
verse for the evening.

Do you have any idea where the idea for the first line originated?
In school I had a friend who was Dutch. He lived down the street from
me. I was sort of conscious of Dutchness. Other inspiration for it came from
stories like “The Boy Who Held His Finger in the Dike.” It was a traditional
story from Holland. And when I started this song about my friend, I realized
it was about that story. And I used my sister’s name, Margaret. And when I
worked on that part I realized it didn’t sound like someone you went to high
school with; it sounded like someone who is old and actually lives in
Holland. So then I had to pursue it down that path.
So any song where you’re winging it, if you start off a story
interestingly, you have to justify it by finishing that story. And I read a lot
of books by Jan de Hartog who wrote about Dutch tugboat captains during
World War II. So I used things I remembered from his books, verbal
pictures.

It’s interesting that you can point to the source of so much of your
work, whereas other songwriters say that their songs come from
someplace that is beyond them.
The thing I think is beyond is the mood. The yearning to make “Loretta
of the Rivers” or “The Dutchman” or “Spoon River” into something that
would voice what I was feeling. It’s feeling very dissatisfied that I haven’t
justified my visions well enough, so I have to make something that will
work better than the ones before.
The mood is something I can’t control. It’s just nature. Human nature.
God is expressing himself in my nature. Thank goodness I don’t have
control over that. Because I try, you know. It’s a good thing that you can’t
give away your hearing because there are people who would be imploring
you to do so. We don’t have any say in how our natures are. So we must
trust that our nature is in line with what God has in mind. And I think the
one that God loves, who is not conscious of himself, is the one who makes
up the songs. And the one that’s here and talking to you and being a
conscious human, he only arranges for it. He gets determined about writing
a song, but in truth, he’s not doing anything. So clearly it’s not up to you.

How conscious are you, while writing a song, of where you want it to
go?
I’d say it’s not where I want it to go at all; it’s more a question of me
coping with writing this line and where do I go now? In the interview you
did with Dylan, he talked about getting himself into a puzzle and having to
work his way out. You write one line. And that line forbids you from having
anything but a certain second line.
Finally, say you’ve done four lines, you say to the song, “Can I go
here?” And the song says yes or no. Though in truth it’s you saying yes or
no. It seems as if you take your cue from the song. It really is, with the
songs that work, almost inevitable. If someone else was writing “Loretta of
the Rivers” and the first line was “Living on the borderline,” what is he
going to do next? At that point he would diverge and go off into his own
thing.

Like Dylan, you show a lot of respect for the craft of songwriting in
that you use real rhymes and often intricate rhyme schemes.
I’m glad you picked up on that. I like doing that because I like
discovering it in other people. And I do. Certainly with Dylan, he’s always
showing me things.
I think of it as an opportunity to show craft. Or an opportunity to jar
people. One or the other. For me I prefer to show them the craft. People will
consciously realize that it’s wrapped up kind of neatly. If you didn’t do it,
they wouldn’t get that. The great guys, the great ones, will do it with a flair.
It’s like you’re skipping across a stream on little rocks and it has to do
with how you skip and what rocks you land on.
With “Loretta” I wanted to make a picture that was very moody, and I
didn’t want to put in anything that would not contribute to that mood.

“Demon Lover” is an amazing song. It succeeds in being completely

real while being mythic at the same time, and the music is
heartbreaking.
“The Demon Lover” legend is a traditional legend from the Middle
Ages. There are old ballads called “Ballad of the Demon Lover.” And
there’s one ballad called “The House Carpenter” that Joan Baez recorded.
The premise is that a woman is engaged, her lover goes off to sea, and he’s
gone for seven years. By this time she’s married and has three children, and
a guy looking just like him returns. And her husband’s away, and he says,
“Will you forsake your children to come with me?” And she says, “Yes, I
will.”
He takes her out to his golden boat. And she notices getting on the boat
that his feet are cloven hooves. And it’s too late. He’s got her and takes her
down to hell in this boat. That’s the “House Carpenter Ballad” because she
was married to a house carpenter.
Then I read this wonderful book by Shirley Jackson called Adventures
of the Demon Lover. I read this when I was about eighteen. And I wanted to
do this ancient story in a modern setting. So I used things that were
common to my New Jersey upbringing and used the name of a girl I knew
in grade school, Agnes Hines. She was the first girl I knew whose father
had died. I thought of her as being a tragic figure when I was about ten.
I worked on “Demon Lover” for a long, long time. I had the idea for a
couple of years.

With that song, did you finish the words before writing the music?
 I liked the idea of making the tune almost like jazz. I was trying to make
something that sounded like Mel Torme. I figured that if I could make this
tune that has major seventh chords in it that is talking about demons and
people disappearing in the middle of the day, there will be a mood.
There’s a reason why myths last for centuries. They give us a skeleton
that we’re not even aware of but is full of strength in its structure. Like fairy
tales do that. Like the song “Down in the Willow Garden.” “I put my sabre
through her . . .” I would never think of anything like that. I am a suburban
white guy in the twentieth century.

It’s powerful to have an ancient story not only linked up to modern

images but especially linked to that beautiful melody, which is modern
but also haunting.
I realized I could do others that way. In a sense Dylan did that,
specifically with the song “Seven Curses,” which is an old story that he told
in a new way.

“Demon Lover” is such a rich narrative that if you miss a single line,
you miss out on the story. It’s a rare example of a song that causes
people to hang on every line.
That’s wonderful. I love that. Because for me, that was my interest in
folk music. Because you’d hear a song like “Bells of Rhymney” and you’d
want to know what those lines meant. You could think about those lines.

The song leaves unanswered the question: Is the kid who returns and
sweeps her off her feet the real kid or a demon disguised as the kid?
Here’s what I think is going on in that tune: she wants him back so bad
that she gave over the power in her life to some creation that only
responded to desire. In a sense it was him, and in a sense it was a
solidification of her dissatisfaction.

Have you done a lot of reading of myths in general?

Yeah, I read like a crazy person.

Do you read poetry?

 Yes. I love Wallace Stevens. I like Yeats. And I think the verbal pictures
in folk music are beautiful and powerful. You hear them and you can’t help
but be struck by their power and beauty so much that you want to write a
song like that. “Loretta of the Rivers” was my attempt to write something
that sounds like the beautiful Mexican mariachi tunes.
Also, I happened to meet someone whose name was Loretta Del Los
Rios.

That’s a gorgeous song. Was it one that you worked on for a long time?
I would say what was most of the work part was finding the guitar riff.
And the words occurred to me to match the music. It was done without
thinking. If I can persuade myself that this is just a little abstract project that
I’m working on and not some song that had better be real good, then I’m
better off.
For me the pleasure of writing a song is getting to hear it back. Not
playing it. I love being an audience to my own songs.

I love the structure of the song, how the choruses connect with the
verses.
Yeah, I think if you write songs a lot, there will be times when you’re
really possessed and you don’t have any doubts. It becomes more like this is
what I do and I’m doing it now, and I’m not a hero and I’m not a fool. I
think “Loretta” is like that, and that’s when they come out best.

It’s funny to me that you mentioned thinking of the work as an abstract

project like that. I know with my own songwriting that if I trick myself
by thinking this is a song just for fun and not to be played for anybody
that the best things can often come that way. I’ve written many songs
that way, and I always fall for the trick.
[Laughs] Absolutely. Because there’s a child inside you. And that child
has to be very, very reassured before it can come out. And the world doesn’t
want the child to come out. The world wants you to pay the bills. That’s
what the world wants. I know that I’m so aware of money that it drives me
crazy sometimes. The only problem with being poor is that you have to
think about it so much. So for me, the child hides when the bill collector
comes to the door. The child says, “You have to go out and get a job and
feed me. Don’t worry about getting any songs.” And my life is a process of
reassuring the child that it’s okay to come out.
If you’re very successful at an early age and make a lot of money, you
can exist in that child’s world. Michael Jackson did it. John Lennon did it.
Elvis did it. He made that world for himself where he didn’t have to be an
adult.
When I’m writing a song I’m really vulnerable. I’m not being
aggressive at all. I’m just having a good time. And the older I get, the
harder it is.

Through the years have you found any ways to let that child get out?
I get high. I get high all the time. I’m just like The Beatles. [Laughs]
And I drink more lately. I know it’s the fashion these days to say I don’t do
drugs. But I can’t see how a person can live in the modern world and not do
drugs and be an artist. The world is saying to me, “What you’re doing is
trivial and not important. Get a job.” And the world will say that to me as
long as I’m not a Beatle or John Denver. That’s the way the world is toward
artists. If you’re an artist, who needs you?
I was raised in a very rigid and accomplishment-oriented environment. I
don’t mean my family. I mean being Catholic and white and in America in
the fifties, when everybody had crew cuts. I think you have to get past that
somehow.
Throughout the centuries people have been very upset about artists
seeking to escape the world through whatever means. But for me, at least,
what I see is that Edgar Allan Poe got it, The Beatles did it—that’s enough
for me. And I know how music was for me before I got high. I used to be
nervous about reality shifting. And my whole approach to music was a
whole lot less sensual because I didn’t stop to smell the roses. And it was
The Beatles saying to stop and smell the roses that made me shift my
consciousness and become a hippie. And for me to become a hippie was a
big shift. It was like Wally Cox turns into Marlon Brando.
Marijuana is not a big shift in consciousness. If there is underlying fear,
it shows. If there is underlying peace, it shows. If I get a poetic image when
I’m high, it seems much more beautiful, and I look at it and I become an
audience. And when I become an audience, that gives me enthusiasm to
finish the project.
Under the influence of some drugs certain things can seem more
beautiful than they are. But in your songs the beauty and the depth is a
real part of the work.
I think that has to do with your perception of what simplicity is. I would
say that with Dylan, for example, he will send you a message, and you’ll
get more than he meant. That’s a talent. And Dylan had that talent before he
ever smoked dope. So if you’re not a good songwriter to begin with, you
can smoke all the dope you want and it’s not going to help. At the same
time, I think it will maximize your sensual appreciation.

Your song “Vampire” is also mythic and so genuine, it made me wonder

about you.
That’s interesting. I think “Vampire” is highly sexual. It really is a sex
song but with imagery that stands in the way. I was simply trying to write a
song of seduction, and it seemed interesting to do that with imagery that is
not sexual but sensual. Also I had read a lot of Stephen King and Anne
Rice’s books. She was the first person to ever make me think being a
vampire could be a glamorous thing. People had attempted to do that. So
she turned my head around for sure.
It also had a lot to do with an E minor 9 chord. [E-G-B-F sharp]. E
minor 9 chords sound like horror films to me. There is this guitarist named
Tony Mottola who was the staff guitarist on the TV show Danger, and he
used to play this chord that went from the bass note up, E-B-F sharp-C-D-E.
Try that some time. It’s a wonderful chord.

Do you generally write more than you need and then edit out lines?
I write lines that I take out. But it’s not like I have two pages and only
use one. I wish I was more like that. Stevie Goodman was like that. Bob
Gibson is like that when he writes songs. He’ll set an alarm clock for ten
minutes and just write like crazy for ten minutes. That’s too free for me. I’m
much more careful than that. I write line by line.

For “The Dutchman,” for example, did you write any other verses than
the ones we know?
No. I had a couple of lines that didn’t go anywhere, so I took them out.
Your song “Three Monkeys” concerns Central America. Did a trip
there trigger the song?
No. No. The first line was a lift from Zane Grey, I believe, in one of his
Western novels: “It gets so hot here, the natives say, that the wind has
forgotten how to blow.” That was the line. I lifted it, and then it was like
“The Dutchman,” having a first line and saying, “Where do I go with this?”
I wanted to create something that had a feeling that was like a spy movie,
like Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham.

Where were you when you wrote that song?

I was in Chicago. It was probably the middle of the winter. Like a lot of
people in folk music, I get my culture secondhand. John Stewart [see page
194] used to say that he makes imitation folk songs, and that’s what I do
too. “Loretta” is a lot like a John Stewart song. I can hear him doing it. He
does a thing to me that I do, which is the use of a lot of imagery of a
specific nature. I imitate him in some ways. I think he’s really talented.

Do you recall where the title for “Three Monkeys” came from?
That started out when I watched a TV show about people being “love
addicts.” I liked that phrase and wanted to use it. It seemed very heavy
metal to me. I started working on it, and I thought of what imagery I
connect with “addict” and one of them is “monkey on your back.” I was
thinking about that and I thought about the three monkeys that you see in
old Sydney Greenstreet movies: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
And that imagery to me was a lot more exciting than love addicts or
monkey on your back. There was a mood there. It was clear, right away,
that if you have a song called “Three Monkeys” that it takes place in the
tropics. Having that title was such a mood.

“Spoon River,” to this day, is to me one of the most beautiful songs ever
written, both lyrically and musically. Was it inspired by the anthology
by Edgar Lee Masters?
Yes. I love that book. I was seventeen, and it was just the right time to
read that sort of thing. They did a Broadway version of it that I really hated.
For a long time I had this imagery of someone taking someone for a
carriage ride. I had that image for about two years and when I thought of
placing it in “Spoon River,” it seemed like the perfect emotional climate for
it.

I so love the use of the rich time-specific imagery, such as all of the
calico dresses, the gingham and lace. It is so beautiful visually and
verbally both.
Songs are more personal now and more concerned with the emotion.
For me, even Randy Newman is more personal and concerned with
emotions than me, though sometimes he will tell stories. That’s an old way
of doing things. “Eleanor Rigby” is an old song. Though for me, if I could
write songs like “Eleanor Rigby” for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man.

Your songs share that richly detailed quality and a real sense of
character and place—
I like songs that delight in giving you a picture. I don’t get that much
anymore. I don’t get it from U2. What I’m getting is youth, and youth
seems more fragmented to a person who has grown old.

I love the description of Sister Clarissa being eleven feet tall. It really
makes you feel like a kid looking up at this mammoth figure.
That was the first line I thought of, as a matter of fact. I was doing a
show with Bob Gibson called The Women in My Life. It was his idea to
separately write songs about the women in our lives. The first song I wrote
was “Sister Clarissa.” And I had that first line about her being eleven feet
tall, and Gibson said, “You know, I think that should be the second verse.”
And it was just like tumblers falling into place. Of course. Of course, I’m
grateful to him for that because it never would have occurred to me in a
million years to shift the first verse and the second verse.

I also love the line about getting a star for “spelling Connecticut right.”
Yeah. That’s essentially true. Working out the rhythms of that song was
fun. It was like I was trying to make it like a Jacques Brel tune.

I was wondering if Brel was an influence because your songs to me are

as resonant and beautiful as a Brel song. You and Brel—and few others
—are in the same league.
 Well, thank you. I love Brel. He’s the one that makes me cry the most.
And that’s true because he’s sentimental but also because you really hear
his worldview. At the time of “The Dutchman” I was particularly focused
on Brel, Piaf, and Leonard Cohen. I always thought that “The Dutchman”
sounded like a Leonard Cohen song.

Yeah, it’s definitely in that area. As is “Crazy Mary,” another one of

my favorite Michael Smith songs. Is that one fictional?
No. That’s true. I made up her motivations. When I was a kid on the
way to school every day there was an old lady on the street corner who had
a lot of warts, and she was Italian, and she stood at the street corner and
essentially screeched and hollered and talked to no one in particular. If any
children came near her, she would do things like give you gum out of her
mouth or give you candy with maggots crawling in it. Or she’d want to give
you a big kiss. And it was awful, and it was scary. And when you’re ten you
don’t know how to cope with someone saying, “Come here!”
When I wrote that song it never occurred to me that there wasn’t one of
those in every neighborhood. Now I see it’s a specialized memory. But as a
kid I thought it was part of the neighborhood. There was the butcher, the
baker, and the crazy lady. So in that song I was trying to make something of
her, trying to give her something back, I guess.

Do you write songs all the time?

I’m always trying to do something. I’m always thinking about
something. Sometimes just a guitar riff. But to physically sit down and do
it, I’d say I luck out to do it three times a week. That’s a lot for me.
Today I was watching Let It Be, and they were singing “Don’t Let Me
Down” [by Lennon] up on the rooftop, and I thought, I have to go, “The
Dutchman’s not the kind of man to keep his thumb jammed in the dam that
holds his dreams in.” It takes me all this time to get out this poetic imagery
to people, and they do “Don’t Let Me Down,” and suddenly you’re there.
And I saw that there’s a freedom and a subtlety and a lightheartedness in
making good pop music that people who are writing folk songs are trying to
approach but are not getting. It’s like I’m doing Norman Rockwell and The
Beatles are Picasso.
Well, some of those Norman Rockwell paintings tell such poignant
American stories, as do your songs. They are not cubist songs; they’re
more traditionally structured. But that is perfect for the song. “Spoon
River” touches me so deeply because it’s so much about America and
our unique history.

Also The Beatles had many songs, such as “Across the Universe,” also
by Lennon, with long poetic openings like “Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup . . .”
Yes, that’s very true. Lennon did get rattling along at times. I think I’ve
got a big hero-worship with them that maybe does not serve me well.
Part of the premise of pop music is to reach out to people. Not people
you love or people you trust, but just people. And I think because of that, it
gives the music an impersonal, frantic quality that ethnic or folk music
doesn’t have.
When I hear people perpetrating those really dramatic stances with the
slamming drums and the electric guitars, it doesn’t work for me. It has to do
with the franticness with which they are pursuing the approval of the
masses. It shows in every fiber of the music. I’m not saying they’re not
talented people—they’re just too uptight. They’re so anxious for approval
that they make fools of themselves.
There’s a big gulf in people’s hearts, and people are so fragmented
because they don’t have an Elvis and they don’t have a Beatles. And they
don’t have a Kingston Trio. Those artists consolidated us and brought us
somewhere new. Now it’s like a vast wasteland in a certain way. So when I
say Beatles, it’s a way of saying to keep your light burning in the middle of
a lot of bullshit. Their music was never forced. It had a succinctness and a
subtlety to it that was real.

I noticed when listening to the song Steve Goodman did that he often
changed your words. And usually the originals were better.
Stevie was a real approximator in certain ways. And it gave him his
lightheartedness. And you could even call him on it and say, “Hey, you
didn’t learn this right.” And he’d say, “Yeah . . . It’s just my way.” It was
part of his charm.
 In truth I think that’s what a great artist does. That’s what Ella
[Fitzgerald] does. You put a song in her machine, and it’s going to come out
different because she’s Ella. Same with Billie Holiday.
In general I think it was Stevie not learning it right and militantly not
giving a shit. And that was part of his picture of himself. I do think that
“The Ballad of Dan Moody” would have been better if he would’ve gotten
all the words right.

What started you writing the kind of songs that you write?
I’ve had unsettling things happen to me—not tragic, necessarily. But
when it comes time to make art I come at it from a strange angle. Also, I
think I tend to think too much for my own good, and I think that gives what
I do an aura of tension. It’s like an oyster with a pearl—maybe there’s a
certain amount of oddity about my life and that creates a tension in trying to
make it acceptable in art.
I don’t know where the songs lie. If I could get a handle on it, I could
make more. It’s almost as if each time I do it, it’s a different path.

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Dave Stewart
 Eurythmics and Beyond
Hollywood, California 2015

Meeting with Dave Stewart at his Hollywood dream factory is a dizzying

experience, not unlike what one imagines visiting Warhol’s Factory was
like in the day, except minus the zombies and cocaine. There’s a whole lot
of people in a unified space doing a whole lot of art all the time. To Dave,
it’s more Wonka than Warhol, “except instead of candy we make ideas.”
A lot of ideas. The Dave engine, which sprawls over two stories above
Hollywood and Vine, goes 24/7, sparking always in many directions at
once: besides his myriad musical projects as artist, songwriter, and/or
producer—including, at the time of this talk, a glorious recent solo album,
The Blackbird Diaries, and the phenomenon of his most recent supergroup,
SuperHeavy, which includes Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, A. R. Rahman, and
Damian Marley—there are films (he films everything always), books, TV
shows, photographs, and always more. Dave’s staff is forever editing and
mixing and working away to his instructions, though they’re remarkably
agile when it comes to showing a visitor a film of Dave and Shakira
dancing in a barn or soloing Stevie Wonder’s miraculous harmonica solo on
The Eurythmics’ “There Must Be an Angel.”
He’s the great collaborator. Most famous of course for The Eurythmics,
his collaboration with Annie Lennox, his genius is for humbly standing
behind the singer, whether it’s Annie or Mick or Tom Petty (they concocted
“Don’t Come Around Here No More”) or any of the other stars with whom
he’s written songs—such as Bono, Dylan, Bryan Ferry, Stevie Nicks, and
Sinead O’Connor—and making them shine. “There’s only two kinds of
people,” his mother told him. “There are drains and radiators. People who
drag you down and people who spark you up.” Without a doubt Dave
Stewart is a radiator. He brings out what is essential and best about an artist,
whether it’s Dylan, Petty, or Jagger.
In Eurythmics he and Annie Lennox cowrote every song, but Dave was
the producer. Always, from the very start. The song—and the sonics
surrounding the song—were always part of his vision and always was
attained by experiments, by combining acoustic and electronic textures in
brand-new ways.
In signature fedora and dark shades and nursing a freshly brewed
cappuccino, Dave opened up about his years working with Annie Lennox in
The Eurythmics and what came after. “We never did break up,” he said of
The Eurythmics. “We just stopped. We have paused. But nothing is over.”

Where did you meet Annie Lennox?

Dave Stewart: I met her in London. She was a waitress at a health food
café in Hampstead High Street. My friend knew her, and I went with him. I
remembered she looked a bit sort of quirky and odd, wearing Kellogg’s
Frosted Flakes’ Tony the Tiger sunglasses and had cropped spiky hair. But
she got off work and came with us; we went back to her tiny bedsit room in
Camden Town. Just a little room with a little bed and her old wooden
harmonium. We started talking and didn’t stop talking for the next twenty
years.
She already wrote songs and played me some, singing and playing
harmonium. One was “Tower of Capricorn,” and the other was “Song for
Matt,” about a boyfriend who had died. I was utterly knocked out.

By the songs? The singing? Or everything?

Everything. Everything about her. The singing, the chords she was
playing, her delicate words, and her haunting beauty. Her music reminded
me somewhat of Joni Mitchell. Sad and beautiful both.

What was the first song you and Annie wrote?

 The first song wasn’t a song, really; it was an instrumental we
composed during our time in The Tourists, before Eurythmics. A sound
collage, really, called “From the Middle Room.” It was an experimental
track, electronic and weird. We did it whilst recording a Tourists album, but
nobody was in the studio—no Peet, no producer, just me and Annie and the
engineer. I said, “Let’s just experiment,” and we got the guy to record our
sonic doodling. And that’s where it all started. We recorded the crickets
outside and brought in this weird psychedelic harpsichord sound. It was
pure experimentation.

Then you set up your own studio?

Yes. Eight-track. A friend helped me determine what gear we needed,
and we got space in a picture-framing factory and put together a very small,
basic, but workable studio.
I learned that anything is possible if you ignore the rules. If I wanted to
distort the drum machine, no one could stop me. If I wanted to mix the
sound of the street with the guitar, that was fine too.
Once I had this freedom, I would go into the studio on my own for
hours. I’d work twenty hours in a row, easy. Annie would be back in her
little flat. She’d come in and I would play this stuff that was just insane,
bonkers stuff, very weird and totally experimental. There would be monks
chanting against drum loops, and I would be playing weird instruments I’d
bought in Camden Market, like Thai stringed instruments or Moroccan
percussion.
But she was always great about it, always interested, because she loved
being experimental too. I’d get other kids in from the street of all
nationalities to shout or make noises to record. It was very important for me
to experiment to the point of extreme madness. And then reel it all back into
the Sweet Dreams album.
The drum machine was quite complicated to operate. It had analog and
synthesized drum sounds and a tiny visual monitor. We were recording on
an eight-track tape recorder, and one of the tracks had to be used to record
time code to synch up to the drum machine. On the first beat I’d tuned one
of the tom-tom drums down so low, it sounded like a slave drum. It was
deafening and blasting on the first beat of every bar, but I couldn’t get it to
stop. It was like driving an out-of-control steam engine.
 The sound of these drums woke Annie up out of her depression. She
went straight to the keyboard and landed on this great riff with a string
sound on the Kurzweil, and it locked in with my weird drum pattern. I
grabbed our Roland SH-101 synthesizer and started playing a pattern with
her. These three sounds together—the keyboard, the drum, and the
synthesizer—were the only tracks happening, yet they created this
monstrous feeling. We were very excited!
She immediately started to get some ideas for lyrics and went down to
this little empty room below the studio. Shortly after, she came out with
“Sweet dreams are made of this”! Incredible! And could there be a more
appropriate title?
Very quickly the song was getting constructed, and then we realized it
was just doing the same thing all the time, so I suggested there had to be
another bit, and that bit should be positive. So in the middle we added these
chord changes rising upward with “Hold your head up, moving on. Keep
your head up, moving on.”
When Annie was really excited about something a lightbulb would go
off in her head, and the race to the end was always incredible. She was
singing, “Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to get used by
you. Some of them want to abuse you.” All great lines that she was coming
up with off the top of her head. In the space of twenty minutes Annie
changed from being down on the floor to leaping about the room.
To us it was a major breakthrough, but I remember later some
publishers said they didn’t get it at all. They just kept saying, “I don’t
understand this song. It doesn’t have a chorus.” But the whole song is a
chorus! There is not one note in the whole song that is not a hook.

And after that you kept writing songs in the same way?
Yeah. Having the studio to create in every day, Annie and I started to
become amazing creative songwriting partners, true collaborators, and we
began to write all our songs together. When we were together sparks would
fly. We played different roles and didn’t step on each other’s toes. I was
always experimenting at the desk or on an instrument, and Annie would sit
behind with a notepad, thinking or writing furiously.
It’s a kind of alchemy that occurs, a magical process of making
something out of nothing. One minute a song doesn’t exist, and twenty
minutes later it does. We always knew within ten or twenty minutes if it
was worth pursuing an idea, and very rarely disagreed. Once or twice I
would fight for something but usually we were on the same page.

And you were essentially writing the songs and making the records at
the same time. There was no division between songwriting and
production?
Yes. By default I had become the record producer. Along with Annie,
we could do anything. We could play all the instruments between us, record
ourselves, make mistakes, and not care—just laugh about it. Freedom at
last. Sometimes I would have programmed the drums, played the bass on
synth or real bass, played the guitars and other keyboard parts, engineered
myself recording the sounds and Annie’s vocals and keyboard parts, and
then mixed it all in a few hours—a magic feeling, as for once we were in
full control!
Usually there was no one in the room while we were writing, as
whoever was working with us would tactfully make an exit when they felt
something was brewing. Then when we recorded there would be one
engineer. Someone we trusted not to break the spell. We didn’t use
expensive studios or expensive equipment. We were always about keeping
it close or DIY.

One of my favorite Eurythmics songs is “There Must Be an Angel.”

Annie started that one. Sometimes she’d have the whole idea for a song,
like a melody and lyric both, and she had both words and music for “There
Must Be an Angel.” When she wrote it she said, “This could be great for
Stevie Wonder.” I heard it and said, “It would be great for us too, but why
don’t we get Stevie to play harmonica on it?” So we sent the song to
Stevie’s people, and we didn’t hear anything and figured, “Okay, he isn’t
interested.” Turned out that he did like the song, and one night, very late
after we went home from the studio, Stevie showed up! So we got out of
bed and went back. And there’s Stevie, in all his glory. And he played that
extraordinary solo. One take. To this day I play that track—Stevie Wonder
playing a harmonica solo on our song—and it is breathtaking.

How did “Would I Lie to You?” come together?

 We were in Paris. I was having breakfast in my kitchen. Eating a bowl
of cereal, my acoustic guitar on my knee as always. I wanted to come up
with a killer R&B riff, and that’s where I came up with that riff for “Would
I Lie to You.” I was belting it out in my boxer shorts till I had the whole
guitar part for the song mapped out in my head.
I couldn’t wait to play it to Annie. At first she wasn’t too sure about it,
as it sounded too removed from what we were doing. But the great thing
about Annie is, even if she’s not sure at first, she will let the experiment
develop, whereas some people are too afraid and shut down before even
trying.
When we started putting it down, the song had a lot of energy and
inspired Annie to come up with the great lyric “Would I lie to you?” She
also came up with the melody on these very odd answering harmonies,
“Now, would I say something that wasn’t true?” These harmonies are
unusual, and she’s a genius at working them out very quickly in her head.
It became a fusion between Stax-type R&B and Eurythmics. We soon
realized this could be a monster track. Annie’s lead vocal was fantastic and
a killer to record.

Were there any times you had to struggle for songs or had a dry spell?
Not really, no. It was always immediate. People would witness us doing
this and would go, “What? Hang on. Did you just make that up?”
And we’re going, “Yeah. We’re busy making it up now.” And they
would be amazed. We never ever did spend days working on a song.
Probably the longest time we ever spent writing one must have been an
hour. And we wrote maybe 140 songs. When we were together we knew
within minutes where we were going. We knew each other so well that I
would play a chord and she’d go, “No, not that chord.” I’d play another
chord. No. Then she would sing, and I would say no.
It was like we were honing in on a very precise thing. That was the
essence of us. It was like being a surfer catching a wave. You wait, and you
say, “No, not this wave. Not this wave.” We both knew when it was the one.

And if you don’t catch the wave at the right time, you lose it.
Yes, absolutely. You lose the spark of the thing. People are so used to
taking forever on every project. I like to make an album in a week. Annie
and I [in Eurythmics] used to take ten days or two weeks, tops. I was
amazed when I found out people would take a whole year. I do it like they
did it at Motown—two or three records in a day.

You wrote “Worth the Waiting For” with Bob Dylan—

We wrote so many songs together. We have songs we never finished. I
remember working on that one with him. It was midnight, and we were both
drinking tequila. We were in my kitchen in London. Dylan was wearing a
big Mexican hat. We’d been that day jamming in my church, and we were
playing it back on a cassette recorder and then recording that on another
cassette recorder. We had Joni Mitchell playing the drums. Like fifty people
in the church, all playing the instruments they don’t play. Huge burners of
frankincense burning. That night we sat in my kitchen and wrote the words.

Besides Dylan, you’ve worked a lot with great songwriters who rarely
collaborate, or if they do it’s with one person only, as with Mick Jagger,
who usually writes with Keith Richards. You’ve written many songs
with Mick—
I’d say we’ve written about fifty! Mick only makes a solo album once
every ten years or so. But as writers, we never stop writing. [plays tape of
“Time Drags On” with Mick singing—an unreleased gem].

I love the duet with Colbie Caillat, “Bulletproof Vest.” A very beautiful
song.
I like melancholia, especially in a girl’s voice. I like raw blues soul
power or melancholy. And usually the best singers can do both. Like Etta
James—

And Annie Lennox—

Well, yeah. That was like our whole thing, this melancholy thing that
suddenly went very powerful.
I think there is great strength and power in things people think are sad.
Acceptance of death gives you great strength to live the day. I love a garden
when it’s all sort of overgrown and the roses are blood red, not the bright,
tight spring buds. I love the tangled disarray where it seems like it’s falling
apart. And I’m trying to put that into music and words.
How do you do that? How do you translate something so abstract into a
song?
Ultimately it’s about discovery, about being receptive to the magic soul
of a song. It’s like following Tinker Bell. I’m always looking to discover
what is the magic thing. The magic thing in it might come from something
you weren’t expecting. It might be a mistake or a word that just pops into
your head. And what I’ve got the ability to do is just scrap the rest and go
for the magic.

So much of the genius of Eurythmics and of your other collaborations

with great writers is that you have a great gift for bringing the best out
of creative people. Even Dylan said that: you recognize the genius in
someone and let them express it without manipulating them.
That is true. These people with whom I have written songs are so
talented, it is a matter of how to channel their energies. Annie is a genius
songwriter in her own right. I was a kind of a catalyst in a way, a trigger to
explore and explode a wealth of songs and styles. But Annie, like many
songwriters, can become prone to writer’s block, which, if you dwell on it,
can be torturous. When we wrote together I think I could break that spell
because it’s a collaborative effort, and you can spark off each other and use
what I would call “breaking the plane,” which could be anything from
taking a walk to standing on your head. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long
as it changes the train of thought.
Annie has within her the talent and instincts to write some of the
greatest songs ever and already has. But she might not necessarily feel like
doing it all the time, which I understand, as there are many other things in
life that overwhelm us all, particularly if you have become a mother and a
known figure.
But I will say I always saw Annie as a writer from the beginning. That’s
what I realized about her when we first met. Those songs she played on that
harmonium were astounding.

But it’s really in the collaboration with you that greatness emerged.
Something about your joyful approach to life fused with her
melancholy—
 Yeah, with me and Annie, on any Eurythmics tracks, we always hit the
nail on the head with this dynamic of despair and hope at the same time. It
would be really dark, and then boom, it would transform musically and
lyrically and in every way. And those two things together made a magic
vibe.

You wrote “Don’t Come Around Here No More” with Tom Petty.
Yeah. It was after a show in my hotel room, using my little four-track
Portastudio, I started to create a track with a drum machine, a tiny
synthesizer, and this Coral Sitar guitar, which has sympathetic strings that
make it sound like a real sitar. I came up with this whole track but without
any words, and then the line came to me. I was singing it with the track and
it fit well: “Don’t come around here no more, don’t come around here no
more . . .” I had that with the music, but no other lyrics.
Tom listened to it and went in the studio, and he was trying some stuff.
He was singing, “Don’t come around here no more”—he got the chorus I
had written. He goes, “Okay, that fits this.”
We ended up finishing it in his garage studio. He was making a
Heartbreakers album, and the band wasn’t on the song. So we decided to go
into a sort of double-time groove at the end and have the band come in. The
guys in the Heartbreakers really didn’t seem to like the song because it was
different and he made it without them. It was the start of Tom doing a lot of
solo projects. But he never broke up the band—he does both.
After that double-time part there’s an almost impossible-to-reach high
note. We had a singer there, and I got that note when I shocked her by
leaping naked into the studio. That worked! After that note the whole band
comes crashing in. Everybody played great, and the whole experience was a
trip.

Did you and Annie write “Here Comes the Rain Again” in New York?
Yes. We used to stay at the Mayflower Hotel, and we had a corner room
overlooking Central Park. We used to like to stay in this hotel because of
the windows looking onto the park. I’d been out on 46th Street and bought a
tiny little keyboard, a really tiny little thing. It was an overcast day. Annie
was sitting in my room, and I was playing some little riff on the keyboard,
sitting on the window ledge, and Annie was saying, “Oh, let me have a go
at that keyboard.” But I had just bought it and, a bit like a kid, I said, “I’m
playing with it now.” So we had this fight over the keyboard, like two
seven-year-olds. I was playing chords I knew would get to her, especially
on a rainy day, these little melancholy A minor second chords, an A minor
with a B natural in it. I kept on playing this riff while Annie looked out the
window at the slate-gray sky above the New York skyline, and she just
started singing spontaneously, “Here comes the rain again . . .”
And that was all we needed. Like with a lot of our songs, you only need
to start with that one line, that one atmosphere, that one note, or that intro
melody. And the rest of it became a puzzle with missing pieces we filled in.

And you finished the puzzle then and there.

We did. No need to wait. We had it.

You love the process of writing and recording, which inspires others.
Whereas for so many people it’s torturous—both the writing and the
recording.
Yes. One of the secrets to my ability to collaborate with so many other
talents is that I take all the pressure away. As Mick [Jagger] said, there’s no
angst. It’s done out of joy. Stevie Nicks was very happy when she realized
this and said, “Oh, hang on. We can just have fun and not worry?”
And I said, “Yeah. You know why? Because if we don’t like it, nobody
will ever hear it.”
People have gotten used to the pattern of having to make a new album
at the same time they’re touring, and the record company is waiting for it,
so there is a lot of pressure. Suddenly they have a handful of weeks to write
and record twelve new songs. The pressure is remarkable and not conducive
at all to writing good songs.
So when I come along and say, “Well, you know, it doesn’t really matter
if you don’t like it—nobody will ever hear it. We’ll just throw it away.
We’ll burn it! It doesn’t make a difference,” suddenly it’s a whole new
world. There is no pressure, and you’re allowed to make mistakes, and you
know everything is fine. You don’t have to think everything is precious.

And that freedom opens up artists to doing great work.

 When you’re relaxed great things happen and you can capture
something truly amazing. And this creates a momentum because you use
that energy, and it leads to more ideas and inspiration. People get excited,
and it becomes fun. And when you’re having fun making music, it’s
infectious, for yourself and everyone around you. And it’s also much nicer
for your family when you eventually get home. When you say nothing
matters and we can burn it, often your collaborator will say, “Oh, but I
really like that! Let’s keep it,” or “Let’s put it on the track.” It’s a kind of
reverse psychology.

It is a psychological experiment, writing a song with someone else. And

an intimate one.
Writing songs with other people is like falling in love over and over
again. It’s a fast track into somebody’s soul—you can feel their heart
beating against yours. When I play guitar and they start to sing, even when
we are just improvising, there’s something else that starts to happen that no
one can explain. We try to follow whatever that something is and
understand what it is telling us to do.
It’s like when you were a child and you got to run through a wooded
glade with a friend, and you came across a hidden stream where you could
bathe or quench your thirst—except this race is in your mind, and when
words start to fall out of the improvisation they are like fireflies lighting the
way: they guide us back through the woods till we see the village in the
distance. We are soon inside a safe place where our minds meld in the warm
glow of creativity.

OceanofPDF.com
Joan Armatrading
 Walking Under Ladders
Hollywood, California 2000

It’s late afternoon in Los Angeles, and at the House of Blues on the Sunset
Strip Joan Armatrading’s band is in the midst of a sound check. Folk art
fills the walls in a rainbow of colors as the smell of fried catfish, chicken
wings, and other soul food delights waft in from the kitchen. Onstage the
band is cooking on a funky instrumental, their leader nowhere in sight.
After a few moments a small woman sidles onto the stage with her back to
the empty house, an electric guitar slung around her neck. She easily joins
the jam, strumming a chunky rhythm before laying down a tasty and slinky
solo. When she turns around it’s surprising to realize that this is Joan herself
—seeming much smaller in the flesh than the mighty figure suggested by
her powerful voice and the robust vigor of her music. “People often feel I’m
tiny when they meet me,” she says later. “I guess it’s because I’m much
bigger in my songs then I am in the world.”
Unlike so many songwriters who are pushed by their parents down
musical pathways, Joan Armatrading was pushed in the opposite direction.
Though her father owned a guitar, he prohibited her from playing it. “My
father had a nice guitar,” she recalled, “but he would never let me near it.
We had a cellar behind this big bank-vault door, and he would keep the
guitar in there. And not only that, but he used to hide it on the topmost shelf
in that room, so even if you could get into the room, you couldn’t get to that
guitar.”
This forced separation from the instrument of her choice created a kind
of Romeo and Juliet complex between Joan and her guitar, resulting in a
profound hunger on her part to make music. Eventually she broke down her
mother’s resistance and persuaded her to pawn two dilapidated baby
carriages in exchange for an old acoustic guitar. Though it had “strings
about a foot from the neck,” this condition didn’t stop her from diligently
teaching herself to develop the distinctively rich, muscular guitar style she
has retained ever since.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I just played my own stuff,
and so I invented my own way of playing. I wanted to hear bass and drums
and rhythm and lead and everything, and so I tried to play all those things at
once.”
Born in the rural splendor of the West Indian island of Saint Kitts, she
moved with her family in 1958 to the urban confines of Birmingham,
England, where she was raised. Unlike almost all songwriters whose first
songs are imitations of what they hear on records or the radio, her first
songs were inspired by no one other than herself. “When I started writing,”
she said, “the only person I was listening to was me.”
It was while acting in a 1971 production of Hair that she met Pam
Nestor, with whom she wrote songs for Whatever’s for Us, her 1972 debut.
When the partnership dissolved, Joan continued to write songs on her own,
and in 1975 she made Back to the Night. Her next album, Joan
Armatrading, propelled her into the UK Top Twenty and produced her first
and only Top Ten single, the amazing “Love and Affection.”
It was the unexpected strength and beauty of this song that introduced
her unique voice and style to America. Here was a love song as rich and
sensuously jubilant as love itself, rendered by a singer with an undeniable
abundance of soul. Its immense international popularity led to the success
of follow-up albums Me Myself I, The Key, and Walk Under Ladders, the
latter of which began with the exultant and anthemic “I’m Lucky.”
Instead of taking the familiar path of focusing on personal vulnerability,
she opted instead to project faith, the pursuit of personal happiness, and the
strength to sidestep superstition and fear. Of course, when she did write
about vulnerability, as in her powerful “The Weakness in Me,” few people
could do it better, coming as she was from this position of strength and
positivity. It’s the reason why so many female songwriters, including
Melissa Etheridge, Jewel, Joan Osborne, and others point to Armatrading as
an idol, as a woman who proved early on that both strength and weakness
could be genuinely projected in the song if the underlying emotion is real.
Of the many that emerged in her wake, the first and most notable was
Tracy Chapman, whose acoustic guitar and vocal style owed an
unmistakable debt to Joan. It’s been a source of some frustration for her;
although Chapman and Etheridge covered both “Love and Affection” and
“The Weakness in Me,” Joan felt burnt and bewildered by journalists who
omit her name when discussing rock’s most influential women. “It has been
frustrating to an extent,” she said. “But I can’t spend a lot of time worrying
about it. I know that I am lucky just to be able to do what I do, and that’s
where I have to keep my focus.”
Following the sound check, she sits down to do this interview but
requests that we refrain from digging too deeply into the origins of her
songs. “I’ll be happy to talk about songs,” she says, softly perched on a
wooden bar stool as miscellaneous roadies and soundmen loudly haul
equipment and tables around the club. “I just don’t want to talk about my
songs.” When informed that this was a little problematic, as there are few
songs I’d rather discuss with her than her own, she smiles softly and says,
“Well, I’ll do my best, but I’m not sure how much I can give you. I know
people always want me to give more. But you know, in my songs and my
shows I really feel as if I have already given enough. But you just go ahead
and do your job. And I’ll do my best to give you what I can.”

When starting a song do you have a clear idea of what you want the
song to say?
Joan Armatrading: I have a clear idea of what I want to say, but I
don’t have a clear idea of how I want to say it, [laughs] which are two very
different things. The trick is to find the words that will say the thing you
were trying to say.

How do you do that?

I can’t tell you. I know that when I am writing I am trying to have the
words make sense. I want them to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Whenever somebody asks me how to write a song, that’s all I can say.
[Softly] But how do you find the words, I don’t know. [Pause] Do you
know?

No. Sometimes it seems that the music tells me what the word should be
—
Yes. Songs can be written as words and music together. As if you’re
singing the song. Sometimes the words come first, and sometimes the music
comes first. There is no pattern.

After all these years of writing songs? Do you find that anything helps
the writing process—
No. [Laughs] Whatever that is, whatever response you want, the song
itself will just dictate how it is supposed to be. Some songs come from
somewhat of a nonprocess; they just come like that. [Snaps fingers] With
some songs the chorus will come easy, and all the rest of it will be hard.
None of that changes. I wish there was some formula that I could find that
would make it all easy. But there is none. [Laughs] Yet I still keep looking.

In a way that is one of the great things about songwriting, that there is
no formula—
Yes. I agree. The mystery remains.

Does it feel to you more a sense of following where the song needs to go
as opposed to leading it?
When I am writing a song—say, a blues song—it’s not up to me to try
to make it a reggae song. Because the song tells you, “I am a blues song. I
am not a reggae song.” Maybe when it’s finished and it’s in its pure form
somebody else could take it and change it and then it will work. Because it
has already become what it was meant to be.
But writing a bad song and saying, “Well, it’s bad because it’s not
reggae, or it’s not blues, or it’s not a ballad,” that doesn’t make much sense.
Because a song is what it is. It also sets its own tempo. It tells you what
pace it should be taken at. And it also sets its own key.

Really?
 Yes. That’s what I find. The song is in a particular key, and I just follow
it.

A lot of guitar players will play in keys that fit easily on guitar, such as
E or G. But your songs are often in keys that are tough for the guitar,
such as E flat.
Yes, that’s because I’m just writing the song. I’m not thinking about
guitar. The song said that’s the key it’s meant to be in. I have even written
songs in keys that are not particularly right for me to sing. But the song is in
that key.

So even when a key isn’t great for your voice, you go with that key?
Yes. You must let it tell you. If you impose something on top of it
before you begin, that can overpower it. So you have to back off a little bit
and find out where it wants to be rather than making up your mind about it
before you even begin. However it goes. Whatever instrument there is, that
is what I will use to push the music along.

Is that instrument usually a guitar?

Guitar or piano. Piano songs tend to be the more melodic ones, such as
“The Weakness in Me.” More rhythmic things, like “Steppin’ Out” or
“Kissin’ and Huggin’,” those are guitar songs. You can tell the difference
because you can hear how heavily dominated by the instrument it is.

Do song ideas sometimes just pop into your head?

Rarely. Usually something has to trigger an idea for me. It’s very
unusual that I would just be walking along and a song out of nowhere
would come to me. More often they come out of something that happens
from watching life. The song “All a Woman Needs” came out of a friend
telling me about somebody that we both know. A man who was in love with
a woman. And he would shower her with presents. Whatever she wanted.
But he never said, “I love you,” which is all she really wanted. When she
told me that, I was able to think of a song, and I connected with it well
because of knowing how he was. So it’s usually something real that will
trigger a song.
Does using true details give songs more emotional resonance?
Yes, and it’s much easier than just making something up. I have done
that. The song “At the Hop” is just made up, but it’s a good song, but it’s
just made up. The song “The Shouting Stage” is about people I know who
have gotten to that point. Where they have gone through all this nice loving
stuff and are now at this horrible place. When you think of how they used to
be, you wonder, “How is it possible?” Here are two people who were one,
blinded by the same light, and suddenly it’s all gone.

Is writing an enjoyable process for you?

Oh yes. That’s what I do. What I do is write songs. So I had better enjoy
it. I like the process. It’s good. That’s the part that gets you the song. The
part I don’t particularly like is the writing out chords and lead sheets.

Do you write often lots of lyrics without any music?

I used to do that more than I do now. I still do a little bit, but not as
much as I used to. The other thing that I do is that when I write, whatever I
am writing, good or bad, I finish it. I can’t leave a song unfinished.

Why?
Well, I don’t know what it is. Maybe I feel if I don’t finish it, I will
never be able to finish any song, or something like that. If I am writing a
song that I’m thinking is just a bad song—because you can hear it right off
the top—I have to just keep at it. I’ll finish it and then I’ll just chuck it.
Some, if they’re not so bad but they’re just not that good, I’ll keep.

Do you find that judging it while writing can make the writing tough?
Well, it can be tough, but sometimes you just have to be honest with
yourself. If you’re writing it and it’s sounding horrible, maybe you just have
to know that it’s horrible. If not at that point, what better point is there?
[Laughs]

But can you sometimes take something that is horrible and turn it into
something that’s good—
No. I have written some horrible songs. They just have to go. And if
they’re that horrible, they get erased.
Do you mean lyrically horrible or musically—
Everything. Everything is bad. The music’s bad, the lyrics are bad, the
rhythm’s bad, the key is awful. I mean, it happens.

Do you have many of those?

No. [Laughs]

“Love and Affection” is the first song of yours that many of us heard,
and it was such a powerful and individual statement. Do you remember
what led you to the writing of that one?
Yes, I do. Remember me saying I don’t usually talk about why I wrote
my songs? Some songs I am quite happy to talk about, and others I’m not.

Do you not want to discuss the songs because there’s something too
personal attached to them?
Yes. Exactly.

But apart from the personal connection to your own life, “Love and
Affection” is such a powerful song. Were you surprised when it came
through you?
Absolutely. In fact I said to the record company that I would like this to
be the single. And they said, “Well, remember you are the one who wanted
this.” [Laughs] I just thought it would be a very big hit. I really did. And I
think they weren’t so sure of it. So they reminded me that if it didn’t work,
it was my fault.

And you were right.

Yes. It was a hit over the whole world. It was great. I loved getting the
whole arrangement to that right, all the voices and all. I knew exactly what I
wanted with that. I wanted the bass to be melodic. I knew all those things
and I did all the arranging. I tend to arrange all the songs anyways. I like to
think of that—once I have written a song, the most important part is how
the arrangement should go. To me it’s part of the song. It’s part of my
songs, anyway.

Your song “I’m Lucky” has the great line “I can walk under ladders.”
That happy defiance of silly superstitions was so great, and it became
our theme song all that year—
[Laughs] I can talk about that one. That’s me. I just feel like I am a very
lucky person. I say in the song that I’m so lucky that I’m as lucky as me,
[laughs] because I do feel very lucky. There are a lot of people who are
talented who never have a break and can never make anything of their
work. I have been so lucky to make this life where I’m able to do my work
and have people enjoy it.
I started that one with the big riff on the synthesizer.

You play less guitar on Walk Under Ladders than on your other albums.
Yes. Because that’s what I heard in my head then. I don’t always want
to play on my albums. But then on some things I think I want to play on
everything. I play all the guitars. Sometimes I have to be talked into
playing. It goes back to what I was saying about how the song dictates
everything.

Is “Me Myself I” about you?

Yes. [Laughs] That’s definitely about me. That one came reasonably
quick. I don’t remember it being very agonizing. There’s a song called
“Body to Dust” that took forever. It took so long. Normally a song that
takes that long, by the time I get to the end of it, it’s not worth it. But that
one, even though it took so long, it still came up pretty good.

How about the song “Drop the Pilot”?

That one was pretty quick. I wrote that to be a single. I sat down and
said, “I am going to write a single.” And it worked. [Laughs]

Is that something you don’t normally do?

Right.

Some songwriters believe if you intentionally try to write a hit, it can

screw you up—
Yes, that’s right. It really can. I didn’t do that again for that reason.

Were there any other songs that were attempts at radio singles?
No . . . name one.
“(I Love It When You) Call Me Names.”
No. I’ll tell you how I wrote that song. I wrote that in Santa Barbara
because there were two chaps in my band. One was quite tall and one was
little, and they were always at it, always fighting, always calling each other
names and winding each other up. And it was like this love affair. [Laughs]
I like that song.

How hard is it to remain inventive and inspired in your work within

this industry, which has such a short memory and often forgets where
the inspiration for so much of today’s music originated?
[Laughs] I know where you’re going, and I’m not sure I want to go
there. I still just do what I do. I’m not trying to follow the trends. I’ve no
idea whether it’s good or bad. It’s what I do—I write songs and I enjoy
singing them. I write all kinds of music, music that is bluesy or jazzy or
folky. I have lots of things I can change while I still remain me. Whatever I
do, it always remains me. I’m not trying to please anybody. So that does it
for me.

Will you keep doing it?

There’s no reason not to. Even if I write a song and nobody hears it,
that’s okay. When I started to write songs nobody heard them, and that
didn’t stop me. I was just writing because it was something that’s in me.
Still is. [Laughs] I don’t see that changing. There’s no reason for me not to
write, even if nobody listens. [Laughs]
It’s a nice thing. I am very lucky to be able to do what I do. I’m very
lucky to be able to write songs that are meaningful for people and help
other people to express their feelings. It’s quite a special thing.

OceanofPDF.com
Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook
 Being Squeeze
Burbank, California 1999

“Well, it’s ’cause I already know what he’s about to say,” said Glenn
Tilbrook about his tendency to tune out while his partner speaks, “so there’s
really no need to monitor.” Asked the same question about his similar
tendency, Chris Difford said, “See, the thing about that is I prefer not to
listen, in case he says something wrong, which will just lead to a debate.
And no one wants that.”
So, unlike other collaborators who finish each other’s thoughts and team
up on every sentence, Glenn and Chris sat at opposite ends of the table,
paying attention only while talking and tuning out completely while the
other spoke. It made the setting of our second talk, a tennis court, the
perfect place for such a meeting, as I was compelled to constantly turn from
one to the other, as if watching tennis.
It’s a style indicative of their entire artistic relationship: these guys don’t
sit face-to-face and write songs à la the early Beatles but create completely
separately, lyrics and music conceived individually, an approach closest to
that of their compatriots Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Like that writing
duo, Difford and Tilbrook have established themselves as writers of
infectious and sophisticated pop rock, songs like Elton and Bernie’s that
have everything going for them: great grooves; powerful, chromatic
melodies; and a perpetually poetic and dynamic use of language.
 Glenn Tilbrook, the composer, was eleven when he wrote both the
words and music to his first song. Though he never felt himself to be
particularly gifted with words, the music always came easy to him, and he
decided at that early age to become a songwriter, but one in search of a
lyricist. He met one when he answered an advertisement looking for a
guitarist, and though the meeting of Difford and Tilbrook was initially the
meeting of a guitarist and a bassist, they soon discovered that their potential
was limitless as a songwriting team.
They wrote songs together for a few years, waiting until 1974 to form a
band. They called it UK Squeeze at first to distinguish it from an American
band called Squeeze. They released an independent EP produced by John
Cale, who also produced their first eponymously titled album. The song
“Take Me I’m Yours” was a hit for the band, the first of many hits Difford
and Tilbrook would write in the coming years. Although the lineup of the
band shifted a few times, the high quality of the songwriting was constant,
and subsequent albums featured countless soulful pop-rock gems, such as
“Tempted,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell),” “Annie Get Your Gun,”
“Black Coffee in Bed,” and more. All had the Squeeze signature of
powerful, sophisticated, but seductive music and ironic, slightly skewed,
finely detailed lyrics.
They opened for Elvis Costello, a major admirer of Squeeze’s songs,
and he produced their marvelous East Side Story album. Though the band
essentially broke up in 1982, playing a farewell concert for the Jamaica
World Music Festival, fortunately the core of Difford and Tilbrook
remained together and, as a duo, released the 1984 album Difford &
Tilbrook, which was produced by Tony Visconti.
In 1985 Squeeze re-formed again to play a benefit concert in England,
and because the energy within the band seemed better than ever, they
decided to keep Squeeze alive and have released five albums since then,
including Babylon and On and Frank.
The great Play was produced by Tony Berg soon thereafter, and it was
in 1989 that this interview was conducted. They then broke up again in
1999 and returned in 2010 with Spot the Difference. In October of 2015
came a whole album of new songs, Cradle to the Grave.
Quick personal aside: One always remembers the impact of great music,
and never will I forget the sound of Squeeze—that brilliant, shiny, and
beautiful sound—emanating from great speakers back when I first came to
Hollywood in 1981. I had a job as a third engineer in a recording studio, a
job of many mundane morning chores that were enlivened by constant
Squeeze. Nothing was more exultant or electric then. The perfect fusion of
traditionally great songwriting—dynamic melodicism, brilliant word play,
and romance, all lit boldly by a brightly modern sound, abundant soul, and
delicious vocals. To this day that sound brings me back. As I know it does
for Squeeze fans the world over.
I met up with Difford and Tilbrook twice, both in LA on mornings after
concerts, meaning that Glenn Tilbrook, the lead singer of the band, was
weary of voice, leaving Chris Difford—who does provide all the words for
the songs, after all—to do the majority of the talking. This is a combination
of those two interviews.

Did you guys write songs together before Squeeze was formed?
Chris Difford: Yes, we wrote for about two or three years without
playing too many shows at all. We used to write pretty much solidly the
whole year round. Which was a good apprenticeship, spending that time
growing and writing different types of things.

How did you first meet?

Difford: I put an advert in a local shop window, and I was looking for a
guitarist to join our band and get a record deal and go on tour and all the
rest of it. I didn’t have an album deal or a touring deal or any of those
things. It was a complete bluff. I was just lonely, looking for a friend.
[Laughs]
Glenn Tilbrook: And he found me.
Difford: And I found Glenn. I had just tasted being in a couple of
groups, and I thought it was a good living, that it could be a good living,
better than a job. And I didn’t want to put an ad in Melody Maker because it
was too serious.

So you were looking for a band more than a songwriting partner?

Difford: I can’t look back at it now and say how it actually happened. It
just happened that way.
 Tilbrook: I saw the sign in the window. I was interested by the
influences Chris had put down there: Kinks, Glenn Miller, Lou Reed. I
thought, “That’s interesting.” I replied and got together with Chris, and he
was very vague about the band. Then went on holiday for two weeks, and
then when he got back we got together and sat down and played together.
At that point what we did was play our own songs for each other. And
within about a month or two we tried writing one together, and it so
happened that without even talking about it, our strengths became apparent:
Chris’s as a lyricist and mine more as a tunes-man.

Do you remember the first song that you wrote?

Tilbrook: I remember it well. It’s not at all . . . distinguished. [Laughs]
We didn’t record it. But it was sufficiently encouraging for us to look at that
and see that it was probably better than what we had been doing
individually, and from that point onward carry on writing together rather
than separately.

What was the title of the first song?

Tilbrook: “Hotel Woman” it was called.
Difford: The titles haven’t gotten any better, have they?

How did hearing Dylan affect you as a writer?

Difford: I didn’t get hooked on Dylan until Blood on the Tracks, and at
that point I went back and bought all the early albums and started really
listening to them. I just loved the way he could create an imaginary story
that would be right there in your mind as you’re listening to the song. “Lily,
Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” for me, is the most fantastic lyric for that
particular scene within your mind. Where you can play the track and you
can see the film running by. And I thought I’d like to be able to do that sort
of thing, to be able to create a minifilm in someone’s head.

I can see Dylan’s influence lyrically on you. Was he a musical influence

as well?
Tilbrook: Interestingly enough, “Up the Junction” was very Dylan-
influenced musically, although it didn’t sound at all like it. I sort of had in
mind, when we were recording it, I was saying that we should try to sound
like The Band, and it should be seamless and flowing and not particularly
making any differential between the verses and middle bits. Just try to
create an atmosphere, which I think The Band did excellently.
Dylan wasn’t really that much of an influence on me. I was more
interested and drawn to melodic things—a lot of sixties stuff. I was madly
into pop radio, and it was a great time to be exposed to all those things
when I was growing up, and I think a sense of that time has stayed with me
ever since then. Further on, toward the time that we first got Squeeze, I was
very influenced by Jimi Hendrix, who I thought was a great songwriter. His
songs are incredible; there’s such a vast imagination, besides being the best
guitarist there ever was. He was a big influence on me melodically.

Unlike most songwriting teams I’ve talked to, you sit on opposite sides
of the table and only speak separately. Is this indicative of your writing
relationship, that you work separately?
Difford: Yeah. It’s very individual in that respect. It’s more like Bernie
Taupin and Elton John in that respect. And when we do interviews, because
we’ve done so many together, I instinctively know what Glenn’s going to
say. So I just sit back and relax. And probably likewise. I know what you
mean. Sometimes the interviewer feels like somebody in the middle of a
tennis match.

When you began writing together you instantly knew that Glenn
should do the music and Chris should do the words?
Difford: It just happened that one day I was writing a lyric, and I passed
it to Glenn, and it seemed to take shape right there and then. Glenn asked
me to write some more lyrics and give them to him, so I did, and it kind of
snowballed from there. We wrote a hell of a lot of stuff in that first summer
we were together. For a time we lived in a house together. I lived in a room
downstairs. And we literally wrote as much as possible, which was good. It
was an exciting, transitional time.

So that is the usual process, you write the lyric first?

Difford: Yeah. And now it’s become the case that I’ll write a bunch of
lyrics, and Glenn will write a bunch of tunes, and then we’ll have sort of an
open-house affair with the lyric at a later stage, when it’s going to the vocal
stages of the album.

When you write a lyric, Chris, do you write it to a melody in your

head?
Difford: Occasionally I get a sort of feel for some kind of flow, yeah.
But mostly not. Mostly you’re just trying to build a story that’s going to
rhyme.

Do you signify the different sections—what is the chorus, the verse,

etcetera?
Difford: Not anymore, no. I think the verses always pretty much speak
for themselves, and the choruses and the middle eight sort of speak for
themselves. Quite often I’ll give a whole lyric to Glenn, and Glenn will find
his own middle eight and his own interpretation of that. I don’t think there’s
any rule at all. Sometimes it’s very obvious. Other times it’s a complete
open book.

Are you the kind of writer who jots down notes constantly, or do you
only write when writing?
Difford: More and more, sadly, it’s just when you know you have the
time to sit down and write. I sort of miss, in a way, the regimented way I
used to work, which was quite frequently. On our last tour with Fleetwood
Mac there was such a lot of time to kill that I did do a lot of writing, though
I was out on the road. I got a portable Macintosh, and I found that quite
inspiring to work with. Occasionally a notebook.
For this album [Play] a lot of lyrical ideas came from one of those little
portable tape recorders. Because I lived in the country and driving into
town, you can waste a whole hour just sitting there, looking at the road,
listening to the radio. And quite a few ideas actually came to me, so I went
and bought a little Olympus minicassette thing and just spoke into it. Or go
for walks and speak into it. If I’m riding in a car or walking across a field,
it’s usually just a dribble that you have to sort of create a lake of when you
get home. You get home and put it on the computer and say, “That’s a good
idea. Where can it go from here, logically speaking?” Then you take it a
stage further.
Do you usually write more than you need to and then cut it back?
Difford: Glenn mainly does the editing in that respect, because I am one
for rambling. Again, going back to songs like “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack
of Hearts” [by Dylan], if I could write thirty-six verses to a song, I would.
And it’s fun because you can ever expand the characters. But I know it
would be difficult to fit that kind of thing onto an album. The last time that
lyrically that succeeded with me was a song called “Melody Motel.” The
lyric kind of flowed and told a story, and it all sounded like a good, old-
fashioned song.

When you set a lyric to music, do you try many musical approaches
before settling on one?
Tilbrook: Good question. I think I try to settle on one approach from
the beginning, but sometimes I’ll get so far down the road with something
and realize that it’s not working. I try to always finish off every idea that
I’ve had. I would rather finish it up and leave it and figure it’s no good or be
able to come back to it. Very rarely, but sometimes I will completely
abandon what I’m doing and start anew. Sometimes I have the tendency to
write these horrendous tunes and not be able to see it.

Is “The Truth” a true song?

Difford: Yes. It’s very autobiographical. For a long time I had a lot of
trouble with the truth. I think most men do. It’s very easy to paint yourself
into a corner sometimes, and the only way out of it is to lie. It’s an awful
sin, but everybody does it. I was very clever for a long time, juggling the
truth with lies. And then I got to a point where I didn’t know which was
real.
So this song is about me turning round to all the men in the world and
saying, “Face up to it. We’re all liars. This is the truth.” Lots of men come
up to me and say, “I understand ‘The Truth.’ It makes perfect sense.” It’s
the most masculine of lyrics on the album.

How did “Walk a Straight Line” originate?

Difford: It was a story about somebody who is crippled by alcohol and
the kind of abuses that come with that. It’s really about a character trying to
find some reformation in himself. Looking for a reason to believe, I
suppose. Tony Berg, our producer, brought up a good point. He thought the
two characters were trying to get sober, to walk a straight line together to
get married in a church. So they could walk a straight line to the altar to get
married. I think that’s really a good observation.

Had you looked at it that way yourself?

Difford: To be honest, I hadn’t.

It’s about time you were honest!

Difford: At long last. [Laughs]

Your collaboration is similar to that of Elton and Bernie Taupin, except

for the fact that, unlike Bernie, you also sing and play in the band.
Difford: Yeah, unfortunately. I like being in the band, but I am a
lyricist-songwriter. That is my trade. If I were a carpenter, somebody who
was building furniture, that is what you would do. But I’m a songwriter and
somebody who goes on the road. And when I go on the road I can’t usually
do any songwriting. One negates the other.
So you can’t always concentrate your whole time on one particular
aspect of your life. You have to keep swinging from one to the other. It’s
great to be in a band, but as one gets older you tend to wonder where your
loyalties really lie. Are you a writer or are you in a band? And then the
catch is that one doesn’t really exist without the other anyway. So it’s an
interesting twist.

Being a musician yourself, do you have musical input to the songs when
you write a lyric? Do you have melodic ideas that accompany lyrical
passages?
Difford: Sometimes I do, yeah. Sometimes I can sing a lyric into a tape
recorder, write the lyric down, and give it to Glenn, and he will never know
where the melody has come from. For the most part I write mainly from the
first word on. From the first idea. Without melody. It’s an interesting
phenomenon, which I still don’t understand. How can you sit in front of a
computer and create a lyric like “Satisfied,” which took maybe three
minutes to write lyrically? How that came about without any melody in my
head? I’m not really sure.
You mentioned the lyric for “Satisfied” took only three minutes. When
writing something like that, do you write it in meter so that it’s easily
set to music?
Difford: Glenn approached me once and said, “Your metering isn’t as
good as it could be.” He was finding it hard to put music to some of the
lyrics. And ever since that event I’ve been very careful to make sure the
metering is as close as it could be to a mathematical equation. I labored
over it for a long time, but now it just comes naturally.

Do you usually start with a title, or do you create the title later in the
process?
Difford: I’m not terribly good with titles. That’s probably my weakest
aspect, I think. Glenn always seems a little shocked by the audacity of my
titles. I used to steal a lot from book titles and film titles. I thought I came
up with one the other day that was not from a book or a film. It’s more of a
pun, and for the week or so I’ve been conjuring up the image of what this
particular title and song could be.

Can you divulge that title?

Difford: It’s a thing called “Third Person Removed.” I thought of the
title, and now I’ve got to fit lyrics into the title.

Songs often share titles with other songs or with movies or books. Yet in
songs you are able to present a fresh twist on a title.
Difford: Indeed. It’s not like plagiarism. It’s an interesting way of
drawing people’s attention to the song.

As in your song ‘“Annie Get Your Gun,” which is a wonderful usage of

that title.
Difford: Indeed. Annie was not a real person. It was a jumble of ideas,
really. Kind of a melting pot of images more than anything else. I had
written, a lot earlier in my life, songs about Annie Oakley. I don’t know
whether that had anything to do with that, but it probably did.

Do you recall writing “I’ve Returned?”

 Difford: Yes. For the most part that whole album, Sweets from a
Stranger, was sort of soaked in alcohol. There are a lot of alcoholic images
in the context of that album, that song being one of them. A drunken
character returning. Abruptly. Onto the scene, as it were. The way
alcoholics do.

Yet it seems a triumphant return.

Difford: Yeah, it’s almost like a fanfare. You expect trumpets to come
blaring out.

One of your most intriguing titles is “Pulling Mussels (From the

Shell).”
Difford: That song was influenced really by The Small Faces. I used to
adore the way they would write about English situations. Very British
picture-postcard situations, really. I wanted to write about the experience
that a lot of working-class English people do of going to the seaside and
what a day out for them would be. And then taking it a step further by
talking of old people, young people, and family people at the seaside.
The result is a cross-section in each verse, virtually, of how I saw
seaside villages. So you have the old people looking round the shops, and
then in the chorus you have the young people who are trying to have sex
with strangers behind the chalet on the beach. A lot of working-class people
in Britain go on holiday in England. That’s as far as they ever go, you
know. I suppose it’s the same here in the States. People only go to the end
of their garden for a holiday, and they come back and they’re satisfied with
that—that’s their life. I find that really intriguing. I think it’s island
mentality.
I don’t like to travel. If I wasn’t in a group, I wouldn’t go anywhere. It
must be something steeped way back in your past, hundreds of years ago.

Could you be as good of a writer without traveling? Some say you can
sit in your room and do it, that you don’t have to go all over the globe.
Difford: I’d like to think that you could sit in your room and imagine.
The traveling that we do, you don’t really experience anything. You’re on a
bus, a plane, in a hotel. It’s not like we’re going to the Museum of Modern
Art every day or exploring my environment.
 One day I’d like to come to America and hire a Winnebago and drive
around and see it for real. There are influences, of course. You turn on the
TV in America and you can see the absurdities of Richard Simmons and the
church ladies and that sort of thing. But you’re really only scratching the
surface.

What was the inspiration for your song “Piccadilly?”

Difford: It was basically about a couple that used to drink in a pub
where I used to work in London, and I just happened to be observing them
one night. They seemed to have reached a pinnacle in their relationship at
the bar. And they’d been out somewhere, to the theater or something. They
looked as if they didn’t have anywhere to go, as if their evening had ended.
And I took their situation a step further and put them back at her house,
where her mother was, and he wasn’t supposed to spend the night, the age-
old situation.
I’ve been through it myself when I was younger. You go back to their
house, and they say, “You can’t really stay, but if you’re quiet, we can sneak
up to my room.” You’ve spent all evening trying to impress upon this girl
what a great guy you are by taking her to the theater and taking her for an
Indian meal. And then you get found out.

How about “I Think I’m Go Go”?

Difford: Yes. Now that was influenced by touring. I felt like I was
going go-go last night after doing two shows. I felt like this is murder. The
lyrics speak about different continents. And the middle verse that I sing is
obviously about America. It’s about a state of mind one can get in as a
young musician on the road for the first time. Abusing one’s self to the nth
degree.

Was the ascending chord progression and melody in the chorus on

“Go-go-go-go” part of your original conception?
Difford: No, Glenn did that. I don’t know what enhanced him to do
that, but it made perfect sense. He’s fantastic at weaving a chord sequence,
there’s no doubt about that. It mesmerizes me how he gets that together. He
creates some really fascinating tapestries with what he does.
Tilbrook: Why, thank you.
Glenn, how do you go about setting a lyric to music? Do you work on
an instrument?
Tilbrook: Yeah, almost always. I’ve done it various different ways. I
think the way I like best is to look at a lyric when I’m at a piano or guitar, to
see if I feel—this is very difficult to articulate—see if I feel something that
would suggest a tune. If I’m lucky enough to get started that way, then I’ll
alternate between guitar and keyboard all the time, just for the change of
perspective that it will give me. Things look different if you play them on
guitar than if you play them on keyboard. So I’ll sort of learn it on both and
switch about every half hour and switch back and forth. Other times I will
stick to one instrument.
Other times, very rarely, I’ll just sing a tune with a drum machine and
see what chords fit behind that. That’s unusual for me, but it’s a nice way to
work. It leaves your imagination free to go in other places. I like just
running a tape and improvising and then figuring out the bits that are good
and trying to fashion that in some way.
Or you can work the other way, which is also valid, which is to actually
slave away on a tune for ages and keep coming back to it. I used to think
that that would be overanalytical, but in fact, going back as far as
“Tempted,” that took me a week to actually get it right and get the changes
right. And I know that you can get back to things that can have a spark all
the time as long as you use your sense of judgement and are willing to say
at some point that that’s enough.

Are your piano songs more harmonically complex than guitar songs?
Tilbrook: Almost always. There’s a greater opportunity with my
playing to expand on keyboard than there is on guitar. But then, that’s not
always the case. There’s a song called “House of Love,” which is quite
complex musically, and that was all written on guitar.

Was “Tempted” a piano song?

Tilbrook: Yes, it was written on piano. Which is the way I’m playing it
tonight, in a fashion. [Laughter]

You invariably come up with chord progressions that are unexpected

but so great. I’m always dying to figure out how you do those.
 Tilbrook: [Laughs] Me too. I don’t always know. Sometimes you just
land on something and you’re lucky.
Difford: In “Satisfied,” for example, going from a B flat to a G in the
chorus is such a magic moment for me. It’s such a strange selection. On
“House of Love,” when you played me that on acoustic guitar, I thought I’d
been hit by a machine gun—there were so many chords in it. For that
reason it really complements the lyric. The lyric is very bizarre, and the
chords are very bizarre, so it all makes for a bizarre picture.

Where did you get the idea for “If I Didn’t Love You?”
Difford: Again it came from one particular line: “Singles remind me of
kisses, albums remind me of plans.” That line I wrote first because I was
going out with a Swedish girl at the time, and I was finding it very difficult
to make love with her. I found it very hard going, if you’ll excuse the pun.
So I put on a Todd Rundgren album, Something/Anything?, that had a very
long side to it, twenty-eight minutes, I think it is. I used to play that because
I knew I had twenty-eight minutes to get it on with this girl. And that led
me to write that line. And the rest of it followed on from there.

Do you ever feel restricted by having to be at the screen when writing?

Difford: When I write I go and turn the computer on in the morning,
come to the front page of what I’m writing, and then generally leave the
room immediately as the lyric appears. I go and have some tea or do
whatever I have to do, and then come back to it later. There’s a mystical
element of having the lyric sort of churning away in the computer. It’s very
odd. I’m sure it’s just my imagination.

Do you enjoy the use of a computer for writing lyrics?

Difford: Yeah. It’s good. I think the fascination came from being
brought up on TV when you’re a kid. Now I see my own lyrics on a TV
screen, and I’m impressed. It’s like watching Wagon Train.

OceanofPDF.com
Aimee Mann
 On Memory Lane
Aspen, Colorado 2005

So that’s today’s memory lane

With all the pathos and pain
Another chapter in a book where the chapters are endless
And they’re always the same
A verse, then a verse, and refrain
From “4th of July,” Aimee Mann

Aimee Mann is in Aspen. The altitude is getting to her, and driving around
the towering mountains and rolling Colorado canyons to arrive here has
made her a little queasy on top of the exhaustion from being in the midst of
an ongoing tour that brought her to the majestic Red Rocks Amphitheatre
outside of Denver on the previous night. So happiness is not the headline on
her front page at this moment.
On this night we are to appear together onstage at the glorious Belly Up
club in the heart of Aspen—she is the guest of the Aspen Writers’
Foundation’s ongoing Lyrically Speaking program, in which I have the
fortunate mission of interviewing great songwriters, a discussion punctuated
by intimate performances. It’s a great gig for many reasons, not the least of
which is that it allows me to come frequently to Aspen, also known as
heaven on earth. People I knew from Los Angeles who were consistently
dour and miserable in the vast urbanity of LA are completely different
people in Aspen—they ride bikes, they smile frequently, they are as
peaceful as Buddhist monks.
Aimee is performing on this night with a stripped-down band—just her
on acoustic guitar and a bass player and keyboard player, the latter of which
requested an old Wurlitzer, which was a challenge to find anywhere in
Colorado, but was eventually located and transported to the club. On this
early afternoon the chore is to do a sound check and to configure the stage:
where we will sit, if she will stand or sit, should the mics be on stands or
handheld—those kinds of logistics. The stuff that can be painfully dull
when feeling healthy and simply painful when you’re not. And she wasn’t
feeling healthy.
So after much discussion among musicians and managers and
soundmen, we settled on a stage structure that seemed to make sense, and
there was Aimee, unsmiling, discontent, evidently unhappy to be there or
maybe anywhere at this moment. We sat on tall stools with twin wireless
microphones. Sound-check time had arrived, and my role was to pose a
question or two, just to check the mics and also to maybe establish some
kind of rapport. I’d interviewed her in the past on the phone, but we’d done
very little in the way of in-person interaction. My instinct, as always, was to
loosen things up, inject a little levity, if possible, into the proceedings, and
let the artist know that although a serious discussion is intended, that it’s not
impossible to also have some fun. So I asked her about her boxing.
Yes, Aimee Mann boxes. She is in great shape, and among other
physical activities, she loves boxing. Real boxing—in the ring, gloves,
punching, the attempted KOs, the whole thing. It seemed like the logical
topic from which to launch our inaugural discussion. “How would you like
to box Bob Dylan?” I asked, unsure as to how she might respond. Silence
from all gathered. Then a slow smile spread over her face, and she caught
the ball and ran with it.
“I’d love to box Bob Dylan,” she said with relish. “And he does box. I
think he’d probably be pretty good in the ring. But I think I could take
him.” This made us all happy and relieved: not only was she willing to
entertain absurdity—always a good sign—but she did it with easy panache.
Soon a discussion ensued about other songwriters she’d like to box—Neil
Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Paul Simon—during which time sonic dynamics
were balanced and tweaked.
She’s an astounding songwriter. One of the best. Like Jules Shear, Paul
Simon, Joni Mitchell, and very few others, she’s equally gifted and focused
on being inventive and innovative with both music and lyrics. Her melodies
are consistently as engaging as her lyrics. And like her potential boxing
mate Dylan, she embraces traditional song forms while breaking new
ground within them—Krishnamurti’s mantra that “limitation creates
possibilities” in action. She uses real rhymes almost exclusively, lending
her songs a powerful inner matrix that many listeners might never
consciously register but certainly sense. She employs often intricate rhyme
schemes to great effect and understands, as Dylan put it, that phrasing is
everything. The flowing river rhythms of her words is as alluring as her
rhymes and imagery. Her songs don’t fall apart like cheap watches on the
street, to paraphrase Van Dyke Parks. They are sturdy. They are poetic and
colloquial both, ideally balanced and beautifully rendered.
She said once that she likes songs to be conversational. Confronted with
some rather enriched poetic language found in her verses, she laughed and
said, “Well, maybe I just have a larger vocabulary than a lot of people do.”
Indeed she does. She has a keen intelligence and a gentle and humorous
knowingness, and she is unafraid of instilling it into her songs. Unlike the
majority of songwriters who created their best work in their twenties, she
has surpassed her early work and has gone on to craft one great album after
the next.
She is a fan of other songwriters: she loves her husband Michael Penn’s
work, of course—they are married after all. But she is also a big fan of
former beau Jules Shear as well as Dylan, Bacharach, and Elvis Costello. It
was Elvis who said that truly great songwriters show a lot of attention to
detail. She does that: her use of telling details is measured and inspired. She
consciously creates a rich sense of place, of time, and of character in her
songs, and always with genuine passion.
Much of that richness can be found in her most recent album, a
remarkable song-cycle called The Forgotten Arm. It’s the story of two
lovers, John and Caroline, a musical fable painted with dimensional
cinematic scenes, poignant poetry, and classic melodicism. She knows
about the essence of singability; regardless of any other concerns, the words
always flow flawlessly on the current of music. Her songs, even the morose
ones—and there are many of those—are imbued with genuine joy: the joy
of making music.
Born on September 8, 1960, in Richmond, Virginia, she studied music
at Berklee in Boston, and joined her first band, Young Snakes, there in that
historic city. In 1983 she formed ’Til Tuesday with her boyfriend Michael
Hausman, an amiable man and agile drummer who is now her manager, and
they struck gold in 1985 with their hit single “Voices Carry,” which she
wrote. Unlike many songs of that era, it wasn’t a mindless confection; it
bore her signature of a powerful melody with provocative words and sounds
as good in this twenty-first century—she caved to repeated demands and
performed it onstage in Aspen—as it did in the previous epoch.
The band recorded several albums, and multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion,
who went on to become an influential producer, joined them. The pressures
of operating within the industry started to rattle her in every way, as such
pressures will, and she broke up the band in 1990 to go solo.
Her next illustrious companion was the songwriter Jules Shear—for
whom she wrote the song “J for Jules.” (When I asked her about putting his
name into a song and thus stating her private truth so bluntly, she laughed
and said she did it only because she liked rhyming “Jules” with “fools,” and
had his name been Byron or Henry it wouldn’t have gotten in.)
Her first solo outing was Whatever, the first of many albums to establish
her, outside of the band, as one of the most talented songwriters and
performers on the scene. Jon Brion produced two of her albums as well as
the soundtrack for the movie Magnolia, which director-writer Paul Thomas
Anderson constructed around her songs. It earned her an Oscar nomination
for Best Song and launched the beautiful “Save Me” into the culture.
These days she’s much happier than she was during her long winter of
discontent entrenched in the corporate confines of Geffen Records (where
Bluerailroad columnist Peter Case also dwelled). She made the superb solo
album Bachelor No. 2 while still under contract to Geffen, but it was
roundly rejected by the company, who objected to both its artistic direction
and content. They insisted it be radically rehauled, she refused, and a long
season of legal skirmishes ensued. Her ultimate victory allowed her to
release Bachelor on SuperEgo, and it has generated a spirit of liberation that
has led in turn to the deeply brilliant and beautiful cycle of songs that
became Lost in Space and all of her subsequent albums. These days she’s a
little weary when it comes to discussing such history but brightens
considerably when discussing her new music, and she expounds with
understated exuberance on the diverse and delicate considerations necessary
to coax a song into being.
Music always comes first. Her primary songwriting process is to find a
provocative musical idea and allow it to define the direction of the melody
and the content of the lyric. Her most recent work, The Forgotten Arm, is
produced by Joe Henry (see page 624) and captures the energy of live
performance by having been recorded mostly live in the studio; it’s another
compelling chapter in the musical tome she’s been writing now for decades.
As Jon Brion said, “She’s certainly one of my all-time favorite intelligent,
emotional pop songwriters. She is by far one of the best lyricists, I mean, by
a long shot. And the fact that she also happens to be gifted melodically just
really puts it over the top. I still don’t think the world at large even fully
understands how good she is. I just think she’s nothing short of
remarkable.”
That expresses the essence of what is at the core of this admittedly
expansive introduction: that the world at large might not even get it yet. It’s
true of many of our greatest artists—painters, poets, and musicians. What
they are doing is so good and is at such a level that it takes a while for
people to catch up with it. But those in the know certainly know, and they
know there are few better than Aimee Mann. Though she said in Aspen that
she writes her best songs when she’s bored, there is nothing boring about
her work—quite the opposite. And just as it elevates the artist herself from
the everyday doldrums of life as lived, so do these songs enhance our lives
with a sweet and solemn confederation of sound and soul and thought.

When you work on a song, do you always keep at it till it’s finished?
Aimee Mann: It really depends. I think I’m pretty good at recognizing
when I’m getting to the flogging-a-dead-horse space. And then you’ve just
got to let it go. And those kind of songs, it might be years later that I pick it
up, and it seems like a totally new song, so I can work on it more. I think
for me it’s when a song needs a different section, and you don’t know
where to go, and that often requires a certain perspective. Like a bridge, for
example, you need a section that has a lift to it or a different kind of
cadence, and sometimes I can get too caught up in the vibe of the verse that
it’s difficult to go to a different place, and the bridge turns out to be just like
the verse, sort of rewritten, and it get a little stale. That was the case with
“Invisible Ink,” where I needed a lot of time to see it differently and to
discover a new place to go with it.

Musically and lyrically?

Both. I started writing “Invisible Ink” with a friend in Boston years ago
and never finished it. I remembered it and was able to reconnect with it and
write a new section that made it complete. It has lyrics that I rewrote, but
what it really lacked was a bridge. I could never write a bridge to it, and
then twelve years later I sat down and wrote a bridge to it. That song is
different from the rest musically because the music was mostly written by a
songwriter friend of mine in Boston. So it goes to different places.

You wrote many of your early songs in Boston. Does it affect the song
where you are when you write it?
No. I think what matters more is that I have some quiet time, without
interruption.

When you start a song, do you start with words or music?

I start with music mostly. I’ll have a couple of lyric lines, and I’ll fool
around with them on guitar and try to find some kind of melody that works.

Do you start with an idea that you are trying to express, or does that
come while working on the song?
Both. I think they come together. Usually I’m playing the guitar and
humming the melody, and usually they will form themselves into words,
and I’ll think about what it sounds like and follow that. Music definitely
leads me into lyrical themes. I’ll find some music and then see what it
sounds like it’s about. So the music is more of a driving force in forming
the song and what the song is about.

Do you have one guitar you use?

Yes, an acoustic 1954 Gibson J-160 that I use. It’s my main guitar. It’s
the best for everything. I record with it, I write with it, and I take it on the
road and perform with it. It’s really beat up. It was beat up when I got it.
And then I was in a car accident and it got thrown from the car. It got
shredded, and I got a guy in Ann Arbor who rebuilt it for me. And he did a
pretty great job. It looks pretty beat up, but it essentially sounds great.

Do you write with a capo?

Oh yeah, frequently. I do a lot of capo action. Usually if something is
not in my key. Sometimes it’s helpful because it puts me in a new place I’m
not overly familiar with, which can lead to new musical ideas. But I do
often end up playing the same chord changes anyway. I think, “Oh look,
this is a different progression,” and then realize it’s the same chord
progression I’ve used before, only with a capo putting it in a different
position. You know, I sing a lot of stuff in B—B major and B minor—so I
put the capo on the second fret and play in A or A minor.

So you don’t strive to come up with new progressions you haven’t used
before?
No, I do. Sometimes I deliberately try to come up with chords that are
put together in a different way. But sometimes I’m just writing and I have a
chord progression that works, and I just let myself go ahead and finish the
song, even though I know the progression might be similar to something
I’ve written before.

“This Is How It Goes” is in A flat, which is not a common guitar key.

Yeah, there you go. That was capoed on the sixth fret. Starting on a B
minor shape.

Your songs are often very ingeniously structured with great bridges. Is
song structure something you enjoy working with?
Yeah, I really like the kind of traditional pop song structure. You know,
verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. I rely on that heavily.
Sometimes I find I like songs that have simpler structures, and these are
probably songs that are built in the studio. I kind of like it to sound like it’s
a complete song before I get to the studio. I don’t want to have to rely on
the studio to complete the song. I work hard to make sure both the melody
and words are strong before thinking about recording or production.
Your songs are always wonderfully melodic. Have you always been a
fan of strong melodies?
Yeah. I think that the artists I like the most are artists who have a really
strong melodic sense. Like The Beatles and Elton John.

“Pavlov’s Bell” has a great structure, the way it builds up to the chorus,
which then explodes.
That was a conscious choice. You try to build the momentum into the
writing so that kind of prechorus section is a little sort of floaty and then
tightens up to the chorus. So that was done intentionally.

When you are working on a song are you concerned with the guitar
part or just strumming chords?
Just strumming chords. I can’t really play anything. I’ll have an
occasional arpeggio.

“Humpty Dumpty” is a powerful song, with that great line “All the
perfect drugs and superheroes wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to
zero.”
That’s how I felt. Sometimes you feel bad, and you can’t imagine
anything that would make you feel better. That’s in A minor. There’s a lot
of A minor to E minor in these songs. I also like to contrast major and
minor—that one is in A minor for the verses but goes to F major in the
chorus, which gives you that contrast. I think there’s some irony and a
feeling of an almost anthemic quality to having this very depressed lyric;
it’s like having defeat and triumph all in one.

In a song like that are you leading where you want the song to go, or
following?
With that song it came from the music I was working on, and then there
was a sense of building in the prechorus that kind of hinted what the chorus
chords were going to be, and then I ended the chorus, which kind of built up
to a certain thing harmonically. Then I play that music and think, “What
does this sound like to me?” and that’s what it sounded like. To me the
music dictates a certain area, but then I try to picture it and translate that
picture into words.
Do you finish the music first usually and then work on lyrics?
Sometimes. Probably I always end up playing catch-up with lyrics.
That’s always the last thing that has to be done. I very rarely have lyrics
written out completely before finishing the melody. It’s much harder for me
to fit music to lyrics than to find lyrics that fit the music.

Do you always work on these lyrics with guitar?

Sometimes I’ll keep it in my head—while I’m doing chores or driving
somewhere. I find it helps sometimes to think of it as somebody else’s song
and then decide what I would do with it or where else I could go with it. If
you’re playing it on guitar, you can get caught up in the chords, or your
hands will automatically go to familiar chord changes that you’ve heard a
million times. So it’s good to sort of hear it first and then figure out what it
is. So you have to put the guitar down and just focus on the melody and
later figure out the chords that will fit that. This happens only when the
melody and the meter of the song is already there so that I can get away
from the guitar and think about the lyrics. The mind keeps working on the
songs when there’s something there worthwhile.

Mentioning meter, the phrasing to so many of your songs is so nice,

even without the music, such as “Baby kiss me like a drug, like a
respirator . . .” Using those multisyllabic words that fall into the music
so well.
I work on that as much as anything. I also try to get the best rhyme
scheme I can. There’s a lot of stuff I throw out because I don’t think it fits
the meter or it doesn’t sound right within the meter.

Your rhymes are also great, such as in “It’s Not,” the rhyme that holds
together the title with “astronaut” and “afterthought” is so pleasant.
Traditional aspects such as rhyme and meter are elements you are
concerned with?
Yeah. If it’s not a perfect rhyme, it’s either because I either got so sick
of working on it or because I just couldn’t find any other way to phrase it. I
do spend a lot of time trying to get a perfect rhyme. That is important to me
because I think that helps a lot in communicating certain ideas to a listener.
I think it makes a nice little surprise that helps you connect with a song.
Even if the listener doesn’t realize it, subconsciously they feel it. I don’t
always have perfect rhymes, but I work hard to get them.

Is rhyming fun for you?

Yeah. I feel as a songwriter, that’s your job. There’s not only the thing
that you are saying, but there’s the best way to say it. It’s your job to find
out the best way to say it, to make sure the meter is good, and that it sounds
very conversational. “Baby, kiss me like a drug . . . ,” that’s kind of the
cadence of how you would actually say a line like that. It’s your job to try to
make it be as good as it can be, and these are my standards for good.

You have a great mixture of conversational language with infused

poetic language.
I try to keep it conversational. That’s always my goal. Maybe I have a
vocabulary that other people don’t have, I don’t know.

A line like “Let me fall into the dream of the astronaut” is a poetic
thought.
True. But it also says exactly what I want to say. That was the image. It
was very 2001, kind of that image of the astronaut floating away. On the
one hand, it’s very peaceful and dreamlike, but it’s also very bereft and
alien. Those things are all there in that picture.

And it’s a picture, which is something you give us a lot in songs.

That helps me write. If I have a picture or image in mind, I can describe
what the image is, and that makes my job easier.

“It’s Not” is a haunting song, and it’s cool that way you use the title, in
that it has a different meaning each time.
I try to do that. That’s definitely something I like to incorporate into my
songwriting, that the title can mean something a little different every time
you land on it. It’s got a nice string arrangement, which really adds a whole
different layer to it.
With that one I wanted to have the first few verses to be broad and sort
of this vague, like a kind of mental exhaustion, and then you find out in the
final verse, you realize where it’s all directed, and it suddenly becomes
more personal, and the words are directing you. It all ends with “and I
believed it was you who could make it better, but it’s not.” Well, [laughs]
that’s kind of the way it goes.

That song has the line “lost in space,” which is also the title song of the
album. Which came first?
Actually I had the title for the album first before either song. I knew that
was what I wanted to call it. The song “Lost in Space” didn’t have that line
in it at first. But as I was working on the song I felt it just wasn’t good
enough, and I had to take it apart and keep working on it to rewrite the
lyric. And I ended up using it as my first line, and it became the title line.
And once that was there, when I was working on “It’s Not,” which was the
last song I wrote for the record and the song I knew would be last on the
record, I wanted to tie them together. I felt that would be perfect.

Do you find that using true details from your own life adds resonance
to songs?
Yeah, you always have to connect it to yourself or it becomes just an
exercise in writing. I would feel like it’s cheating, in a sense, if I don’t have
some real emotional involvement with the song. Plus, it’s just harder to
write—if you have no emotional involvement, what’s the point? Some
writers, like McCartney, have written little story songs, like “Maxwell’s
Silver Hammer,” that have nothing to do with him. Maybe if I had more
talent, I could write outside of myself, and I might do that. But I’m just not
that interested, if a song does not directly relate to me in some way, to work
on it.

Are lyrics and melodies equally important?

I think it’s a balance. It’s all part of the same thing in songwriting.
Songs are interesting because it’s always the music that gets to you first. It
is for me because music has feeling in it too. The music does have a story in
it itself. It sets up an emotional tone which then, as you listen more closely,
you find out more details. With songs, if you listen more closely, if you
realize it’s just kind of thrown together, it’s a letdown. It’s the difference
between seeing someone who looks really interesting and then getting to
talk to them and find out they’re a moron—it’s a real letdown. Certain
celebrities are that way. They look so cool, but when you hear them speak,
it’s really disappointing.

“This Is How It Goes” is interesting in that regard, in that it has an

upbeat chorus, yet the lyrics contrast that feel with “It’s all about
drugs, it’s all about shame . . .”
It doesn’t seem like a contrast to me because those words and music
came at the same time.

You’ve written frequently about drugs and addictions and battles with
those kinds of demons.
I think that’s true. That’s a theme that comes up a lot in many of these
songs. Sometimes when I write about drugs, that’s a shorthand to describe
certain kinds of compulsive behavior. And then some of the other songs are
connected to a certain kind of emotional disassociation and depression.

“Humpty Dumpty” starts with the idea of being split into fragments.
That started with the music. That’s one of my favorite songs.

“Lost in Space” is great, with the lines “By just pretending to care /
Like I’m not even there / Gone, but I don’t know where . . .”
That’s another song, like “Humpty Dumpty,” which is about
disassociation and trying to have a face that interacts with other people, but
you feel it’s not really you. I think a lot of people feel that way. They feel
that there’s a false front, where they feel that they have to interact with
people in a certain way, but they feel really divorced from the people they
are with.

“Pavlov’s Bell” is kind of a road song.

It’s also a song that uses a kind of fear of flying as sort of a natural thing
and what people do to try to mask certain fears and certain phobias.

When you’re working on a song, even if you don’t think it’s a great
one, do you allow that critical voice to be heard, or do you try to keep
that outside?
For me what defines “great” or not is just if I am interested in it and
connected to it emotionally. I can think something is really good and just
not be connected to it, and that’s the end of that song. I stop working on it.
There are a lot of songs I just drop along the way. And then I might try to
pick them up at a later time. And then there are definitely songs I’ve tried
over and over again to finish or work on and I fail or succeed. I tape myself
while working, so I can preserve any melodic ideas I think might be good at
the time.

“The Moth” takes the idea of “a moth to a flame” and bends it in new
ways.
Yeah, I love that. I like to do that—to take a cliché or an idiom in the
language and examine them. And the moth in a flame is perfect. It is
obviously the perfect kind of addiction reference. And having a kind of
discussion about how the moth feels about the flame and how the flame
feels about the moth.

I love your version of “One” written by Nilsson, which was featured on

the great album For the Love of Harry and was also on the Magnolia
soundtrack.
That was almost a note-for-note remake of his original demo version. It
was just so great. If you listen to his demo version, we just copied those.

You’ve had well-publicized battles with record companies. Did those

battles ever cause you to be creatively derailed?
Well, I think there were definitely times that I felt having to deal with
the record companies added a real inhibitory factor. It’s very difficult to feel
really good about writing a song when you know that there are people who
are going to give it thumbs up or thumbs down before anybody else has a
chance to hear it. And more likely than not, it’s going to be thumbs down. I
don’t think they ever understood what kind of an artist I am. I think they
had this weird perception of me, where people kept looking at me as if I’m
this real commercial artist who suddenly, out of nowhere, is doing this other
thing. And I guess that comes from being in ’Til Tuesday, I’m not really
sure. But there is this perception, and it did hinder my work during one
period to the point where I couldn’t write at all. It was very difficult. I
couldn’t write and I couldn’t sing. I just kind of shut down. It lasted a while.
It was while I was making Bachelor No. 2. It was a real struggle to
circumvent writer’s block.

How did you get beyond that?

Therapy. I went to therapy and tried to figure out what was behind it.

You’ve since shown us that it is possible to do it on your own without a

major label. Is that liberating for you?
Oh, completely. Because I can just think about the music. I can just
write songs that are great. You know what? Some people won’t like it. But
at least the people who do like it will have the chance to hear it before it’s
thrown into the trash. But I think the corporate big labels will collapse of
their own weight. Any minute now.

OceanofPDF.com
James Taylor
 The Secret o’ Songwriting
Massachusetts 2007

To get to his home you drive down a winding country road in the verdant
heart of Massachusetts, under sun-dappled arches of ancient oaks and elms,
over railroad tracks, and past a graveyard of tombstones so old they look
like dominoes frozen in midfall. A long and winding road leads through the
trees, past a big red barn, and, just beyond it, the house. Though it’s not
quite October, there’s already a little pumpkin by the front door.
With a gentle smile, JT strides through the kitchen to greet me and
introduces me warmly to his wife, Kim. Their living room is washed with
sunlight and punctuated by a long, carpeted wooden beam that connects the
high-ceilinged first floor with the second and on which Ray, their cat, can
swiftly ascend, which James and Kim happily encourage him to do. Built
with the same kind of economical ingenuity James brings to his work, this
skyward ramp is sturdy, functional, and elegant.
We sit on a porch in the back and talk over lunch. He speaks with the
same blend of wisdom, awareness, and curiosity that he brings to his songs
—from explaining the unshakable fidelity of Bostonians for the Red Sox to
the characteristics of a hog-nosed snake (it plays dead). “You have to learn
to grow fonder of your burdens,” he says, underscoring a trajectory both
zealous and Zen-like, wise enough to flow with the current but unafraid to
dip in his own paddle. Like the harmonic structures of his songs, there’s
more depth and complexity there than what’s on the surface. Asked if he
considers songwriting to be a conscious or unconscious act, he expounds
expansively on the nature of consciousness and the physics of music.
More than anything, he’s humble. He questions the premise of anyone
truly owning a song and generally deflects and diffuses any praise about his
work, though he does receive and even harbor criticism. When told many
songwriters, such as Randy Newman, admire his harmonic virtuosity, he
worries whether his songs are “too chordy” and in need of simplification.
Complimented on the profusion of genuine soul in his singing, he laments
the exploitation of black musicians. Questioned about the philosophy of
acceptance expressed in “Secret o’ Life” (“the secret of life is enjoying the
passage of time”), he minimizes its message as facile and presumptuous.
When asked about the intimate clarity of his work, he disparages it for
being “too self-referential.”
He’s been both lauded and lambasted for being the ultimate
representative of the confessional school of songwriting. But it’s not the
whole truth. Although he’s famously written about private and personal
explorations of the heart, he’s also always been a remarkable narrative
songwriter, spinning mythical musical yarns, from “Mud Slide Slim” to
“Millworker” to “The Frozen Man.” Indeed, his intention in songs has
sometimes been misread—the best example being “Sweet Baby James”—
which many interpreted as self-referential and perhaps even self-indulgent
when, in fact, it was written as a lullaby for his newborn nephew, who was
named in his honor.
Which isn’t to say he hasn’t written songs that could be considered
confessional. But he’s always done it in a way that springs not from a
bleeding heart as much as from an empathetic soul. The very declaration
“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain” echoes biblical verse, and the song
resounds with a measure of mythical grace much more so than any kind of
self-pity. Even the direct allusion to Flying Machine, the dissolved band of
his youth, doesn’t speak of narcissism as much as it does wistful
resignation: “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.”
There’s an authenticity there in his songs, a human connection that’s
undeniable. It’s there in the earthy resonance of his voice, the gentle focus
of his guitar playing, the ripe and soulful splendor of his melodies, and in
the lucid dynamism of his lyrics. His songs have long provided a sense of
tranquility in the midst of turbulence, an unflustered alternative to the
fleeting frenzy of modern times. And though his work has long impacted
the very culture from which it springs, he’s existed outside of the
marketplace, outside of any desire to bend to the whims of fashion, and for
this reason his work remains timeless. Sting, who has declared on more
than one occasion that James is the modern musician he most admires, said,
“His singing and his sound are always contemporary and yet timeless,
totally immune to mere fashion.”
He was born on March 12, 1948, in Belmont, Massachusetts, and raised
in North Carolina. His first instrument was cello, which, from ages eight to
thirteen, he played “badly, reluctantly.” His older brother Alex had a
profound influence on his musical sensibilities, as did his friends the
guitarist Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar and the drummer Joel O’Brien, with
whom he formed his first band, Flying Machine.
It was Kootch who delivered a demo of his early songs to Peter Asher
who, galvanized by Paul McCartney and George Harrison’s enthusiasm,
made James Taylor the first non-Beatle act signed to Apple Records. JT
recorded his debut album in between Beatles sessions for what became The
White Album and wrote one of his most classic songs then, “Carolina in My
Mind,” on which McCartney played bass and also sang harmony with
George Harrison. When Apple ultimately collapsed, JT moved back to the
States and signed with Warner, where he recorded the album that forever
cemented his reputation, Sweet Baby James. Containing a chain of
breathtaking originals, such as the poignantly pastoral “Blossom,” “Country
Road,” and “Anywhere Like Heaven,” he presented an organic alternative
to the urban school of songwriting, culminating in an unprecedented
masterpiece of personal songwriting: “Fire and Rain.” And from that
moment on, James Taylor became a beloved and venerated artist, as deeply
ingrained into the cherished fabric of American culture as Stephen Foster,
Woody Guthrie, or Hank Williams.
Perhaps more than any other single quality to be found in his musical
persona is an unassailable affability: the powerful sense that this singer is
your friend. And not just any friend—an old friend. Someone who’s been
there when you needed him. His reedy baritone resonates with rustic
warmth and empathy. It’s the reason why he so thoroughly inhabits “You’ve
Got a Friend,” even though Carole King wrote it. When he sings it, you
believe it. A sense of spiritual generosity, of Lincolnesque honesty, radiates
from his singing, adding an extra dimension of sincerity no one else could
summon. It’s the reason why Randy Newman, when he wrote “You’ve Got
a Friend in Me” for Toy Story, wanted James to sing it. (Because of
scheduling, however, that didn’t happen, but he did sing and play Randy’s
wistfully glorious “Our Town” from last 2006’s Cars.)
At the televised MusiCares tribute to him, in which Simon, Sting, and
Springsteen were all present to honor him and perform his songs, Carole
King closed the show by saying, simply, “Everyone has been telling these
great James Taylor stories, and nothing for me says it better than this song.”
With that, she launched into “You’ve Got a Friend.” At the conclusion of
the evening James, the antithesis of someone who enjoys basking in self-
glory, said, “It’s strange to be at an event like this and still be alive. It’s very
moving, very terrifying, and very wonderful.”
When we met, he was just finishing up a CD-DVD set entitled One Man
Band, derived from his recent almost-solo concert tour, supported only by
keyboardist Larry Goldings and a pickup-truck-sized drum machine of JT’s
invention. He was on the very verge of completing it, working the previous
night with an engineer and editor till dawn. During our interview he led me
up to a loft above his barn to show me a clip from the film of the band
performing “My Traveling Star,” a song that, like so many of his, touches
on his own wanderlust and that which led his own father away from his
family for so many years. And there is James, the family man, sitting
quietly beside me as I listen. And there is James Taylor on the screen in
performance mode. And there, beyond this monitor, is a window that looks
out on the verdant New England hills of his home, where his twin sons,
then six years old, are swinging on swings and tumbling down the hill. And
here is an equation that works: a man whose songs are everywhere at once,
enriching the lives of millions, as he succeeds in being a man of the family
and a man of the world at once.

Your songs, from the start, have always been poetic but clear. They
made sense. Was that intentional?
James Taylor: No, that’s the way it comes out. It’s a cliché, but that’s
because it’s true to say I don’t have any real conscious control over what
comes out. I just don’t direct it. I wish I could say, “Oh, that would be great
to write a song about . . .” But what I am doing is assembling and minimally
directing what is sort of unconsciously coming out. It’s not something I can
direct or control. I just end up being the first person to hear these songs.
That’s what it feels like, that I don’t feel as though I write them.

Many feel songwriting is more a sense of following than leading—

I know you’re a songwriter. Is that your experience too?

Yes. I find it’s both. I’ll think of a subject and I’ll lead it, but the best
lines are those which just occur. And then I might consciously think of
a set-up rhyme. So it’s both conscious and unconscious at the same
time.
Yes, that’s right. And I think there’s a phase that’s unconscious. And
then there’s a phase where you kind of have to button it up and finish it and
pull it into a form that’s presentable. Make it five minutes long. I don’t
know why songs are five minutes long, but they are. Three, four, and five
minutes long. That’s a conscious process, when you’re trying to finish off a
song and find a third verse that’s gonna complete the first two or
complements them somehow, or a bridge that’s gonna make a general
statement about the whole thing, or look at it from afar and then come back
down into it again.
There are stages in it that are very conscious. But it all starts with a
lightning strike of some sort, an unconscious emergence. And to me it
happens most when I’m sitting down and playing the guitar. That’s when
these things will iterate.

Words and music at the same time?

Yeah, usually. A melody will suggest itself in the context of whatever
I’m playing. And then the rhythm of that melody, the cadence of it, will
suggest words. And those words and the rhythm of them I don’t think
comes from a conscious place. Often, for instance, if I’m stuck on a song,
I’ll lie down and close my eyes. Take a nap. Fifteen minutes or so, and
when I wake up often it will be solved. There will be a solution, and I think
it happens when you’re asleep.
It’s somewhat surprising to hear you say that, that the words come
unconsciously, because some of your songs are so specific.
“Copperline,” for example, presents a theme and explores it and is so
well crafted.
When I wrote it, though, the first idea was that I had a version of an old
song called “A Dog Named Blue”: “I had an old dog and his name was
Blue / Bet you five dollars he’s a good dog too.” I played that with Jerry
Douglas and Mark O’Connor on an album of Mark’s. And so I was playing
the changes that I had come up with on that song. And then the line “down
on Copperline” came up. I don’t know where it came from or what it
means. I’ve since interpreted it as being a place about a mile and a half
away from where my home is. There was a creek that flowed by at the
bottom of a hill by my house. Morgan Creek. And down there, there was a
stone quarry, and that’s what I think about when I think about “Copperline,”
and I’m the person who can decide what the song is about. [Laughs]

I assumed that was what people called that region.

But the first verse is about “even the old folks never knew why they
called it like they do . . .” They call it Copperline. So it starts by saying I
don’t know why this song is called “Copperline.” It makes some
suggestions: copperhead, copper beech, copper kettle.
And then it says, “Half a mile down to Morgan Creek / Only living till
the end of the week.” “Only living till the end of the week,” that has to do
with how people will ask me, “Could you have foreseen, when you were
eighteen years old in New York City, writing ‘Rainy Day Man,’ could you
have thought of yourself at the age of sixty still doing this?” And my
answer is always, “When I was eighteen years old I could never think
beyond maybe a week in the future.” I just never planned for anything, I
never planned for anything. And I didn’t think I would be alive at fifty-nine.
I just didn’t anticipate it at all. And so that thing about only living till the
end of the week refers to not being able to think ahead.
“Hercules and a hog-nosed snake.” A hog-nosed snake is a strange kind
of a creature. It’s a snake that pretends to be dead. But even if you go over
and poke it with a stick and tread on it, it won’t move. It will act like it’s
dead. And my dog Hercules killed snakes, and there were lots of snakes
where we lived. I tell people sometimes when I perform the song, “Hercules
—not the god, the dog.” [Laughs] Anyway, he would kill snakes. But he
wouldn’t kill a hog-nosed snake because it was already dead. But it wasn’t
—you would walk away and come back later, and it would have slithered
off. It survived by pretending not to be. And that, to me, playing possum, as
a survival skill, as a way of getting out of a particularly dangerous situation,
playing dead—that’s what I was talking about.

But that verse in which you explore all those different copper elements
—copperhead, copper beech, copper kettle—that seems consciously
crafted. Was it?
You sit down and those things come to your mind. It’s hard to say
whether that is conscious. Sometimes I open a rhyming dictionary just to
remind myself of what words might fit the bill. But it’s what those words
mean and if one of them will catch.
The other day I sang with Tony Bennett—we sang at Radio City Music
Hall—we sang “Put on a Happy Face” from Bye Bye Birdie. It has that line,
“Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy, it’s not your style / You look so
good that you’ll be glad you decided to smile.” So “tragedy” and “glad you
de-cided,” that kind of word game is delightful. Those things are great. I
love that kind of lyric. That’s very self-conscious and very on purpose,
premeditated.
I’ve written a few songs that were real Chinese puzzles of rhyming
schemes. “Sweet Baby James” has about three rhyming schemes in each
verse.

Yeah, it’s got “horse and his cattle” with “sits in the saddle,” and
“companion” with “canyon.”
Right. “Lives on the range” and then, four lines later, “his pastures to
change.” It is. That’s right. There are a number of rhymes in it.

Was that one that emerged or you consciously crafted?

Another place I write a lot is I’m either sitting down playing the guitar,
I’m walking, or I’m driving. Those are the three things I’m apt to be doing
when I write. I was driving down Route 95 to North Carolina after I picked
up my car in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a car that I bought in England in 1968.
And I was driving it down to see my brother Alex and his wife, Brent, who
had given birth to little James. First child born to my generation in my
family. And they had named a kid after me, and I was gonna go down and
see the little baby. And I was driving down there thinking of a cowboy
lullaby, what to sing to little James. Rock-a-bye, sweet baby James.
I was very excited that they had a kid, and very moved that they named
it after me, and I was behind the wheel for twenty hours or so, straight,
maybe fifteen hours, driving straight down. And that song just assembled
itself as I was driving down there. My memory was good enough in those
days that I remembered it all. As soon as I got home I wrote it down.

The music came to you too when you were driving?

Yeah. I already had been working on the music to it. That arrived intact,
that song. So did “Millworker.” I was asleep on Martha’s Vineyard in my
bed, and I woke up with the song entirely in my mind. I walked down, it
was a moonlit night, I walked down and turned on the light on the desk that
was in this library space in the house. And wrote down the song, went back
upstairs, and fell back to sleep. In the morning I really didn’t know if the
song was down there. I came down and there it was. It was amazing.

You write on guitar, but unlike some guitarists who write simple,
diatonic songs, your songs are often harmonically complex. A song like
“There We Are” or “Secret o’ Life” have some adult chords.
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah. I write as a guitarist. I write on guitar, though the
song “There You Are” was written on piano. But a song like “Mean Old
Man” has some changes. It’s just a series of descending scales.

It sounds like a standard.

You know I got a great compliment from my mentor and the guy who
gave me my break, Paul McCartney. He bought a bunch of those albums to
give to his friends, and he said the reason he did was because when he
heard “Mean Old Man” he thought it was a Porter tune. And he thought it
had to be a standard and looked to see who wrote it and was surprised that it
was mine.

I looked too. And was surprised. Lyrically, too, it has that style.
 Yes, it’s an old-fashioned style. And McCartney, of course, does that
too. “When I’m 64,” “Honey Pie,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”—

“Your Mother Should Know.”

That’s right. He writes from that music hall experience. Which you
could call old-fashioned. It was superseded by rhythm and blues and Elvis
and stuff. But my personal feeling is that the Broadway musical, that was
the apex, the epitome of American popular song. The lyrics and the changes
and the melodies. The sophistication of it. It’s high art. It’s a very high
form. And what’s happened since with rhythm and blues and a return to
folk music is a simplification of that.
Though I think people have a clichéd idea of folk music when I say I am
a folk musician. I just mean somebody who has basically learned music
without studying it in any formal way. I basically just absorbed what I
learned.

I agree that the work of the Gershwins, Porter, etc., was high art.
Though their songs were primarily about melody—and great melodies.
But it was those from your generation—you, Dylan, Simon, The Beatles
—who, in writing songs for yourself, brought a new intimacy and depth
and poetry to lyrics of popular song. A song like “Fire and Rain,” for
example, is not a song Ira Gershwin would have written—
No, that’s right—

Or “Copperline” or “Frozen Man.” You brought songwriting to a new

place, which is also high art.
It is very self-referred and very personal. And often I feel
uncomfortable about that, and I regret that is the case because often I feel
it’s a little bit self-obsessed. Sometimes. But basically I’ve just accepted
that that’s the way I write, and I’m not surprised if and when people get fed
up with it. In other words, I don’t think it’s for all audiences all the time.
But occasionally I’ll stumble on something that resonates with people as
much as it resonates with me, and then I’ve got something I can work on or
work behind.
You’re known for being one of the great “confessional songwriters,” yet
from the start you wrote story songs as well. You wrote “Mud Slide
Slim,” and you went on to write “Millworker” and “The Frozen Man,”
which are not songs about you—
That’s true. But “Frozen Man” is about my father. So is “Walking Man.”
It’s not about him, but it’s informed by him—

Were you consciously thinking of your father when you wrote “Frozen
Man,” or was that a later revelation?
Somewhat when I wrote it. There are a lot of those can’t-quite-get-home
kind of songs, or highway songs, or songs that romanticize the call of the
road or the inability to settle down, the inability to find peace. And a lot of
those wandering songs are about my dad.

When you would write a song—say, “Copperline,” which I love—that

has a verse about your father, did you intend to include that, or does
that come during the writing?
In the process. It’s sort of like an area. A song will be open for a while. I
typically will work on a lyric in a three-ring binder. And on the right side
I’ll write the lyric, and on the left side I put in alternate things and things
that might be alternates or improvements. And I’ll turn the page and I’ll do
it again. And I’ll turn the page and do it again or incorporate the
improvements. Eventually I end up with some material, and often it needs
to be ordered.
I remember when writing “Copperline” that Reynolds Price and I had
some late-night discussions about what order to put the verses in and where
to break it for the bridge. So it is. In the liner notes to One Man Band I
wrote that a strange thing about the modern version of the popular song is
that the first time a song is heard is the first time that it’s performed. You set
it in stone in its first performance. You might even finish it in the studio on
the day you record it. You don’t very often write a song and play it. It takes,
like, twenty times of playing it in front of an audience before it kind of
completes itself. But often it’s going straight from your head into wax, and
that’s the final version of the song that goes out. But it’s only after you’ve
played it on the road twenty or thirty times that it becomes really finished
and polished and you really realize what it means and you get the phrasing
right. One would wish you could write an album, tour with it for a year, and
then record it. It never happens that way, though. It’s always straight out of
the box and then set it cast in stone.
So it is sort of odd that I write for my own recordings. I think one of the
points you made early on is that as a singer and a recording artist and a
touring performer, I’m writing material for my own show, my own albums.
And I don’t often get the chance to sort of do a commissioned work—write
something about this. That’s what “Millworker” was and “Brother Trucker”
and a couple of songs that were in that show Working. That was a rare
opportunity to write stuff that was commissioned, where I was asked to be a
songwriter and apply my capacity to a task.

And you met that challenge. “Millworker” is a classic song.

Did you hear Springsteen’s version of that? It was great. He sort of
boiled it down a bit.
One of the things about writing for guitar and voice is that I think I tend
to be a bit more chordy than I need to. I throw in more changes just to
interest myself than is often good for the song. I consciously try now to
limit, to be spare, with my changes so I’m not having a chord change every
second. The problem really is that I don’t write chord changes; I write
melodic lines that basically organize themselves into these little wheels that
turn themselves over and over again. They’re not really chord changes. You
can write changes that follow them, and you can see them as a succession of
changes that go from one harmonic center to another. But really what they
are is more horizontal than vertical. And then a melody suggests itself that
works in the context of one of these little wheels. And you can make one
turn away or go into another one or come back into it, and that’s really what
I end up doing.

By that do you mean you think of the melody first, apart from
changes? Or do you generate the melody based on the changes?
There are different kinds of ways of dealing with it. Sometimes there
are changes first and you find a melody that goes through it. Sometimes it’s
a melody and you find chords. Like the final line in “Mean Old Man,” at the
end of each verse is [whistles descending line]. It’s just a long, chromatic
fall. And in order to find changes that bring you back to the letter A, the
changes that are jammed in there, there’s only one melody line that goes
through them. If you tried to find another workable melody line to get
through those changes, you would end up with something that is disjointed.

You once said that the sign of a good song is that it can stand without
any accompaniment, just pure melody. So you have written songs
melody first?
Yes. I did write “Mean Old Man” melody first. But that is an exception.
Usually I am playing the guitar. I will have three lines that are happening at
once. Usually a bass line, an internal line, a top line, and a melody line that
I am thinking of at the same time. Sting writes in this way too, and he and I
have that in common. I’ll write a melody, and the chords will shift under it.
And then it will mean something else because of the chord underneath it.
My song “4th of July” is the same melody over and over again. But the
changes continue to shift, so the melody means something harmonically
different ’cause the context changes.

And that’s a great sound, when the harmonic foundation shifts under a
repeating melodic phrase.
Yes, when it works. “One Note Samba” is like that. Jobim does that a lot
too.

You said once that Paul Simon had showed you some diminished
chords, which surprised me, ’cause I felt you already knew diminished
chords—
Calling it a diminished [chord] is really too simple. Paul has this way of
kind of escaping from a melody or from a harmonic sort of context and
jumping into another one. Like the bridge to “Still Crazy.” He was trying to
explain it to me, and I tried to pay attention.

He said he was trying to use every note in the twelve-tone scale which
he hadn’t used in the verse—
That’s a very mathematical game.

Yeah. But it worked.

Oh God, it worked.
I learned a lot of chords from playing your songs. You use augmented
chords or chords with alternate bass notes. Not the straight-ahead
diatonic chords that a lot of rockers or folk musicians use.
As soon as I found those chords, I used them. I was talking to Paul
McCartney, and we were amazed that there was, like, this F 13 chord in
“Michelle.” I love all of McCartney’s music. And Paul said that was the
only jazz chord [he and John] knew. They used to go down to a record store
in Liverpool, and there was somebody there who played guitar, and he
showed Paul and John this thirteenth chord. So the second chord in
“Michelle,” under “ma belle,” that second chord is a very unlikely chord—
it’s a thirteenth. And you wouldn’t expect to see it.
McCartney’s chords are surprisingly simple when you take them apart.
But, boy, the way he bounces one onto another. It’s really very much like
cubism, to listen to McCartney’s stuff. Because it represents so much in just
a simple line. He’s really brilliant.

Even in the earliest stuff, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the bridge
goes to the minor V instead of major.
That’s right. Which is a great sound. He did that in a few songs.

It’s interesting that your career started pretty much because of Paul
McCartney. You made your first album for Apple while The Beatles
were recording The White Album. What was that like?
It was great. It was unbelievable. I was a huge Beatles fan. I listened to
them—as did millions—with absolute utter focus and attention to every
note and every word. And just devoured everything that they came out with
and parsed it and learned it and reinterpreted it. So when it turned out that I
got the opportunity, when the song “Carolina” says “the holy host of others
standing around me,” that’s what it refers to. Just the fact that I was in this
pantheon, really being present in Trident Studios in Soho, Leicester Square,
where they were recording The White Album. It was just amazing.
I was at a session for “Revolution,” a recut of it that was done at Abbey
Road, and some of The White Album was cut at Abbey Road, but most of it
was cut at Trident. The reason for that is that it had the only eight-track
board in England. They had been working with eight-track at Abbey Road,
but the engineers there were distrustful of the eight-track machines that
were on the market. They trusted four-tracks, so they synched them up, and
that was as close to multitracking as Abbey Road would come. So they
went to Trident, and we just took the interstices; anytime they weren’t
tracking, we would go in.

You mentioned the line from “Carolina” that refers to The Beatles. So
you wrote that song after you got your deal? It wasn’t on your demo?
No. What was on the demo was “Something in the Way She Moves,”
“Rainy Day Man,” and “Circle Round the Sun.”

McCartney played on “Carolina”—

Yes, he did. He played bass. Paul sat in on that one, and he and George
sang on that one too. I think the song that was the strongest on that demo
was “Something in the Way She Moves,” and I think that’s the thing that
got me signed.

Did Paul lay down the bass with the band, or was that an overdub?
He laid down the bass with the band. A guy named Don Shinn played
piano, I played guitar, and I think Joel O’Brien played drums.

You’re known to be pretty specific with your bass lines. But did you
allow McCartney to come up with his own?
The song had its own bass line when it was written. As you say, I am
pretty specific about those lines. I wrote out a simple chart, a Bible-Belt
chart with chord symbols. I think he probably just learned it.
That song was started on this little island in the Mediterranean. We took
a break ’cause The Beatles stopped recording for a break and the studio
closed down. So I went out of town with a friend of mine. A very affable,
friendly, beautiful, flower-child hippie scene going on down there on this
primitive Mediterranean island. The houses all made of stone and mortar
and whitewashed. And beautiful landscape, and this amazing brilliant
Mediterranean and the sun all the time. It was just an amazing place and
beautiful. I had a bit of a drug habit, I’m afraid, and I wasn’t terribly
comfortable. And I kept moving. And I wrote “Carolina” there. I started
writing “Carolina” thinking about my home, thinking about what was going
on with me. But I couldn’t shake this idea that I needed to get home.
 I’ve written maybe 150 songs. But really what I’ve done is written 25
songs ten times. That’s what I do. I write different versions of the same
thing. There are themes I will write about.

I was just noticing how similar “Country Road,” one of your earliest
songs, is to “My Traveling Star,” and one of your most recent ones,
“Another Highway Song.”
Yeah. And I have a song called “Highway Song” and “Nothing Like a
Hundred Miles.” That’s another one. That’s a song that Ray Charles
covered, one of my favorite covers that I ever got. There’s a beautiful
version that he and B. B. King did. For me, he was the man, Ray Charles.

Ray Charles used to say he was like a radio and songs came through
him. Lennon said the same kind of thing, that songwriters are
receivers, picking up songs like a radio picks up radio waves. Does it
seem that way ever?
Yes. Some songs seem to come from outside. “Gaia” seemed to come
from outside and sort of pass through, be filtered through. “Secret o’ Life.”
I mean, to call a song “Secret o’ Life” is preposterous. That’s why the title
is “Secret o’ Life”—it’s meant to be a Life Savers flavor.

Do those kind of experiences cause you to have any notion what the
source of those songs is?
I think it’s largely unconscious and out of my control. Like language
itself. When kids begin to speak they say gobbledygook that takes the form
of sentences and syllables and has the form that sounds like a question or
sounds like a statement or an expletive or whatever. The cadence is already
there, and it comes out as language. They start to plug language into it as
they hear it more and more. I speak French and a little bit of German, and
I’m constantly, in the back of my brain, translating things into those two
languages. It’s just a little game that I’m constantly playing to see if I know
how to do that. And somehow songwriting is like that. It’s always making
little attempts.
And as I said before, I find that now I’m revisiting topics over and over
again that I’m compelled to write about. Loss or celebration. Or a kind of
mystical statement. Trying to give consciousness the slip. And relax back
into the context that we come from.
I think that human beings are an experiment in consciousness, and we
are individuated and ego based, and we re-create the world with these
conscious minds we have, and that allows us to be isolated. We live in these
conscious re-creations of the world. And what that does, it predicts the
world. It predicts behavior; it predicts reality so that we can basically stay
out of trouble. That’s the essential job of consciousness, to look for and
avoid trouble. And secondarily you want food and third you want sex. So I
think that this individuated consciousness that we are an experiment in
allows us to be isolated and it also allows us to get things wrong, to get lost.
So we’re always doing two things almost constantly: one is that we’re
comparing our worldview, our reality, with other people’s to make sure
we’re not getting it wrong. Because otherwise maybe the tree will fall on
your tent or whatever. And the other thing that we’re constantly doing is
trying to somehow get back to give that whole mechanism the slip. Because
it is an illusion. Everybody says it’s an illusion, and that’s because it is.
Consciousness is an illusion. It’s hopelessly subjective, and it is not the
truth. Because it is too tainted by individual and human priorities.
So you’re constantly trying to give that individuated consciousness the
slip and trust falling back into the context out of which we emerge. Which
is, basically, to my mind, the skin of life that’s on the planet Earth. The
thing that has, for some reason, produced us. And maybe the reason we’re
here is to burn fossil fuels, I don’t know. But we’re here for some unknown
reason.
So that’s one of the things I write about. Finding a way to relax. Just put
your mind aside and be in the moment. Be without judgment, be without
examination, analysis, and question. And just accept for an unknown reason
—and it must stay unknown, or else you’re kidding yourself—for some
unknown reason we are here. It’s very unlikely, but for some reason we are.
So it’s basically agnostic spiritualism that I engage in repeatedly. That’s
one of the kinds of songs I write. “Gaia” is that song, “Upper May” is that
song, “Migration” is that song, “Country Road” is that song. And the last
verse of “Sweet Baby James”—“there’s a song that they sing when they
take to the highway, there’s a song that they sing when they take to the sea .
. .”—that’s also a statement about that kind of surrender and surrendering
control and human consciousness. To go back to the well. It’s just a long,
hard, lonely slog being constantly human and having the responsibility of
having to reinvent the world every second. It is a lonesome road. So that’s a
type of song I write too.

But is it always individual? Is that consciousness connected? Are you

tapping into consciousness beyond your own when you write songs?
[Pause] It’s an act of consciousness to write a song. But the most
compelling thing about music is that we manipulate it and arrange it, but it
obeys laws and represents laws about the physical universe—an octave is
an octave because it’s twice as fast as the octave below it. A fifth is a
mathematical reality; it’s not just something we decided on. People say
there’s a real cultural bias to what people consider musical and what
emotional states they relate to what harmonic equivalence. And people say
major is happy and minor is sad, or a diminished chord has a certain amount
of tension and wariness to it, or a thirteenth chord is apprehensive, and
when you have an augmented fifth and you let it fall into a chord a fourth
above it, anyone feels that as home. If you play an E augmented fifth and
then go to an A, no matter who hears that, they will feel there has been
tension and resolution. So I feel that music exists outside of human
consciousness. So to practice music at all is to give human consciousness
the slip. That’s why it’s so associated with spirituality. Because to listen to it
is to experience another type of reality. And one that must be true, because
it’s mathematically true. It is physics. Music is physics.

Do you feel that each musical key has its own nature, its own color?
People really do. I feel rather that modes have their own nature. With
me the key is only relevant in terms of where it will be relative to my vocal
range. And I don’t feel that E has some kind of an emotional feeling. I
mean, when you’re playing guitar, E feels a certain way.

Yeah. It feels like home.

[Laughs] Yeah, it feels like home. And D has a certain feeling because
of the way the other chords constellate around it. But for me, I never have
noticed that thing of C major being a certain emotional state—
Or a color.
I never have thought about it. That might be the case. Or it might also
be just completely random. I mean, what color would you say the key of D
was?

Light blue.
See, I would have said sort of an ultraviolet. Also I play with a capo. So
to me, the key of E is really like the key of D, because half the time that I
play in E, I’m playing D fingering on the second fret.

I was wondering about that, because often I can hear those sounds of
the D major chord—and the pull-offs and hammer-ons you do on it
that so many of us learned from your playing. But I realized these are
often in other keys, such as E. So you use the capo a lot?
Yes, I do. I usually capo on the first, second, and third fret. Very seldom
on the fourth. And sometimes I’m open. And I don’t stray up the neck
much. I don’t play many inversions up the neck. I stay pretty close to under
the fourth fret usually.

Do you use capos while you write songs?

Yes. When I sit down and play the guitar, I often have the capo on it. I
like to sing in E, but I like to play in D. So it’s natural for me to put a capo
on the second fret.

Do you recall writing “Steamroller?”

Yes. “Steamroller” isn’t a serious blues; it’s a takeoff on an eighteen-
year-old white kid’s idea of the blues, like I was coming to New York City
with Mom and Dad’s money and the family station wagon and buying these
electric guitars and amplifiers at Manny’s Music on 48th Street and then
going back to their garage and pretending I’m Muddy Waters or Howlin’
Wolf or Bo Diddley. “I’m a man, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a hoochie coochie
man, I’m smokestack lightning . . .” Yeah, you want to tap into that thing.
You want to emulate it. It’s pathetic, though.

Funny you saw it that way, because it was one of the first places I
learned the blues, playing that song, long before I heard Muddy or Bo
or Howlin’ Wolf.
I was the same way. I learned from listening to John Hammond play and
listening to Ry Cooder. I also listened to Don Covay and to James Brown
and Lightnin’ Hopkins. And Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

With a song like “Gaia” that comes through you, does anything affect
or enable that to happen?
I used drugs for a long time. I think that sometimes a number of these
things were facilitated—they weren’t generated by it—but a state of
artificially induced bliss. You take what you can get. In other cases I find
that the song itself creates that state and that actually singing the song takes
me back to that place again, and actually the song and the music can be
relied upon to reiterate an emotional state, a place where I was at a certain
time. And that’s remarkable to get that.
I play these songs often. I never stop touring, basically. I just always
tour. And have been. I made some early bad mistakes on record contracts
and such, and I just never made any money on records. The Warner catalog
was a big bust for me—

But you had big hits. I thought if you had hits, you would make money
—
Well, you don’t if you sign away the rights to them. When I was
eighteen I signed a publishing contract with April-Blackwood. Chip Taylor
and Al Gorgoni were their names. They promised the band a recording
contract, but I would have to sign a publishing contract. We were desperate
to get recorded. So I signed it, and they own half of “Fire and Rain” and
“Something in the Way She Moves” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Tonight,” and it was just a mistake I made one afternoon.

Speaking of “Something in the Way She Moves,” George Harrison

based his famous song “Something” on it. How did that strike you, that
he used your line?
It was actually a couple of weeks after I turned in the demo of the same
song. [Laughs] I never thought for a second that George intended to do that.
I don’t think he intentionally ripped anything off, and all music is borrowed
from other music. So I just completely let it pass. I raised an eyebrow here
and there, but when people would make the presumption that I had stolen
my song from his, I can’t sit still for that. Actually, you know that song,
[sings] “She’s in love with me and I feel fine . . .”—“I Feel Fine.” The end
of “Something in the Way She Moves” is “I feel fine.” “She’s around me
now almost all the time and I feel fine.” That was taken directly from a
Beatles song too.

I believe George acknowledged that his song came from your song.
I wish I’d known that. I always regretted the prospect that he might
have felt uncomfortable about that. But I never gave it a second thought. I
have stolen things much more blatantly than that. A lot of stuff. And I also
steal from myself and just rework different things into songs.

You once said that you felt your music, since always written for your
own style, seemed “inbred.” Yet I’ve found that throughout your career
you’ve attempted to go to new places musically and not repeat yourself.
It has to be compelling. I can’t finish a song because I have a deadline. I
write songs because they mean something to me, because it gives me a
feeling.
Aside from the great Broadway songwriters, I like Lennon and
McCartney, I like Jimmy Webb, I like Paul Simon, Randy Newman and
Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Of my contemporaries those are the ones.

Was Bob Dylan an important influence for you?

Yes. Dylan was a revelation. There’s nothing like the effect of hearing
Bob Dylan with a guitar and singing “Bob Dylan’s 114th Dream” or
whatever it was, “419th Dream.” [Laughs] Dylan was a real revelation. I
guess he would say he was listening to Cisco Houston and Eric Von
Schmidt and Woody Guthrie. But he really turned the world on its ear and
opened the door for a lot of us. He and The Beatles were the biggest
influences on my lyrics. And then musically the thing I was most thrilled by
was to hear Ray Charles. Sam Cooke was also great. And Marvin Gaye—
and Marvin was also a writer, and it’s just so beautiful, his stuff. And Stevie
[Wonder], of course.
When someone like you or Dylan or Simon performs a song you wrote
yourself, one feels a closeness to the material, an intimacy—
Yes, and sings it themselves with the guitar that they’re playing. Yes,
there’s definitely a direct connection. That’s sort of a combination of
songwriting and performance art and self-expression that can really be
meaningful, can really offer people an emotional path. It can be a container
for their own emotion. It can help them organize and deal with their own
emotions, because someone like Dylan has shown them a way of handling
it, of laughing at it. “If for one moment you could stand in my shoes, you’d
know what a drag it is to see you . . .” [Laughs] That’s useful, that’s really
useful. It allows you to take that feeling and say, “Yeah, that says it all for
me.” It allows you to process something or to handle it. Someone walks a
path, and you can follow that.
When you hear Ray Charles—though he didn’t necessarily write it—
sing, “He came home with a watch / Said it came from Uncle Joe / I looked
at the inscription, it said, ‘Love from Daddy-o.’ I got news for you,
somehow your story don’t ring true, and I got news for you.” You know:
somebody’s cuckolding him. She’s coming home, she says, “Before the day
we met you said your life was tame / I took you to a nightclub and the
whole band knew your name.” [Laughter] You listen to that song later, and
you say, “Yeah, I took her out.”
Or to hear Mose Allison write something like “Long ago a young man
was a strong man, and all the people would stand back when a young man
walked by / Nowadays the old men got all the money and a young man ain’t
nothing in the world these days.” So you just say, “Yeah.”
Songs are useful. They’re like myths. Myths are useful because they
allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for
some people “Fire and Rain” speaks to them in that way. Dustin Hoffman
came to me once and said, “‘Fire and Rain’ allowed me to go from one side
of an experience that I didn’t think I could ever get out of to the other side
of it.” I met Bob Dylan, and he told me he liked “Frozen Man.” That’s all I
need. Miles Davis even once gave me a compliment, so I can remember that
even when reviews are not favorable. I once read a Rolling Stone review of
me that said I was derivative—and it was true—but after that I never read
past my name in print again. It’s like a blowtorch on a flower. It’s a drag.
What did Miles tell you?
Miles said, “You own the key of D.” All right.

It’s interesting that the subject of your father comes up in so many

songs. You’ve said “Walking Man” and “The Frozen Man” are about
him, but he also comes up in songs not about him, such as “Copperline”
and “Traveling Star”—
He’s a part of me. My dad, his wanderlust, his conflict between being a
good father and a man. If you’re a family man, you’re almost a man in a
woman’s world. You have to learn as a man to live in that world. You feel it
as a traveling performer. If you want to stay home and be with your family,
you have to somehow deal with these instincts to go out and sail around the
world. My father had that in spades. He wanted to go to the South Pole and
live under the ice. He wanted to sail a boat single-handed around the world.
This is what he really was interested in. He was itching.

One of your most famous songs is “You’ve Got a Friend,” which Carole
King wrote. How did you come to do it?
She encouraged me to do it. I thought it was amazingly generous of her
to offer me this song when she was about to go into the studio herself. I was
just trying then to complete a second album of songs myself. I was
impressed. But the fact is that she was a Brill Building writer and had
always been trying to place songs. She and Gerry [Goffin] wrote sequels.
So it was the most natural thing for her to try and place a song on someone
else’s album.

She was one of the first to make that transition from a hit songwriter
for others to becoming a performer herself.
That’s right. It was a very conscious effort.
It’s funny, when I started writing songs, because it was the folk music
era and people were doing it all the time, it wasn’t like you had to be a
studied musician. Anyone could basically write a song. So you pretended
that you could, and maybe it would turn out that you were right if you acted
as if you could write a song. It was a very kind way to get into it. Folk
music and the folk scene was, above all, accessible to everybody. It allowed
you to write songs, even if they were really primitive. If my first song had
to be on the level of a Broadway tune, I could have never have gotten off
the ground. But you could write a song like “Something in the Way She
Moves” and get started.

Yet very early on, you brought a sophistication and depth to your
songs. “Fire and Rain,” which came early, is a masterpiece of
songwriting.
I started young. I wrote my first song at the age of fourteen. I started
playing when I was fifteen in front of people. I dropped out of school and
started playing with a band at eighteen. I signed away my publishing at the
age of eighteen. I had put in, by the time that The Beatles picked me up,
five years. Carole, too, was writing some of those amazing hits with Gerry
when she was only fifteen years old. She was just a kid.

“Fire and Rain” is such a direct, authentic statement from your soul.
It is sort of almost uncomfortably close. Almost confessional. The
reason I could write a song like that at that point and probably couldn’t now
is that I didn’t have any sense that anyone would hear it. I started writing
the song while I was in London, toward the end of the time I was working
on the first album. But I still hadn’t had anything out and I was totally
unknown, and I didn’t have any idea or experience of an audience who
would listen to these things. So I assumed they would never be heard, so I
could just write or say anything I wanted. Now I’m very aware, and I have
to make a deal about my stage fright and my anxiety about a lot of people
examining what I do or judging it. The idea that people will pass judgment
on it, that’s not a useful thought; that’s only gonna inhibit me. So I try not to
think about that, obviously. I try to sit with the music and enjoy it.
Right now I have about seven starts on tunes. They’re music and a scrap
of lyric and a direction that the song is going. I have a couple of notebooks
that I carry with me, and in them are little pieces of lyric. Lots and lots of
little pieces of lyric that belong with one or the other of these musical ideas
that I have. They are beginning to organize themselves into another set of
songs.
It’s a strange thing to think in terms of ten or eleven songs or twelve
songs being a batch. If you’re a recording singer-songwriter, you learn to
produce in batches of ten to twelve, like a baker’s dozen. I’m still trained
that way. If I were writing for motion pictures, I would write them one at a
time. If I was writing for musicals, that would be a different paradigm, a
different dynamic.

You always work on many songs at once?

Yeah, I usually work on three or four.

Many of your songs touch on the subject of time, of trying to recapture

the past, of moving into the future. “Copperline” is like a cubist
painting showing many times at once: the present propels you into a
memory of your father, which links him to his past. And then you see it
in the present, but you say it doesn’t change the past: “it can’t touch
my memory.” And of course “Secret o’ Life” says “time isn’t really
real.”
Right. Of course, “Secret o’ Life” is one of those songs which came
intact in an afternoon a few years ago. Yes, trying to get back is often an
element in these songs. Comparing times or remembering old times. “Long
Ago and Far Away” is that.

Did all of “Secret o’ Life” come at once, even the Einstein reference?
Yes. All of it came in short order on a Sunday afternoon.

The philosophy in it—to enjoy the passing of time—has rarely been

expressed like that in a song.
Well, it’s actually a glib thing to say. It’s one thing to enjoy the passage
of time; it’s another to do it on chemotherapy. It’s an easy lyric. I was aware
in putting it out that it was a glib thing to say. A sort of facile thing to say.
But I still like the tune, and a lot of people tell me that they really like it,
that it’s one of their favorites. The idea is hackneyed. To be in the present
moment, to actually be able to tolerate being here now as opposed to being
obsessed with what’s about to happen or reliving something that’s happened
in the past over and over again. They say that the future doesn’t exist and
the past is unchangeable, so the present moment is really all we’ve got. And
that’s the simple message of that song.
It seems your work, and especially your performances in recent years,
reflect that kind of calm acceptance of life.
Acceptance, that’s right. Acceptance and surrender. That and gratitude
are the basic appropriate attitudes. So says the platitude. There’s nothing
new under the sun. It’s a restatement of things that have been said before
but that bear repeating.

What’s new are the songs you’ve written—nobody else wrote them.
And you went through intense addictions which a lot of people didn’t
survive, and you became a healthy, centered, and happy person.
Yes, it just took me a long, long time to integrate. At least to the extent
that I have now. It was a dangerous passage. It well could have killed me.
At six or seven specific points in my life I could have easily died. I made it
through. It just took a long time. I wouldn’t suggest it as a method for
anyone to emulate. It was a lot of wasted time; I’m lucky I didn’t do more
damage than I did. But I supposed it’s what I had to go through to get here.
I’m grateful that I’m here, and I try to remember that I’m lucky and
remember to be grateful. It’s the right attitude.

You wrote many songs out of deep pain. And so many songwriters
complain about the process of writing. Randy Newman has frequently
spoken about how much he hates it. Yet in your work there seems to be
a joy. Do you enjoy it?
Because of “Fire and Rain,” mostly, and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Tonight,” I was sort of cast as somebody who was troubled or hurting. But
it’s not really the case. My instinct is to humor and to ecstasy and to bliss.

You once said your songs came out of melancholy.

Well, that is a place that a lot of them come from. But not all of them.
Some of them are celebratory. And there’s a political tune or two in there
too. “Slap Leather” is one and “Let It All Fall Down” is another. “Gaia” in a
way is political.

It’s very rare that songwriters, with the exception of Stevie Wonder,
can write genuinely happy songs. You’ve done it, though: “Your
Smiling Face” is a great example. It’s truly happy without being corny
or going over that line—
I wouldn’t say that it’s not corny. I would say that it is, and well over the
line. Again, I take what I get. You know, sure, “Your Smiling Face” is just a
relentlessly cheerful and almost saccharine song. But I do, I have a number
of pretty happy songs. But some of them have a wistful aspect to them.
“Secret o’ Life” is a positive song, for sure, but it also has the element of
“since we’re on our way down, we might as well enjoy the ride . . .” The
way down that that refers to is actually entropy in the universe, but that’s
not a very useful concept for people, so I don’t think people think of it as,
well, I don’t know how actually people think of it. If you thought about the
song—

Which I have—
Well, what do you think of when you hear “We’re on our way down”?

That our lifetimes do end, but while we’re in them, to enjoy them, to
enjoy that ride. That’s the message—to enjoy it, as opposed to a song
like “Slip Slidin’ Away” which is basically just about going down.
Though I feel that’s a good song—
Oh, it’s a great song.

Yes. But “Secret o’ Life” has a more positive message about how to deal
with the progression of time.
Right. And the inevitable loss. And the fact that it ends, which is also
unacceptable. But that’s the conundrum of human consciousness. Not that I
have credentials to speak in such terms. But when individuated
consciousness comes up against the idea of individual death, something’s
got to give. That’s why people invent afterlives and versions of the afterlife,
which there is absolutely no evidence for whatsoever. [Laughs]

You feel that’s a human invention?

Oh yeah. I think God is the name of a question. God is not an existing
thing. That’s what we’ve named an unknown. It’s a known as well. It’s not a
matter of whether or not God exists. The need for God to exist is an almost
inevitable human trait. So that’s still an open question. My father was an
atheist, as distinguished from an agnostic. He felt that anyone who
suggested that they represented God was to be deeply distrusted. That
anyone who opened his mouth saying that he represented anything divine
was a charlatan. And furthermore that the world could ill afford that kind of
defended worldview, that kind of defensive tribalism, which is essentially
what it is. He felt it was the enemy of civilization.

Do you share that feeling?

You know, I was raised with that idea. He was a Southerner and a
scientist. The way in which religion presented itself to him was unpalatable.
Sure, that’s what I was given as a set of beliefs from my father.

Yet your songs represent something transcendent. They will exist after
your linear lifetime is over—
Yes, but so will our children.

But the songs don’t age. They exist outside of time.

I think the question comes up how much you can sort of say that you
own a song and that it’s your creation. I do—and it’s really a way of
dodging the question—I do feel they are unconscious occurrences, and I’m
lucky enough to just be the first person to hear the songs that I write. That’s
essentially what it is.

It’s striking to me that you’re reluctant to accept ownership of your

songs when they are praised, but when they are criticized, you do
accept that.
That kind of defensiveness, the epitome of that is the idea that if I turn
myself in, people will go easy on me. [Laughs] I’ll get a lighter sentence if I
turn myself in. So I’m sort of prejudging myself, trying to anticipate
people’s criticism of it. I just shouldn’t be going there at all. I shouldn’t
worry about what people’s judgments might be on my songs. It does
nothing but slow me down. But that’s one of the things that happens over
time: You start with the expectation that nobody will ever hear anything
that you write so you can create anything that you want. You’re just doing it
for yourself and some girl you’re trying to impress. And then the next thing
you know, you’ve had a couple of dodgy reviews and you’re always
worried about how people will take this lyric or that lyric and you’ll worry
about whether they’ll think you’re derivative or whether they’ll think
you’re self-centered or sappy.
I should try to dispense with those anxieties as efficiently as I can.
They’re not of any help to me at all. And if I’m here to do anything, it’s to
write and perform songs and record them. That’s what I’m supposed to do.
The rest of it is really unimportant.
The other day—I don’t know how it came up—my kids were asking me
what jobs are important. I said that parent is probably the most important
job, and after that teacher, and then after that maybe farmer and then maybe
carpenter and then doctor, and policeman. But those are things that
contribute in the present to the quality of other people’s lives. Those are
jobs that do service. Then there are pastimes. For some reason in this
country, we’ve come to glorify greed and raise it to the level of patriotism.
And that’s a neat trick, an Ayn Rand sort of trick.

But you don’t feel artists enrich our lives—

I think they can. I think it’s possible. But it was interesting to me to go
down that list of what I think are important jobs. I don’t know where art
comes into it.

That says a lot about who you are, that you wouldn’t put musician or
songwriter up near the top.
Well, you need a meal before you need a song.

But certainly in your own life, apart from the music you’ve created
yourself, music has enriched your life. Music enriches our lives; it
brings meaning, joy. We wouldn’t die without it, but it’s profound what
it can do.
No, I think you’re entirely right. Sure, it’s true. I love doing this. That’s
the main thing. And it’s just an amazing stroke of good fortune that I’m able
to make a living at it. Because I really have no clue what alternative I might
have. I have weathered some really dodgy times, and I’m in a period in my
life with Kim here in Western Massachusetts, our home and our work are
sort of here in this place that we’ve made for ourselves. It’s a good time.
Everybody’s healthy; everybody’s well. We worry about things in our
immediate field of view. But mostly because, as I said before, human
consciousness evolved to look for trouble. I just would hope that I could
enjoy this period, because I’ve really come up smelling like a rose. I’ve
come up in a good place.

It does seem like a wonderful environment here.

It is. It would be nice to try to communicate some of that too. It would
be nice to try to write more joy, to write more celebratory stuff. If there’s
any such thing—although I’ve denied it for the past four hours [laughs]—if
there’s any such thing as a conscious effort in songwriting, I’ll try to steer it
in that direction. But who knows? As I heard myself say in a performance
recently, in my way of introducing “Traveling Star,” here’s another
traveling song, and after a while you’re gonna get a lot of those. If you
spend your life traveling on the bus on tour, after a while you just get a lot
of traveling songs. And that’s a time-honored theme.

That one, “Traveling Star,” is so beautiful. It brings in your father, and

there’s so much heart there. It’s more than just another highway song.
It’s a song about being a man and trying to also live civilized. One of
the central issues of modern life is what to do with male energy in a
civilized context. And how a man’s energy cannot be too destructive.
Because the instincts that men have—to conquer, to hunt, to procreate—
eventually they start to hurt the earth. The tribal warrior, that’s the dynamic
that’s sort of directly opposed to civilization. If we collapse into anything,
we collapse into tribalism. The world can’t afford it anymore. It’s one thing
when you’re throwing a stone; it’s another when it’s an atomic weapon. So
what does a man do in this world? How can you be a man and live with the
sheets and the blankets and babies and all?

Well, a lot of us grew up with you as a role model. That you could have
this powerful male energy but also embrace and create something
tender and beautiful. That a man could reach that kind of tenderness—
in a song like “Anywhere Like Heaven,” for example—was an
important model to emulate.
Yes, that’s right. It’s a difficult thing. We get so much macho crap. And
we are paying a huge price for the macho fantasies of people who have
bought into—dare I say it—the Bush administration. That’s what they’ve
been selling, this macho crap. It just immediately shows how useless it is.
It’s like trying to fix a watch with a hammer. It takes sensitivity, it takes
skills of people, it takes understanding, and it takes patience. It takes
embracing them. We’re supposed to embrace instead some tribal tough-guy
stance? We’re gonna smoke then out; we’re gonna hit them hard? We’re
paying a high price for their fantasy. We’re also paying, in this country, a
high price for this fantasy of people who want to own guns. Something that
does absolutely nothing which is positive. At least a cigarette makes you
feel good. What does a gun do except kill, except punch a hole in a man?
And we have one for every man, woman, and child in this country. There
are 300 million of them. Maybe 500 million. It’s crazy. So we’re paying a
big price for their fantasies.
I suppose you could say that one of the themes of my music is how to
become a man.

Someone once asked you if you were ever embarrassed by any of your
songs, and the only one you mentioned was “Blossom,” which you said
was too floral, too cute. But I’ve always loved that song.
No, “Blossom” is fine. It’s not that I am so much ashamed of any songs;
I do get a little squirmy about some of them. It’s not so much that they are
confessional but they are so relentlessly self-referred. Again, I accept that
that’s the way I write. But it is pretty self-absorbed. And that’s the thing that
makes me uncomfortable. But again, it’s what I seem to have done. I don’t
know, I might have another batch of songs or two in me. Irving Berlin
continued to write into his nineties. And he wrote a lot of good stuff in his
seventies.

It’s more common for songwriters to do their best work in their

twenties. But you and Simon and few others continue to do it—
Randy Newman continues to write great stuff too. “I Miss You” or
“Every Time It Rains.” Great stuff. It’s amazing.

Randy, like you, is extremely down on himself. He doesn’t take praise

—
 No, he doesn’t at all. He’s extremely down on himself. Maybe it’s the
thing of “If I turn myself in, they’ll go easy on me.”

And he seems to judge himself by the marketplace, how many hits he’s
had compared to other songwriters.
I know.

And you once said the only thing that really gets between you and your
music is the industry itself.
You hire people to advise you and sort of help you. And they end up
thinking that their priorities are the important ones. If you hire a business
manager, he thinks that you should be thinking about business all the time.
And the same thing is true with someone whose job is in publicity and
promotion: they think that’s what your job is—to publicize yourself. But in
fact that just gets in the way. You just want as much publicity as can bring
people’s attention to what your project is, and then let it go. Because that
one will kick back at you. And if you spend so much time with that hat on
so that your job is actually being a celebrity, then you’re standing on real
thin ice. That’s been shown over and over again.

Do you judge your work on how popular it is, on album sales?

Yeah, you can’t help but do that. You can’t help it. The tendency in
capitalism is to put a dollar value on everything. That people don’t feel
comfortable trying to figure things out until they know what the dollar
value of it is. So that’s our way of evaluating people, and we end up doing it
to ourselves, saying “I have this much worth, this bank account.”

Does that mean you feel the songs that were hits are better than the
others?
“Only a Dream in Rio” wasn’t a hit. Neither was “It’s Enough to Be on
Your Way.” Or “Caroline I See You.” But I do think that’s some of my best
stuff. Or “Carry Me on My Way.” I know whether a song is good or not
relatively. The thing that shows me is how often they show up in a set. And
sometimes a song is in a set because an audience likes it. And there’s
nothing like giving an audience something they like. That’s very
compelling. But the other reason I like songs is because they’re easy to
perform and you connect emotionally with them when you play them.

I liked that once, when somebody asked you if you got tired of
performing “Fire and Rain,” you said no. They wanted to hear that it
had lost its power for you, and you said it hadn’t.
Sometimes something can get a little stale and you have to rotate it out
for a while. There is a performance mentality. A sort of personality type that
wants to perform and is very interested in the reaction of an audience. And
I’m not saying it’s terribly evolved. To be stuck in this place where I
constantly need that kind of affirmation. But it does compel me. I’m very
interested in having a performance go well and having the audience pleased
by it and getting them. Putting something across. It’s what I do. For better
or for worse, it’s the thing that really motivates me.

Does it bring you some sense of joy or contentment that your songs live
on, that they have their own life?
Without a doubt. The idea that they might.

They are. Presently.

Yes. It’s hugely validating. And it does, it makes you feel great. The
epitome of that for me was that I hit a low point in ’84, ’85. I bottomed out,
and I went through a year of awful withdrawal from the drugs I’d been
addicted to. And I came out the other end really trashed. And a marriage
had gone down, and I really just felt awful. And I went to Brazil and walked
out onstage in this soccer stadium there. And there were three hundred
thousand people who knew the words to “Fire and Rain,” to “Blossom,” to
“Sunny Skies.” And I didn’t even know this audience existed. And not only
that, it was Brazil, so they were all singing on key and in time. [Laughter]
You know, a kid on the street there has better time than half the studio
percussionists that you run into in Los Angeles and New York. It was a
huge thrill for me to discover that, completely unbeknownst to me, there
were this million or so people in this country far away for whom I was a
part of their life. And in this very highly, richly musical place. And it really
picked me up and turned me around. It also happened to be the moment
when this country shook off this twenty-year junta that had been ruling
them, and it was the night of the first elections in twenty years. And the
whole place was absolutely electrified. I doubt I’ll ever experience anything
like it.
The wall coming down was equivalent to it. Being in Berlin when the
wall came down. So it really put me back on my feet. So that was the very
epitome of the things which you mentioned, having your songs mean
something to people.
And of course, they are very personal expressions. So often when I meet
people and they feel as though they know me, they’re actually not too far
off. They probably have as good of a take on me as you could expect a
stranger to have. Much more than you’d expect a stranger to have.

Well, I think you should put songwriter higher on that list. Because it is
a lonesome road, as you have written, and songs like your songs unite
us, and they bring a lot of beauty and resonance to our lives.
There’s no question about it. And you can have a song that says
“onward, Christian soldiers” or “fight, fight . . .” But “there are ties between
us, all men and women living on the earth, ties of hope and love, of sister
and brotherhood.” That’s the direction I think we need to go in. As corny as
it seems, it’s a fact. So again, I’m gonna sidestep responsibility and credit to
a certain extent. I feel when I’m playing a concert, I have a common
experience with the audience that’s there. I’m making the kind of music I
know how to make, but we’re both basically having the same experience.
Me and my band are making the music, but we’re also listening to it. And
listening to music is very much like making music. It’s like 90 percent the
same experience.

And when songs have so much genuine heart in it, people feel that. “My
Traveling Star” has that.
Yes, “My Traveling Star” is as good a song as I’ve written recently.

I look forward to the next ones.

Me too. I don’t know when I’ll get around to it. But as I say, there are a
lot of seedlings.
OceanofPDF.com
Randy Newman
 The World Isn’t Fair
Los Angeles, California 2007

He’s at the piano. It’s one place that he always seems the most comfortable.
Like many musicians, his thoughts are musical as often as they are verbal.
When we talk about his songs, he frequently starts playing and singing to
make a point. And his playing is always quite astounding—intricate,
sometimes thundering, complex arrangements set against beautiful
melodies. (Although he often jokes that he isn’t much a melodist, in fact
he’s one of the best.)
Today we’re sharing the stage at the annual ASCAP Songwriters Expo,
where it’s my fortuitous mission to interview Randy onstage for a vast
audience of fans and songwriters. He’s onstage, doing a sound check. We’re
at the Hollywood Renaissance hotel, now ritzy but once a funky Holiday
Inn where this writer was known to pool-crash on occasion back in the day.
Later, during the event, I am introduced to the crowd, and then I, in turn,
introduce Randy as the crowd spontaneously erupts into a standing ovation.
We talk—Randy is in showbiz mode, making lots of jokes to great gusts of
laughter—and he bursts frequently into song: “Political Science,” “Sail
Away,” “Marie,” “I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It),” “The World Isn’t Fair,”
“Great Nations of Europe,” “Davy the Fat Boy,” “Simon Smith and the
Amazing Dancing Bear,” “I Love L.A.,” and others are all performed for
the spellbound crowd.
 How does one introduce Randy Newman? It’s not easy, ’cause there’s a
lot to say and it’s easy to get overblown. But unafraid as always of
unchained hyperbole, I said something quite close to this: Some human
beings are way more talented than most. It’s true. You think of someone like
Michelangelo, for example. He was not only a pretty great sculptor but also
a great painter and a poet. George Gershwin was a great songwriter,
composer, and pianist but also an accomplished photographer. And Randy
is one of these people.
“He’s one of the most important American songwriters now or ever.
He’s defined an entire school of songwriting—so often in the press we see
songs referred to as “like a Randy Newman song”—because his work is
really on a level all its own. He’s defined the art of writing songs in
character. Musically and lyrically he has created a world no one else exists
in. Some try, but nobody else does it like he does. Randy’s songs are
sophisticated, brilliant, often hilarious, often historical, timeless—and
endlessly relevant. And musically they are compelling and beautiful. If he
was only a melodist, a composer, he would be one of the best. But he’s also
one of the greatest living lyricists there is, despite Sondheim’s problem with
Randy’s inclination to rhyme “girl” with “world.” Sondheim never wrote
“Louisiana 1927” or “The World Isn’t Fair.”
But there’s more: since Randy’s heartbreakingly beautiful score for
Milos Forman’s Ragtime in 1981, he’s become one of the world’s foremost
film composers. Other songwriters have written scores—and other film
scorers have written songs—but never in the history of the cinema has there
been a serious songwriter who is also such an accomplished and
experienced and great film composer. Usually people are good at one or the
other—but not both. Randy is a seriously great film scorer—as the scores to
Ragtime, The Natural, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Cars, Meet the Fokkers,
Avalon, and so many others attest. And unlike others in the field—he isn’t a
“hummer”—he writes and conducts full orchestral scores that stand up to
repeated listenings, as I know well, having a seven-year-old who loves
nothing more than to watch Monsters, Inc., for example, thousands and
thousands of times.
That was pretty much all of my introduction before I brought Randy to
the stage. And I don’t know if he heard it, but I know if he did, he’d bristle
at the comparisons to Gershwin or Michelangelo. He’s extremely self-
critical. When told, for example, of the exceeding genius exhibited in a
song like “Great Nations of Europe,” which miraculously condenses the
brutality of sixteenth-century European history into a single hilarious and
pointed song, he remarks on the one line in it he felt wasn’t perfect.
Yet it’s this yearning for perfection that makes him the artist he is. It’s
the “divine dissatisfaction” that Martha Graham spoke of years ago, that
quality in all great artists that is never satisfied because art is always
human, never perfect, and yet they strive for the absolute. And it’s that
drive that compels him to always expand his range and his expression
musically and lyrically and results in a new album every few years or so
that is as great or greater than his previous masterpieces. Unlike so many of
his peers who peaked decades ago, Randy Newman is still at it, still writing
songs in his sixties that match the level of the masterpieces he wrote in his
twenties.

Broken windows and empty hallways,

A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with gray.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.
“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” Randy Newman

When asked about his ability to maintain quality throughout all these
years, on more than one occasion he’s answered that it’s because
songwriting has always been a matter of “life or death” for him. Which is
not to say he enjoys the process of writing songs—he doesn’t. (Maybe
because he’s created such a formidable creative challenge in his life:
matching the level of previous Randy Newman songs—no easy feat.) But
he thinks about this, this pattern of popular songwriters peaking early in
life. He received many laughs at the expo by saying that although most pop
songwriters did their best work in their twenties, none of them have retired.
He then sent the crowd into hysterics with a song he wrote, featured on Bad
Love, about this very subject, continuing to do it when you have nothing left
to do, called “I’m Dead, (But I Don’t Know It).” [“I have nothing left to say
/ But I’m gonna say it anyway.”]
He’s capable of writing songs on subjects other songwriters don’t even
dream of approaching. He’s written about racism in America, small-
mindedness, and prejudice better than any other songwriter ever. Though
slavery in America and the genocide of Native Americans are momentous
chapters of not-so-distant American history, our greatest songwriters have
rarely broached either topics. Yes, Dylan does refer to the “ghosts of slavery
ships” in “Blind Willie McTell,” but that’s about it. Whereas Randy wrote
one of the most poignant and telling songs ever about slavery, “Sail Away”
(written in the character of a slave trader luring young black men to his
boat), and on his album, Bad Love, he succeeded in entailing the twisted
history of Columbus and his effect on this land and others in “Great Nations
of Europe.”
His songs contain solid content. Whereas so many songs we hear are
sadly devoid of any details at all, any richness, any human texture, Randy’s
are always about something—a person, a place, an event, or a bit of history.
His use of history—which he started years prior to the Google-era of
instantly accessed history—is widespread throughout his work, from the
landmark “Louisiana 1927” about the great flood that decimated the state
(and was the most poignant of all songs sung after the horrors of Katrina) to
“Sail Away” to “Kingfish,” written about Huey “Every Man a King” Long,
who was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928, to the masterful “Great
Nations of Europe.” And in the remarkable “The World Isn’t Fair” from
Bad Love he somehow succeeds in connecting the history of Karl Marx to
the modern tale of rich “froggish” men with young beautiful wives to
crystallize the inequality in the world. It’s a song only Randy could write,
and he did.
Many years ago, when Saturday Night Live was still new, Paul Simon
was the host, and to introduce his friend Randy Newman, he played the first
verse of Randy’s beautiful love song “Marie.” Of all of Simon’s
appearances on the show, it’s the only time he performed a song he didn’t
write, with the exception of his duet on “Here Comes the Sun” with George
Harrison. His performance of “Marie,” which is perhaps the ultimate love
song, was momentous. Here was one of the world’s greatest songwriters
letting us in on what was still somewhat of a secret back then in 1974:
Randy Newman was among us. “Marie” remains remarkable in Randy’s
work not only because it is heartbreakingly beautiful but because it’s such a
straight-ahead love song, something Randy has always said he wished he
could write but rarely did because his voice wasn’t made for outright
declarations of ardor. But to get around that problem, he put the song in
character and employed an unprecedented technique: having the narrator
get drunk enough to spill out emotions he’d never be able to express sober.
Simon, of course, isn’t the only famous songwriter to sing Randy’s
praises. When I interviewed Dylan in 1993 he spoke of the greatness of
legendary songwriters Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. And when I
asked him to cite a living songwriter who was great, the first who came to
his mind was Randy. “There aren’t many songwriters in Randy’s league,”
he said. “He knows music. A song like ‘Louisiana’ or ‘Cross Charleston
Bay’ [‘Sail Away’], it just doesn’t get any better than that.”

The chief distinguishing characteristic of your work is your uncanny

ability to write in character. How did that start?
Randy Newman: What I did for years was I tried to be Carole King. It
was at Metric Music, in Hollywood. Jackie DeShannon and Leon Russell
were there. When I started at sixteen Carole King was just the greatest, I
thought. And I still do. And so when Gene McDaniels would need a follow-
up, or the Chiffons, she would always beat us. Occasionally Jackie got a
record.
The first song I wrote I was writing for Frank Sinatra Jr., who, in
combination with his father, makes a very good Harry Connick Jr.
[Laughter] So I was writing a song, and I couldn’t take it. So I wrote this
[plays “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear”]. I think that was the
first one. And then I justified it since by saying why shouldn’t songwriters
have the latitude that a short-story writer, like John Updike, has when he
writes a short story or a novel—it doesn’t have to be he who is the
protagonist.

What was the reaction of people to that kind of song? Did anyone say,
Randy, this is not what you should do?
They already said that to me when I thought I had a great follow-up for
Bobby Vee. Carole had “Take Good Care of My Baby,” and I’d come in
with this [plays a slow shuffle]. That’s not bad. [Sings] “I know someday
I’ll find a boy who’ll softly say, little girl, can I take you away . . .” Oops, I
just modulated without meaning to. [Laughter] I wrote that when I was very
young. For The Ventures. That was called “Take Me Away.” I don’t know if
anyone ever recorded it.

“Davy the Fat Boy” was among your first character songs—
Yeah. Originally it was totally different. Using the orchestra was so
important to me, coming from the family I did, that I would tear up songs
just so I could use the orchestra and get the place right. It was one of the
first things I ever conducted. And when you conduct a whole orchestra, it’s
like this weight. They slow you down unless you do certain tricks that I
don’t know. [Laughter] So it’s like building a mountain that you can’t
climb. [Sings dramatic intro at a very slow tempo] So I did arrangements
for myself that I couldn’t sing. And you’d see, it was right in the
mainstream of what pop was doing at that time. [Laughter]

“Davy the Fat Boy,” like so many of your songs, is still just as relevant
as it was—
And the income hasn’t increased. I think that made four cents, that song.
Some of my songs with a good deal more shittiness to them earned a lot
more. Like this one [sings “I’ll Be Home”]. “I’ll be home / I’ll be home /
When your nights are troubled / And you’re all alone / When you’re feeling
down / And need some sympathy / There’s no one else around / To keep
you company / Remember baby, you can always count on me / I’ll be home
/ I’ll be home / I’ll be home.” That song earns more than others. Wrote it for
Mary Hopkin. But, I mean, it’s songs like that, that if I’d gone down that
road, I’d be oil painting in Kauai today. [Laughs] I’ve been very lucky,
considering the type of writing I’ve done. People who are fans of mine. I
think their favorite songs of mine are the ballads, the ones that are when I’m
closer to the mainstream than, say, “Davy the Fat Boy.”

“Davy” really fits today’s climate of American Idol and other shows
people love, which ridicule people.
The song is about the narrator, who is so callous he tells Davy’s mother
and father that he’s gonna be a pal to Davy and then he puts him in the
circus. I find that funny for that reason. That degree of meanness. It’s not
like a cautionary tale or anything. None of us are that bad, or if we are, we
don’t admit it. I’ve written songs about people who are worse.
Leonard Cohen told me, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I
would go there more often.”
Yeah, I’m so tired. I’m even tired of hearing myself say that. I’m tired
of hearing myself whine about it. So I’m stuck now with saying nothing.
But it’s true. It’s not easy. I talked to [Don] Henley, and he said, “I haven’t
written anything in five years.” But he was fighting that war.

You’ve been writing songs now for decades. Do you find it ever gets
easier?
It’s always easy for me when I have an assignment, a movie assignment.
Everything I’ve ever written for a movie has come relatively easy. And
once you get started on something, for yourself, sometimes that will go
quickly. But starting can be difficult. I haven’t learned anything that I didn’t
know before. The real secret to that, like so much else, is stamina. Hanging
in there. And showing up every day.
With a movie deadline, you have no choice. And what it does is, for
motion picture composers, a lot of them, when you don’t have to do
anything, after having to do something every day, every day, every day—
James Newton Howard just did King Kong in four weeks—so when you
don’t have to do anything, you don’t want to do anything. I mean, there
ain’t nothing I want to do. Not much past brushing your teeth. At least,
that’s the way I feel about it. It’s not healthy.

So you haven’t been working on any songs for yourself?

I got a few. But it’s coming funny. Usually I write a really simple kind
of country song to start with, and I have done that. Pretty much so, yeah.
But I’m leaving them. I’m not a good finisher anymore. I’m not finishing
off the three or four that I have. I’m hoping that I’ll have a better idea.

When you say you need stamina, some songwriters have said their best
ideas come all at once, words and music. Does that happen to you?
Sometimes, yeah.

But it takes stamina to stick with it?

It takes stamina to go in there and sit and work at it unless you’re
optimistic about a final result. Which I haven’t learned. I’ll start, and it will
sound terrible to me, absolutely terrible. I never think I’m gonna get
anywhere with what I’m playing, where things are taking me. No plan. So it
makes you want to quit and do something else. Particularly when you don’t
exactly have to do it. The world isn’t waiting for the next Randy Newman
record, like, you’ve got to have this record. Those days are gone for the
whole record business.
I saw Paul Simon play at some special memorial kind of thing, and I
also heard James Taylor—on the last picture I did, he sang a song [“Our
Town,” from Cars]—and both those guys were great. Simon did “Bridge
Over Troubled Water,” but he was playing different kinds of chords with it.
When I get a song I don’t mess with it; I leave it alone.
But I admire both those guys for looking for chords other than I-IV-V-I.
It’s not easy. They’re trying to find something better, not just taking what
comes. Sometimes you just take what comes, and that’s the best thing to do.
Not revise.

Both of them are great at using guitar to come up with some

wonderfully complex chord progressions with great melodies—
Yeah, Simon, and Taylor too. That’s pretty fancy, that stuff—

James uses augmented chords sometimes—

Sting will too. But it’s slightly different. It’s jazz oriented.

Do you find the use of the guitar in songwriting has diminished the
harmonic range of popular songs?
Well, in rock and roll itself, from 1953 or 1954, the beat itself did a lot
to diminish harmonic invention and to narrow the harmonic vocabulary and
make it small. When something is beating behind you, I-IV-V just sounds
great. “Louie, Louie”—I like it. And I love a lot of that stuff. Carole King,
early on, knew the repertory. It’s obvious she knew Irving Berlin, Rodgers,
and all that stuff, and there’ll be some of that stuff in her work.
But it really did do that, and you can see why the old dinosaurs—
they’re too good to be called dinosaurs, actually—but arrangers who did
the big-band stuff and people who knew that music and loved it, they would
just hate rock and roll. They just would never get over it, how really simple
and primitive it would sound to them. And their attempts at it were terrible.
You would see sometimes in movies when some composer had to do a rock
and roll thing, it would be just embarrassingly bad. They just had no feel
for it. It’s not often that people can do both.

Do you think the piano is inherently a better instrument for writing

inventive harmonic music?
Well, I can’t think of too many major composers, except Berlioz, who
played guitar. But he got places. If you’re a tremendous musician, it doesn’t
matter much.

Such as The Beatles—

Yeah. And they get the piano, easily. When I tried to play guitar I never
got past the F chord. It hurt my fingers. I didn’t have the stamina for that.
But no, not necessarily. And it’s hard for me to say. I haven’t listened close
to what’s going on, but in rap sometimes it’s harmonically fancy. Or heavy
metal. I remember hearing Megadeth, and they sometimes go to odd places.
Maybe it’s just things bumping into each other, but it sounds like they’re
trying to do something. It’s not simple. Jimmy Page, it wasn’t simple what
he did, and that’s guitar.
What with layering now and synthesizers, you can get to those places.
And there’s nothing wrong with a straight diatonic approach in a pop song.
I’ve done it most of the time.

Simon, like you, is a rare example of someone whose words are as

inspired and inventive as the music. There aren’t many songwriters—
even Tin Pan Alley writers—whose words were as good as their music.
No. It’s the rarest commodity in pop music. Because it’s not really
wanted that much. And the beat, the groove, is an overpowering thing.
[Sings part of “Staying Alive,” by The Bee Gees] Like I say, these are
ancient references, because I haven’t paid attention to [laughs] anything
current. It’s the music that does it.
When I first started hearing rap, it was straight rap. There was no
melody. I knew in general they would have to get some hooks in there. The
public is never gonna put up with something they can’t sing along with. I
knew at some point that would change. And now some of those guys like 50
Cent are singing the fifth. And Eminem is too. And they’re getting music in
the middle of things.

Do either words or music come more easily to you than the other?
[Pause] I think words that interest me are a little more difficult. I’m not
so sure that I wouldn’t have been more comfortable in a world of words. If I
hadn’t had music in my family and all, I’m not so sure that I would have
been a musician. If I wasn’t pushed in that direction, if I didn’t just have to
make music. But words I may have had a gift for. I probably don’t anymore.
When I try to write a letter I can’t find the right words to use.

When you approach songs, do you finish a melody before you finish a
lyric?
Sometimes. Never the obverse. Or I’ll finish the form of it and know
where it’s got to go.

Do you ever come up with ideas for songs when you’re not working at
the piano?
Very rarely. More so recently. I’ve started carrying a notebook around
because I have gotten ideas apart from the piano. I got one the other day
that I liked. But usually it was always when I was sitting there. It always
was when I was compelled to, when I had to. When I didn’t, I didn’t think
about it.
“That would make a good song” hasn’t occurred to me too much.
Sometimes when I’ve read something or seen something on television, I
might get an idea. There was more of that in the last record, I think, than
there has been.

What was that topic you came up with?

I’d like to see if I could write about the big change in Europe and
America, where—it’s not news—that we’re drifting apart and that it’s to our
detriment that they’re doing a little better than we are in terms of education,
in terms of higher taxes and getting the programs that are really better,
better phone reception, better roads, less poverty. And they want to pull
away. Naturally, the mass culture is still McDonald’s and the [American]
movies and Starbucks and things like that. That’s our big hit everywhere.
But in general they don’t want to be like us. They always protested that they
didn’t want to be like us, but they did. And now they really don’t. And we
should emulate them in some ways. That’s a change, and it’s a good one.
But it’s not very singable. But I can do it, probably.

You’ve taken so many subjects that might not seem ostensibly singable,
but you’ve pulled it off—
Yeah, that’s true.

Has there ever been a subject you couldn’t make into a song?
No. Oh yeah, there have been a bunch of things I couldn’t do for
whatever reason, but I can’t think of anything that you couldn’t deal with.
Music isn’t great for transmitting a lot of information. You can tell a lot
about character by what you have him say. I sometimes forget that that’s
what I like best about some of the stuff that I’ve written, that it reveals more
about the narrator than he knows about himself.
On the last record I made, which was too long ago, was Bad Love, and I
did want to see if I could legitimately do pop music at the age of fifty-five
or whatever age I was then and write from that perspective. And not an old
croc perspective, necessarily, but where you could legitimately do it and
still be doing that kind of music. All that talk about “we’re not doing this
when we’re thirty,” or “we’re not doing this when we’re forty,” there’s
some validity to it, and everyone forgot about it, you know, because they
just went on. You know, “Here we are—we’re still doing it.” But some of
the stuff doesn’t work anymore because they’re too old.
But I’m satisfied that I succeeded in doing that, and those songs, as a
bunch of songs, aren’t inferior to what I’ve been doing. I think they’re just
as good as any batch of songs that I’ve written for any record. But I don’t
want to write from that perspective all the time. I don’t always want to be
an old guy chasing a young girl and that kind of thing. I don’t want to have
to do that. I don’t want to have to be in my songs. I never have.

Occasionally you are in your songs yourself, as in “I Miss You” or

“Dixie Flyer.”
Yeah, but it’s not exactly true. They’re about me, yeah. In fact, they’re
all about me—as I’ve said to you before, you can guess more about what
I’m like and what I think from my stuff than you could about people who
are ostensibly self-revelatory in what they’re doing. If you had to guess
what I think about this, that, or the other, you’d probably be right.

Bad Love certainly isn’t inferior to your past work. Which is unusual:
most songwriters wrote their best work in their twenties—
Ninety percent of them.

And there are few who haven’t.

Have you ever written about that?

Yeah. I spoke to Simon about that.

What does he think? He’s done it. Neil Young has—

He said, “I can do it because I’m still as interested in it as ever.”

And really focused.

How do you explain your ability to do it?

Well, it’s always been life or death to me, like it is to him. And also I
think doing the movies has kept me in shape. Able to do it. I care a lot about
it, but that’s not to say other people don’t.
The thing about it is, that’s interesting to me, is why. Why during that
period of time did Lennon and McCartney, Carole King—and why not
later? And I think some of it, some of it is focus, but some of it is
competitive. When Lennon was with McCartney, and they were writing not
with but against each other, [laughs] in a way, when you’re in the middle of
it, when you’re in Aldon Music or you’re in a group and there’s other
people writing all around you, that’s when people did that great work. The
great songwriters of the period right before it, they stayed, they were doing
it for thirty years, forty years. They were writing for other people; they
weren’t up there themselves, performing and making tons of money and
being warped by fame and fortune.
I once talked to Chrissie Hynde [see page 406]. I had never met her, and
I saw her at a recording studio a couple of years ago. And I said, “Geez, I’m
really a fan of your writing. I think you’re one of the best writers ever in
pop music.” And it was like she didn’t know what I was talking about. She
thought I was kidding her or something. It’s like she didn’t feel that way
about herself.
But it isn’t like classical music, in which people get better and better.
People do their best work before they’re twenty-seven quite often in rock
and roll. Much more often than not.

Many songwriters I’ve spoken to, like Simon or Petty, seem to really
enjoy the process—
I don’t. I hate it.

And yet you continue to grow in your work.

I don’t know whether Simon enjoys the process. He never told me he
enjoys it. Petty might. It certainly is a saner way to go about things, to look
forward to it, to love writing. Stevie Nicks used to love writing. She would
write hundreds of songs. But Henley and I always hated it. [Laughs] But
you know the old saying: “Only a fool would write for anything other than
money.” That’s one of the sayings. Another one is “Writing can be very
difficult, but having written something is great.”

Yeah, you’ve said in the past that when you get something going, then
you enjoy it.
Yeah, when something’s working. The first flush is good. You might get
down on it the next day or something. But that first thing is the reason for
going through hours of dead time.

When you are working on something that is going well, do you always
finish it?
I’ve had things lately that I’ve put aside, but I used to finish them. I
might be faking. I’ll think, “Oh, I’m happy enough with that” and go watch
television. It’s like I’m getting lazy or something. And also it’s all pretty
simple harmonically. It’s bothering me. Blues-oriented stuff. I get better and
better over the years at writing for my voice. And it’s limiting. If I’m
writing for assignment, like “When She Loved Me” for Sarah McLachlan,
or a different song for James Taylor, which I just wrote for Cars, I write
differently. It’s like if I’m writing for an oboe or a bassoon.
Did you ever think you would be a songwriter for other people?
I thought I was gonna be a movie composer. But then Lenny Waronker
suggested that I try to write some songs. And like Mickey Rooney and Judy
Garland, he went around pushing me. So I remember playing for Lou Adler.
And I would play the melody along with myself. (Later he called me
“Lenny’s Robot.”) I was seventeen. And he said, “You know, Carole King,
she plays something different when she sings.” And I thought she was the
greatest at the time. And I was right. So I did.
And then we went to see Leiber and Stoller out in New York. And
Leiber said I should move out there. He said, “You’d be one of the top
people in five years.” I was real young, real young.

And that didn’t appeal to you, the idea of moving to New York?
No, I was still going to school, I think. But Leiber is certainly one of the
best pop lyricists of the century, in my opinion. He’s right up there with
anybody. Those lyrics he wrote, a ton of those things, are really great. It’s
funny stuff. It’s remarkable.

Was it at age seventeen that you wrote your first song?

Sixteen. The very first song was called “Don’t Tell on Me.” [Sings
plodding melody] And the next one was “They Tell Me It’s Summer,”
which was recorded by The Fleetwoods.

Was it writing for yourself that shaped your songwriting approach?

Yes. If I’d had a voice like Simon or Sting or a voice that I saw as
seductive in some kind of way, or like a romantic hero, maybe I’d have
written that kind of thing. Though I’ll tell you, I’m not sure it would have
interested me. I remember I changed before I started recording. I changed
with “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear” in ’65. That was the
one. Because I couldn’t stand it, what I was doing. Maybe I couldn’t do it as
well as Goffin and King or Mann and Weil. But there are millions of ways
of saying “I love you” or “I don’t love you,” and that’s what 95 percent of
the repertory is. But I just didn’t want to do it. And I was writing for Frank
Sinatra Jr. about some girl named Susie. [Sings simple tune] But I just said,
“Jesus Christ.” I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t care what I rhymed with
what. So I changed.
Was it a conscious choice to start writing from a character’s point of
view?
No. Not conscious. But once I did it, I liked it. The song being slightly
oblique. The song is about some guy who has some kind of gimmick and
uses it and is kind of cynical. It isn’t as if a lot of people followed me down
that road or that there’s been a lot of people before me doing it. I can think
of almost no one. There isn’t much of it. Because the medium is made to be
more direct so people can put themselves in it. They’re not used to hearing
irony. More so with rap, when people are characters more often. But you’re
not used to it on the radio.

Yeah, but maybe because people can’t do it. There are people who have
tried but haven’t been able to pull it off like you have.
That may be. You have to get the diction right. You have to have the
vocabulary that the person you’re writing about would have. And you have
to have it not be you. But I mean, if I could write “I Love You Just the Way
You Are,” I’d have been happy to have done it. But I would have written
the whole thing, and at the end I’d have gone, “I love you just the way you
are, you stupid bitch” and blown my chances.

There are songwriters like Sondheim who have pulled it off, but he has
the context of theater.
Yeah, he’s writing for shows. He said that if he didn’t have an
assignment or some reason to write a song, he doesn’t know how he’d do it.
He did a good job writing that song for Madonna [“Sooner or Later” from
Dick Tracy].

One of the best pieces of advice you gave me about songwriting is

“Don’t let the critic become bigger than the creator.”
Yeah, it’ll kill you. But I’m not able to do it. Not always. It’ll shut you
down. Sometimes I just won’t let it go. Like I say, now all this stuff I’m
writing is so blues oriented, so simple, that I’m a little dissatisfied in a
sense. But I could be wrong, and I may end up finishing these songs.
This reminds me of the first time I met Leiber. I talked to him about
songwriting, and I was writing all these songs with straight eighth-note
accompaniment. I was doing that before The Beatles did it. I did it really
early for some reason. And I complained to him about the fact that that was
what I was doing, and he said, “If that happens, you just write yourself out
of it. You let yourself do it, and eventually you’ll get tired of it and think of
something else.” And that’s very good advice, and I’ve thought of it often.
You make yourself just finish them off, and do it, and you will move on. It
may be even more likely when I was twenty than now, but I am pretty sure
that that’s the case.

You’ve always written both bluesy songs, such as “Lucinda,” as well as

harmonically complex ones. What affects which kind you do?
Sometimes my songs become a little bit more complex when I have to
think about the chords and write them down and move the voices around.
The Kurt Weill harmonic vocabulary is something I could sing to. But it is
something that I think about. In fact, I’m thinking about it too much. You
know, you can find substitutes for the blues. When I say bluesy, I mean this:
[goes to piano and plays a cavalcade of moving chords, far beyond a
standard blues]. I mean, I’m including that kind of shuffling around.

You’ve been playing for so many years—do your hands go to the same
patterns?
Yeah. [Laughs] They go to shuffles. I have to not do that. Rock and roll
players are really used to straight time. And I like shuffles too. That’s what I
love. I have to force myself not to do it.

Do you consciously experiment with chords you’ve never played

before?
Yeah, all the time. In movies, for sure. And in songs, yeah. You can do
it to the detriment of what you’re working on. I’ve torn songs apart, just so I
can do something with the orchestra. But I’ve stopped doing it because I
thought I was hurting the song, slowing it down.

Do you generate your melodies from chords, or do you think of melody

lines separate from chords?
I’ll sing it against what I’m playing. Though I’ll tell you, what movies
do and have done to me, in part, when you write for an orchestra, you’ve
sort of got to move the right ways. The rules of harmony apply; it sounds
better if you follow these stupid basic things. Like contrary motion, and no
parallel fifths, and things like that. And it just sounds better to me, and it
works better, voicings and stuff. So then when I’m playing songs when I’m
not even thinking about it, I’ll do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do. My
hands will go to the right place, but it’s the wrong place for the song.
And then when you have to write a melody down, to dodge it, when you
do an arrangement, it changes things. Some of the things I sing, when my
ear’s in shape, they sound out to me. They didn’t bother me when I did
them, and they don’t bother me, ultimately. But I probably could have done
it differently. It’s a different kind of writing.

You said your film work keeps you in shape for songwriting—
I would think so, because you’re doing creative work every day, and
you’re forced to do it, and it’s harmonically, certainly, more complicated
than songs. The harmonic vocabulary is bigger than what it is in a song.

It was interesting to me that you said you didn’t want to go to the Hal
Wilner tribute to your music because you didn’t want to hear people do
your songs wrong.
It wasn’t exactly that. I just didn’t want to be like a gray cloud, where
I’m listening and it’s not what I want to hear. I’ve had that experience
before where I can’t fake it too much if it’s my music. Maybe it was fine.

As a songwriter, don’t you want people to interpret your songs in

different ways, or do you want them to stay exactly—
Not exactly. But I want it not to be embarrassing. Not to be enormously
emotive, like versions I’ve heard of “I Think It’s Going to Rain,” and
running the gamut of the emotions. Or getting things wrong, like happy
“Sail Away”s. Or just really making it their own. What are you going to do?
I generally had a specific intent. If someone sings their own notes . . . I
mean, I heard a version of “Vincent” [by Don McLean] where a guy
changed notes and took liberties with it and made it his own. That’s put
together too good. To screw with a song like that, I hated it.

Garfunkel was criticized for being too schmaltzy with your song “Old
Man.”
 I was too schmaltzy with it too. I should have been colder even than it
is, with the strings. I haven’t heard it for a while.

Did you like his version?

Yes. I thought it worked. He is a very great singer. In my version I
should have just put a lid on the strings a little more than I did. But maybe
not. I haven’t heard it in so long.

“The World Isn’t Fair” is such a remarkable song. There’s a lot going
on in that one—it’s both one of your deepest and funniest.
I’m proud of that one. I had the idea first on that one. It came fairly
easily for a while. And I wrestled around with the fact that it’s like one long
verse. It doesn’t get to a tonic or something. It never stops.

Yeah, but it’s such a good melody with those words that it works.
I thought that “The Great Nations of Europe” would be one of the best
songs I ever wrote. But for some reason, and I know what it is, I don’t think
it is. It’s a little didactic. It’s a little like a guy pointing to a board, and it
doesn’t have a character for a narrator. The guy in “The World Isn’t Fair” is
interesting as a character. He’s glad. It’s me. I’m glad the world isn’t fair.
I’m glad that Marx was wrong. In a way, you know. I’ve been very lucky.
And yet I’m not that happy about it. [Laughs]

So many people I know still feel that “I Think It’s Going to Rain
Today” is their favorite Randy Newman song.
It’s amazing. I was a baby when I wrote it. And they pick that, and they
pick “Marie.” And those things are atypical of my work. You can’t win if
you’re looking at numbers, if you’re looking at how much money you’re
making or how much money someone is making. I told my boys that people
who think that way are never happy. The Buddhists are really right about
material things. Absolutely, for sure. And you can’t win if you go out
listening to what people say about you, even when they praise you. They
say, “God, I love ‘Think It’s Going to Rain,’” you can’t help thinking,
“Geez, you like something I wrote when I was twenty-one—what about the
last forty years?” [Laughs] Even Springsteen, people like that, if you let the
nature of the compliments bother you, the quality of them, you get stung all
the time. Paul [Simon] doesn’t want people saying, “God, I love ‘Bridge
Over Troubled Water’” with Artie singing the lead. [Laughs]

Yeah, it bothers him still.

Sure it does. And it’s like Salieri in Amadeus. I saw [Simon &
Garfunkel] at Shea Stadium years ago, and Paul’s written everything, all
this fancy music, great music, and the crowd’s reacting great. But Artie
comes on and does “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and the lid comes off!
There’s this curly-headed handsome guy, and I just know Paul’s dying. But
you can’t get into it.

When I interviewed Dylan he singled you out as a great songwriter.

That’s very nice, coming from him.

Yeah, he’s pretty good.

Yeah, he is. Or was—or is. It’s hard to say.

He mentioned “Louisiana” as one of your greatest songs. And I heard

you do it—and also Aaron Neville do it—at Katrina benefits. And it
was more moving than any other song sung. Is it surprising to you at all
when past songs apply so powerfully to modern times?
Yeah, it is surprising. That one, of course. It’s surprising how they’ve
held up in a way. Same’s true with Donovan, however. If you listen to those
old Donovan records, [laughs] and I didn’t notice them then for being great
records or anything, but they hold up.

Yeah, they’re good. But a handful of his songs, not all of them. Whereas
you’ve never done a weak album.
No. Born Again is odd. But not weak, I don’t think. And that’s what I
try to think of myself as hoping I can keep doing. If I ever think I’m getting
appreciably worse, I won’t do it. But I haven’t felt it. And as I say in the
song “I’m Dead,” you wouldn’t know, maybe. I think my early stuff earns
more money in royalties every year than stuff of the nineties or even the
eighties, except for “I Love L.A.” But it’s that stuff, the stuff on Sail Away
and Good Old Boys and Little Criminals to some degree, that is what people
know me for. So, I mean, in a way you could say that I had this window,
like Neil Young from ’71 through ’75, where you write everything people
love. He stayed good, but the bulk of his estate was written then. And mine
too, maybe.

Yet you’ve written so many great songs since then, like “The World
Isn’t Fair” or “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do”—
Yeah, but they’re not comparable in what they generate. But yeah, the
new songs are improvements to me. “The World Isn’t Fair” is real good.
But the reality is that they’re not as popular pop songs [laughs] as the early
stuff.

You’ve often put yourself down, because you say you haven’t written
many hits—
But it’s a fact. I sometimes wonder about Bacharach. My Uncle Lionel
[Newman] was a musician, and he said about Bacharach: “You know, all his
tunes sound like third oboe parts.” [Laughter] But I went to this tribute to
Bacharach, and those tunes are very impressive. I mean, he wanders all over
the place, but when he gets to the hook, he knows that he’s there.

Bacharach has defined a sound in popular music. A Bacharach song is

distinctive. And you have done that as well, not only musically but
lyrically too. Is there some satisfaction in the fact that you’ve created
something unique in popular song?
There’s some satisfaction, yeah. There is. And there’s some satisfaction
that I’m still around. And functioning almost at the same level I was.
Maybe 65 percent, 73 percent. I thought that the Bad Love stuff was as good
a bunch of songs as I’ve written since Sail Away. So I was happy. Because if
I think I’m getting appreciably worse, I wouldn’t do it.

You are so busy writing film scores, and I know a lot of the fans of your
songwriting worry that it takes you away from songwriting. Does it, or
does it inspire new songs?
It inspires them. I’m usually glad to get back to it. And harmonically it
opens things for me because you go places you wouldn’t go. And I take it
very seriously, writing for the orchestra. So I don’t look at it as time taken
away [from songwriting]. But certainly, when I’m gone, what I’ll be
remembered for are the songs.

OceanofPDF.com
Alice Cooper
 Inventing Alice
Phoenix, Arizona 2009

Long before Tom Waits was playing a street urchin, before Bowie became
Ziggy Stardust, and before KISS became KISS, a little man named Vince
created a rock and roll legend named Alice Cooper. And he became him. He
was the first to fully embrace the theatric aspects of rock spectacle,
understanding that a character who gets beheaded onstage and rises to sing
about it could be compelling stuff.
And he was right. He led the way toward a whole new concept in rock
and roll, but always with the power of song firmly under his belt. He knew
the best way to define Alice Cooper was with words and melodies, and
from the start—and usually by collaborating—he was a serious songwriter.
Yet whenever you talk songwriters with him he points to the one he loves
the best: Laura Nyro. About whom much is said in the following.
He’s known to be a nice guy. Always generous with song credits, he
even impressed his manager, who told me that Alice is the opposite of “that
guy who will only give you four percent of a song. Alice is generous, and
we work with other people who are generous.”
He was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. Alice
Cooper was originally the name of the band he formed in Phoenix in the
late sixties, breaking through in 1971 with “I’m Eighteen.” The following
year brought “School’s Out.” He left the band to be Alice Cooper himself
and established himself with his musical manifesto Welcome to My
Nightmare in 1975.
At the end of the interview I divulged the truth—that my son Joshua,
who was ten at the time, was a great fan as well. In fact, Alice was one of
the few artists we both loved equally. “That’s good parenting,” Alice said.

When you invented the character of Alice Cooper did you intend for it
to become what it did?
Alice Cooper: No, not at all. When I created Alice he was such an
intense character, and, of course, I had to be him. And I really didn’t know
where I ended and where Alice started. I would be out drinking and
partying with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Keith Moon—you know,
they’re like my big brothers. And I’m doing, well, I guess I got to be Alice
all the time. And I tried that. And I drank more. And it was really hard to be
this character all the time. To the point that when I quit drinking I became
very clear on one thing: Alice is an institutional character. He’s a character
like Captain Hook. Or any of these ubiquitous characters. And that’s what
makes Alice fun to play. He’s somebody who’s totally opposite of me. I
didn’t see that when I was drinking because I was a little foggy.
But I realized when I’m writing songs I have to write songs for Alice,
not for me. So that’s a tricky thing. When you’re a lyricist, if I was going to
write a song for Green Day, I wouldn’t write it with Alice’s attitude; I
would write it to their attitude. Or if it was for Lady Gaga, I would write it
for her attitude. But when I write for Alice, I know he has a certain sense of
humor. He would say things I wouldn’t say. I know his humor. I know his
style.
You know, people write songs, and every once in a while they hand
them to me and say, “Here, this is a great Alice Cooper song.” And I read it
and think, “Alice would never say that.” They go, “What do you mean?” I
say, “I know Alice, and he would never say that.”

A lot of people know you as the character and not as the songwriter
behind the character.
I know. Being a songwriter is something I absolutely love more than
anything else. It’s fun to play the character. But being a songwriter is
greater. I saw Ray Davies the other night. I said to Ray, “When I started
writing lyrics I realized I wanted to tell a story in three minutes. You are the
expert at that.” The only other guy who is really good at that is Chuck
Berry. If Chuck Berry wanted to tell the story of Nadine or Maybellene, he
could do it in three minutes and make it really funny and make you get the
whole story in three minutes. And Ray Davies could do that with “Lola”
and with a lot of songs. So I think I even made him blush because I told him
that I fashion a lot of my songwriting after Ray Davies. I talk to young
bands all the time. They give me their tape, and I listen to it and I say,
“Okay, I get it, you’re angry. But I’m not hearing a song here!”
You know Bob Ezrin was my George Martin. And he told me, “If you
can’t sing the verse, the bridge, the prechorus and the chorus, if you can’t
sit down at the piano and sing all of those parts, it’s not a song. It’s a riff
with some lyrics to it.” So I learned how to write songs from him. Bob
Ezrin took what I wrote and turned it into a song, and he turned me into a
songwriter.

I didn’t know he took that role. I knew you wrote many songs together
—
And for every one we used, we wrote eight songs and threw seven of
them away. But you have to get your hands dirty. You have to get in there
and actually throw a lot of songs away. [Laughs]

When you started writing songs, did you start with songs for this
character? Or did that come later?
At first I was just writing for me. I wrote “Eighteen”: “I’m eighteen and
I like it.” The songwriting was developing as Alice was too. They were
working hand in hand. “School’s Out,” “Billion Dollar Babies”—those
were just me writing, and then Alice was evolving out of those songs.
But it’s funny: when I listen to who I think are great songwriters, it’s not
who you might think. When I tell bands who they should listen to if they
want to be great songwriters, I tell them to listen to Paul McCartney. I want
you to listen to Burt Bacharach, Laura Nyro.

Yes, I know we both share a great passion for Laura.

Yes. Listen to her “Eli’s Comin’” album. That is amazing songwriting.
Laura Nyro is my favorite female songwriter of all time. I’ve worn out all
of her albums. And with all the people who cover her songs, nobody does it
better than her. And I don’t know how she does it, but she comes up with
some of the most unique lyric lines that I have ever heard in my life. And
it’s almost Porgy and Bess. It’s got this strange quality. Nobody writes like
her. I appreciate other writers, but nobody was ever in the league that Laura
Nyro was in. I listen to her.

Is it true Laura Nyro is your favorite songwriter?

Absolutely. I was hoping she’d be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
class that I was in. I would have asked if I could induct her. Because the
guys that I know in the business who are Laura Nyro fans are the guys who
are the real songwriters. I appreciate Burt Bacharach and Laura Nyro, and I
appreciate people like Arthur Lee, Brian Wilson, Paul Simon—those are the
great songwriters. And McCartney and Lennon, of course.
The very first time I heard one of her songs—I think it was “Wedding
Bell Blues” or “Eli’s Comin’”—I thought Porgy and Bess. It reminded me
of that. It has that Gershwin-esque thing to it. And her lyrics were so
unique. I listen to her lyrics now, and it’s just astounding to me. Sometimes
I don’t know what she is saying. It’s pure Laura Nyro.
Some of her stuff like “Timer” I love so much. I learned later it was
about her cat.

So interesting she’s the one you point to, yet your own songs are so
different than the kind of thing she would write.
Totally different from hers. Even though I have been focusing on
ballads. Even Burt Bacharach has shown me so much about how a song is
put together. When you listen to something like “Always Something There
to Remind Me” or “Say a Little Prayer” or any of those Bacharach songs
and listen to how they’re constructed, and then we take a hard-rock song
and construct it just like that, it’s just a different style of music. It still has a
verse and a B section, a bridge, a chorus, back to the bridge, guitar break,
double chorus. There’s a formula to it that works.

And great melodies—

Well, [producer] Bob Ezrin would never let us put a song on the album
that you couldn’t sit down at the piano and sing. He said, “We don’t scream
songs. We don’t use germ songs. We don’t do riff songs.” He said, “It’s
great to have a great riff, but your melody line has got to be able to be sung.
And it has to have a melody to it. I don’t care how crazy it is.” “I Love the
Dead” or any of those songs, we were able to sit and play them. And I think
the songwriting was what Bob really emphasized with us. You can’t give up
the songwriting: it is the most important thing. And I believe that.
The show’s the show, but if you don’t have the song, it won’t work. If
you don’t have the cake, you can’t have the icing.

And your shows resound with the greatness of the songs, one after the
next, like an opera.
I think people, when they look back and realize when you start the song,
they know the melody! And that lyric is married to that melody line, and
you can’t have it any other way. It’s like a Beatles song. When you hear any
Beatles song you know that lyric is really perfect for that song structure.

And like their songs, yours have been around for decades and still
sound great.
And are being covered. I love the fact that I hear covers of our songs. I
just heard a girl do a version of “You and Me.” So good. And I heard Tina
Turner do “Only Women Bleed.” Geez. I mean, it’ll rip your heart out.
I also listen to Burt Bacharach. I tell bands: if you can write a song like
Laura Nyro or like Burt Bacharach, you’re a great writer. That might found
funny talking to a heavy metal band. But if you listen to how the song is
constructed and take that in—then write me an angry song! But make it so I
can sing the verse and sing the B section. Make it as angry as you want it to
be, but it doesn’t have to be one note. Right now you have a riff, and all
you’re doing is yelling at me. That might work on one song, but you can’t
do an album of it because it’s not a song.

Yes. Which is why I am happy to have this discussion with you. Because
at the heart of all the theater and the image of this iconic character are
really strong songs. “Poison,” “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen”—these
are anthems, and they are sturdy and melodic.
I would write a lot with Dick Wagner. And Dick and I would write the
ballads. And to me, when we listen to our ballads, those are the best song
songs. I always said that “Good Vibrations” is a great record, but
“Yesterday” is a great song. With me, “Only Women Bleed,” “Might as
Well Be on Mars,” “I Never Cry”—those were the songs that will stand up
as great songs. “School’s Out” is a great record.

Not a great song?

Well, it is a song that you can sing all the way through. It’s a good song,
and it’s a great record. If I was going to say what my best song was, I would
say one of the ballads. “Only Women Bleed” was recorded by eleven or
twelve different women. And each gave it their own interpretation because
they could all sing the B section and the chorus. It can be interpreted in
different ways. To me that is what makes a great song. When you can do it
your way. Frank Sinatra did our song “You and Me.” And he did a version I
would never do. He made it into a Rat Pack kind of jazz, drunk-in-the-bar
version.

Where do you start usually when you write a song? Do you write lyrics
first?
I think there’s a magic thing that songwriters do, and that’s when you
can marry a lyric with a certain chord and melody line that breaks your
heart, that’s when you know you’ve got something. If you can hit one line
that is exactly in tune with that chord, maybe that chord is a minor chord, or
it does something that twists your heart a little bit, and the lyric does the
same thing—nothing’s better. I play my songs for my daughters and my
wife, and if I feel that that one line broke their heart, I sing it. [Laughs] Or
if it makes her sigh, then I know I’ve got it. If you hit that romantic chord,
you know you got it if women go, “Yeah, you’ve just nailed me.” You’ve
just found the core of what makes women work, what makes women sigh.
That’s when you have a hit.

So to write a song, do you sit there with your collaborator and work
together?
Yes. Well, a lot of times you write in tandem with. But sometimes the
lyric will write the melody like “Only Women Bleed.” To me, that wrote
itself. It was the rhythm of that lyric that wrote that melody line. I write
most of the melody lines, though I don’t sit down at the piano. I go to Bob
Ezrin, and I’ll go sing a line, then he sings the next line. So we’re kind of a
throwback to the old Broadway writers. Like Lerner and Loewe.
I came up with that title “Only Women Bleed.” And he had been
noodling around on the piano and had these little noodle things he was
working with. And all of a sudden he hit that one, [sings vamp] and I went,
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! That is exactly the right feel for this.” You know it.
He could play twenty different things, but that was the one. That was the
one that made me go, “Stop. That is exactly the feel for this.”
I don’t think you can explain feel. It’s something that you know or you
don’t know. I worked with Alan Menken on some stuff. We were writing a
ballad for a project called “Alice’s Deadly Seven” about the Seven Deadly
Sins. And we got to this ballad, and I said I wanted to write a love song, but
I wanted it to be about food. About gluttony. The guy is singing, and you
think he’s singing to a girl, but he’s singing to food. And it was the prettiest
song. It was just a heartbreaker. And then you realize he’s singing to this
table of food. And I went, “That is brilliant.” That works on both ends. It
works as a love song, or it can be a song about gluttony. So it was one of
those moments.
Working with Alan Menken was great. Every time he would play
something I would go, “Wait—yeah, yeah!” and he’d say, “No, how about
this?” And I would say, “Yeah—wait!” He was so tuned into writing chords
that make you go “Stop!” but then he would play one that is better. I could
have written twenty songs with him that day, all ballads.

So when you say chords, you mean he would play changes, but you
would sing melodies over those chords?
Yes. A lot of times lead singers write the melodies. Lead singers will
even write better lead guitar parts than a lead guitarist player. Because he’s
more in tune with the melody line. If I come up to my guitar player and tell
him I want it to go like this, and sing him a melody, he’d go, “I never would
have played it that way, but I see exactly what you’re doing there.” So I do
write a lot of the melody lines. I don’t write chords. But if I have a title, like
“Every Woman Has a Name,” I will think of a tune that goes with that. And
then he’ll start chording it. And he’ll say, “Okay, to get to the next section,
let’s go down to this chord, and it will fall right into this next section.” So
we work pretty close, hand in hand. I really want the songwriter in me to
hear where that song is going. My mind will write something, and I’ll think
it sounds forced. Where does it want to go? If you put water on a green—if
you want to see which way it’s gonna break—you put water on a green and
watch where it wants to go. It’s the same for a song. You get to the B
section and ask, “Where does this want to go? How does it want to release?
That part we just wrote, it sounds like we’re forcing that part in there. Let’s
figure out where it wants to go.” And then he might say, “I think it wants to
go to B minor.” And he hits it and I say, “Yes! That is where we want to
go!”
So when you’re a lead singer and a lyricist, you are also writing the
melody because you’re gonna be singing it. I have people bring me songs,
and I tell them, “You know, I just can’t sing this song. Steven Tyler could
kill this song. But it’s not an Alice song.”

“Poison” has such a compelling melody.

I wrote that with Desmond Child. When you’re working with him,
you’re working with another guy who is full of music. You know all that
background singing on that? We did that in three days. And he was doing
things that I couldn’t even hear. He would say, “No, it has to have this vocal
right here.” So once we got the lead vocal done I just let him go on the
background vocals. Because he had this insane idea, and it worked.

In addition to you and Desmond Child, John McCurry is also credited

on “Poison.”
He wrote that great hook guitar line. [Sings the guitar part]

You are generous with credits. Not everyone would give him credit for a
guitar part.
Yeah, when it’s something that is that important to the song, I think you
should. That was as much of a hook as anything else in that song.

How was “I’m Eighteen” born?

“Eighteen” started off as a jam. It was something that we used to warm
up with. And we didn’t even know that it was a song until Bob Ezrin said,
“You know that thing that you guys always warm up with? That is really
powerful.” I said, “What is powerful about it?”
 He said, “What we have to do is take that song and work on it.” So we
wrote words for it. And every time we would play it for him, he would say,
“Nope. Dumb it down.” And we’d say, “Wait a minute!” And he’d say,
“Take those chords out. It needs to be dumber. It’s about a guy who is
eighteen. And he’s eighteen, and he’s kind of not a boy, not a man. It can’t
be sophisticated.” He kept saying, “Dumb it down, dumb it down.” Till
finally we had this basic, kind of dumb song. And we let the lyrics sell the
song. To us, we would have kept writing and putting chords in there and
making it complicated. We needed somebody like Bob to come along and
say, “No! Take things out.”

It’s hard to be simple sometimes.

The Beatles. The Beatles are the best at that. Everybody wants to write a
Beatles song. And the trick that The Beatles had was that there was never
anything in the way of the melody line. There was never in their record
anything that was fighting the melody line. That is so hard to do.

“School’s Out” has five names on it: you, along with Glen Buxton,
Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith.
That’s a band song. We all did parts of it. Glen Buxton did the guitar
pattern. I wrote the lyrics. Somebody else wrote the B section. I said, “You
know, if this is gonna be the song that represents us forever, it should have
everybody in the band’s name in there.”

That is generous of you.

Yeah, well. I am old school. If the bass player comes in and plays a part
that is the whole part that the song is based on, I put his name on it. And it
might be just 15 percent. But that is 15 percent of a hit. And it’s because
that part really worked. When guys get so greedy about how much they
wrote and how much the other guy wrote, it’s not fun anymore. When it
comes down to that, I always usually go, “What do you think is fair?” I let
them come to me. But I might be the one who goes, “Hey, remember when
that guy played that little guitar thing that we built the whole bridge on? We
got to give him ten points on that.” I really believe everybody gets a piece.

I saw you in concert with Rob Zombie, which was an amazing night.
 Yeah, Rob Zombie is like my little brother. We got a chance to tour
together, and it was so much fun. You put both of our shows together, and
they’re entirely two different kinds of shows. My show is much more
Phantom of the Opera scary. His show is more media blitz, you know? His
energy is every bit as high as my energy onstage. We’ll do more of that.

Some of your songs are so famous—do they overshadow the others? A

song like “I Might as Well Be on Mars” is so great and as strong as any.
Oh yeah. Some of the best songs that I ever wrote were not the hits. “I
Might as Well Be on Mars” was one of the best songs I ever wrote. And
there’s a new one called “I Am Made of You” and another called
“Something to Remember Me By,” which I wrote with Dick Wagner thirty
years ago. We wrote it the same time we wrote “I Never Cry.” But I wasn’t
as good of a vocalist then and I couldn’t sing the song. And it took me thirty
years to be able to put that song up and know I could sing that song. I think
it’s one of my best songs.

Alice Cooper is, of course, a character you play. When you write songs,
are you writing in character always?
You know, a lot of it, to be honest with you, a lot of sentimentality I
have to invent for Alice. Because Alice is a stone-cold villain. But every
once in a while I let you in on the fact that he’s got a soft side. And it’s an
extremely romantic side. It’s an Errol Flynn against his normal Basil
Rathbone. There’s a surprisingly good ballad there. But I allow that. For
every song that is really gut-wrenching and scary, there’s a ballad. There’s
one song my wife says, “All of your ballads break my heart.” I said that’s
the best compliment I’ve ever got. Because if it’s gonna be a hit, it’s got to
break the girl’s heart. [Laughs]

After all these years of writing songs, does it ever get any easier?
For me it’s as easy as it’s ever been. I always told people that I’m one of
these guys who if you came to me and said, “Alice, I need a song about a
giraffe and a rhinoceros that are gonna get married on the Empire State
Building,” I would ask you, “Do you want it to be funny? Do you want it to
be fast? Do you want it to be pop? Do you want it to be heavy? You tell me
what you want and we’ll write it.” I’m one of those guys who is sort of a
utility songwriter.
But every now and then a lyric will just hit you. Just the other day I was
thinking of this idea for a song. And I knew this song was not a song Alice
would put on his album. But I would love to write this song with Burt
Bacharach. It’s that type of song that Hal David used to write with him.
And the lyric is so there. And now I’ve got to write these lyrics and send
them to Bacharach and write, “Pretend that you’ve never heard of Alice
Cooper. Just listen to these lyrics and tell me this isn’t a song that you
should write.” [Laughs]

OceanofPDF.com
Donald Fagen
 Being Steely Dan
New York, New York 2012

He’s famously a curmudgeon. Cloaked usually in some combination of

regret, worry, and weary suspicion, he’s also one of the world’s most
creative songwriters. He is Fagen, one half of the Fagen-Becker juggernaut
at the core of Steely Dan.
Growing up when I did, born in 1958, I still remember the impact of
hearing The Beatles on the radio for the first time. And I remember their
rapid evolution, from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in ’64 to expansive
masterpieces like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life” only
three years later. I was hyperaware of the expansion in terms of lyrical
content and expression as well as musical sophistication. So I presumed that
the song would continue to evolve as rapidly and profoundly as it did
between these few years.
Of course, I was wrong. There have been spurts of new song avenues,
but mostly the evolution of the popular song, as Dylan stated to me in SOS I
on this issue, “is like a snake with its tail in its mouth.” It goes round and
round in infinity. It begins where it ends and begins again.
I asked David Crosby about this. His life—and all his ideas—he said,
were shifted forever by The Beatles. Asked if there was anything ever that
profound in their aftermath, he said, “Yes. Steely Dan.”
 And it’s true. Steely Dan did take the song to a new place. They
combined the harmonic sophistication of jazz with the essence of soul and
the fire of rock and roll. With lyrics often comic, complex, darkly sardonic,
and dimensional, they concocted a soundtrack that forever expanded the
chordal vocabulary of rock and roll.
I had the privilege of interviewing both Becker and Fagen for SOS I, but
it was, admittedly, a challenge to speak to both at once, as Becker is the
more gregarious by far and Fagen a tad reticent to say too much. So I was
thrilled in 2012, upon the release of Fagen’s fourth solo album, Sunken
Condos, that I had the opportunity to talk to Donald solo.

You and Becker are among the few songwriters to extend the
vocabulary of chords—
Donald Fagen: It used to be, in the forties and the fifties, back in the
days when they wrote standards, especially moving into the end of the
fifties and into the sixties, a lot of the composers were using more jazz
progressions, like Harold Arlen or Burton Lane. And jazz composers who
wrote songs were into interesting changes. These days it’s because it’s now
all guitar-based music. You do hear it on guitar occasionally with guitar
tunings and such. But that’s a different thing.

Speaking of Arlen, not only were his chords adventurous, but he wrote
such beautiful melodies over those changes, like you do—
Thank you. Harold Arlen is one of my favorites. He was very
influenced by jazz, going back to the twenties.

What do you think makes a melody work?

[Laughs] That’s a tough one. Melodies can be good depending on the
context. You can have a very simple melody, and if the harmony behind it is
interesting, it can make a very simple melody really different depending on
the harmonic context. And then again you can have a complex melody also.
But the more complex it is, the harder it is to sing, and then sometimes it
can sound contrived. In other words, you could write a melody that would
be fine on a saxophone, but sometimes, if you give it to a singer, it can
sound a little bit raunchy.
Which is another hallmark of your work, that although some of the
melodies are quite sophisticated, they are always eminently singable.
And soulful.
Thanks. Well, I think I am as influenced by instrumental players as by
vocalists. So I listen to a lot of saxophone playing.

I love your song “True Companion,” which wasn’t included on any of

your official albums.
Thanks a lot. Yeah, I like that song. That was written for a film called
Heavy Metal. It was an animation in the seventies and had a lot of different
people who wrote for it. I said to them, “What scene is this for?” And they
said, “It doesn’t matter. Just write a science-fiction song.” [Laughs] So I
did.

You’ve written several songs about history, such as “Parker’s Band”

and “The Royal Scam”
Walter and I used to like to make history songs. We even did a
prehistory song, “The Caves of Altamira,” which is prehistory.

Is it your feeling that a song, lyrically, can contain anything?

Yeah, for sure. You’d hear about events in folk music, and when we
were growing up folk music was popular, especially Bob Dylan. He opened
up popular music so you could write about anything. He started using
surrealism in his songs and all kinds of songs that showed the interior mind
at work. Nothing like that existed before he started doing it, and we were
big Bob Dylan fans.

And like him you have reflected that embrace of content in your songs,
where you could write a song about content we’ve never heard about.
Right, right. He was the first person to open that up. People forget that.
But he was the man.

Was there ever content you tried to get into a song and just couldn’t
pull it off?
[Laughs] Yeah, we failed many times. We started songs that we didn’t
finish. We once tried to write a song about the Congress of Vienna,
[laughter] which divided Europe after the War of 1812, I think it was. And
we never pulled that one off. [Laughs] Yeah, we gave up on a few tunes.

Back in the days of Dylan and The Beatles there was a real sense of pop
music evolving quickly, and we felt that it would continue to evolve.
And it really didn’t. Which I mentioned when interviewing David
Crosby, and he said, “Yeah, except for Steely Dan. Steely Dan brought
it to a new place.”
Oh, that’s nice of him to say so. I know he’s a fan; he came backstage a
couple times at shows. Very nice dude. You know, I did hear a song the
other day by Martha Wainwright. Her mother, Kate McGarrigle, died a
couple years ago. They used to write songs about all different things. They
were great songwriters. And apparently the last song was “Proserpina,”
about a mythological woman. It was great, and Martha did a magnificent
vocal on it. And that song certainly expands. It shows what you can do with
unusual content.

You’re obviously an expert on all kinds of songwriting—R&B, classic

rock, standards. Are you at all surprised that songwriting hasn’t
evolved more, and does it have somewhere new to go?
As I say, I have a new record that just came out. So there’s still a chance
for things to happen, but it just happens less than it did because the sixties
was an era where the artistic imagination was going through a period where
it was really intense and society was changing. It was just one of those
times. I think now we’re still in the downward turn from those days. But it’s
just another time. But once in a while you’ll hear something that’s
interesting.

Your work has expanded both the harmonic and lyrical content of
songs, but the form of popular songs, the structures, haven’t changed
much. Do you think there’s still something new to be done?
Absolutely. You know, I think it’s just that there’s not a lot you can do
about people’s tastes. People don’t buy records.. Though I think that might
change now because the record companies are dying. With the Internet you
have a whole new independent music society, really. The problem is, I
think, the masses of people haven’t been exposed to good music in many
decades. So it’s gonna be a minority of people who come up with good
stuff.

You’ve written songs now for over forty years. Does songwriting get
easier over the years?
No, it gets harder every year. It takes longer. I think when you get older
your mind kind of slows down and you don’t have a lot of energy, and
you’ve used up a lot of your ideas. You’ve really got to work to do it.

Do you enjoy that work?

I do, but it’s just exhausting. [Laughs] You think just sitting in a room
and thinking things would be easy, but it’s not. I throw out so much stuff,
that to get a few bars or a few good lines, I throw out so much stuff that it
takes a long time.

Do you have any method for getting the ball rolling?

Go for a walk. I live in New York, so it’s great to go for a walk and see
other people on the street. Go to a movie. For some reason, when I come
out of a movie, even if it’s a bad movie, the whole thing of seeing these
giant faces and hearing loud music gives me ideas, I don’t know why.

So ideas for songs come to you when you’re not writing?

Yeah, I usually get the ideas separate. I don’t usually get ideas when I
go to a room with a piano and sit down to write. I have a list of ideas I got
at random times. The ideas usually come after dinner.

Are you good about preserving those ideas?

I wish I was better. I’ve lost a lot of stuff because I didn’t write it down.
But I do write [laughs] enough of them down that I end up with some
songs, yeah.

I love the song “Slinky Thing” on the new record. Last time we spoke
about the feelings of keys, and that has a classic A minor mood.
Yeah, well, my vocal range tends to move well with A minor, B minor,
G flat minor. I don’t have a big range, and those keys tends to be my best
keys.
I love the title “Planet D’Rhonda”—do you remember where that came
from?
I just started writing that song from the top of it, and when I got to that
place, that phrase came into my mind.

Do you collect titles?

Yeah, I do. I keep a list of titles. But that one just came to me when
writing the song.

Do you have any kind of regular habit or routine that surrounds your
songwriting?
I mainly have three modes: writing mode, recording mode, and touring
mode. When I’m in the writing mode, I keep a regular schedule. I get up
about ten and write till about seven or so.

That’s a long day.

Yeah.

Do you tape yourself while working?

Yeah, I have a little boombox with cassettes. I still use cassettes. I have
boxes filled with labeled cassettes.

Do you try to finish everything you begin?

No. I have all these fragments on cassettes. Sometimes I’ll listen to a
few of them and see if there’s anything there that’s good.

There’s old demos of you and Becker online, and I fell in love with the
song “Stone Piano.”
I vaguely remember that one. That was very early on.

Back then, on those demos, it was always the two of you singing, not
just you, right?
Yeah, when we first started we were going to be the white Sam and
Dave. [Laughs] I took the high part. I think I was Dave and he was Sam.
[Laughter]
When you write songs alone for solo projects, do you play them for
Walter?
No. Unless it’s something we’re gonna work on together. If I think it’s a
good tune for Steely Dan, I’ll show him what I got and we’ll work on it
together. No, I never show him anything and he never shows me anything.
[Laughs]

Do you remember writing “FM”?

Yes, I do. Wrote that in California. There was a film called FM, and we
were asked to do the title song. And I said, “Does it have to have any
specific words?” And they said, “No, it just has to be about FM radio.” We
wrote that very quickly, I remember, in one or two days. And we also
recorded it very quickly too.

What a great chorus.

Johnny Mandel came in and did the string chart. It was fun to meet
Johnny Mandel.

Is that unusual, for you to write something good fast?

Well, it was a simple tune. But yes, it is unusual for us to write
something quickly.

You have made so many classic albums, but as you know, some people
say albums are over. Will you always make albums?
Yes. I think in albums. I’m just used to it. And I think it’s a good length.
I think fifty minutes or so is a good length. It’s not too long, but it’s long
enough to be satisfying. I don’t know if anyone listens to albums anymore.

Well, your fans do. Listening to your new album has been a joy.
Thanks. I like it. For someone who enjoys sitting there listening to
music, it’s a good length. It may be a dead art form, though. I think
songwriters like listening to whole albums.

Last time we spoke about musical keys, and you said how different keys
to you almost have a different smell. Do they have different colors? Do
you visualize keys?
No, but my wife sees numbers in different colors.
Do you have a favorite song that someone else wrote?
That depends on the genre.

Do you have a preference for major keys or minor keys? I think you
have written more in minor keys, but I could be wrong.
I think you could be right about that. I do think that minor keys have
more opportunities for richness. But maybe just because I am a depressive
person. [Laughs]

OceanofPDF.com
Jorge Calderon
 On Writing with Zevon
West Hollywood, California 2014

The first thing that Zevon loved about him was that he was great at
breaking into any house or apartment. It was a useful talent, especially on
those nights when one comes home drunken and keyless. First time it
happened, Jorge disappeared into the dark behind Zevon’s apartment
building, and in an instant, it seemed, the lights in Warren’s windows were
on, and two friends bonded forever.
Zevon also found in Jorge a lifetime collaborator. Zevon was a genius
songwriter, perhaps more capable than most humans ever of writing a song
all by himself. Not only was he a brilliant, sardonically romantic
wordsmith, he was an exceptional composer, one of those rare songwriters,
along with Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks, who not only write songs
but can arrange, orchestrate, and even conduct them.
So he didn’t need a cowriter. He was also a tremendously genial man, a
musician most in love with music and his fellow musicians, and a famously
faithful and devoted friend. In interviews Zevon would often jokingly refer
to himself as a lazy songwriter who had to devise easy methods of writing
songs. And one of the best was to invite great friends to write songs with
him. Sure, he’d steer, but he’d welcome all the power they could bring.
Zevon journeyed into song with many famous non-songwriters, such as the
writers Mitch Albom and Hunter Thompson. They’d say, “But, Warren, I
don’t even know how to rhyme!” And he’d say, “No sweat. I’ll make it all
rhyme—leave that to me.” In other words: “I got the craft nailed. You just
bring me some content. And I’ll expand on what you bring and you expand
on that till we get somewhere.”
But with Jorge Calderon it was different. He wasn’t there just for words.
Like Warren, he’s a serious and soulful musician and so could craft the
thing as solidly as Warren and could balance both words and music adeptly.
Unlike those authors with whom Zevon collaborated, Jorge was in the ring
with him, returning every punch. He would match him chord for chord,
groove for groove, symbol for symbol. He’d be in on the metaphor but also
the modulation.
They also shared the same dark sense of humor, which informed all
their songs, and love of the beautiful physical detail, so delicate and
dynamic in songs, so that when Jorge showed Warren a photo from Elvis
Presley’s TV room at Graceland of one very fragile, ornate porcelain
monkey, they both knew that was the key to the kingdom in terms of
writing an Elvis song. And “Porcelain Monkey” was born.
Jorge was also there for Warren during those nonwriting times, which is
most of life—when you are charging the batteries and passing all the time at
hand. Together they’d endure the long LA days by meeting in the valley for
afternoon movie matinees—always the worst science-fiction and horror
films they could find, which they both loved.
They’d also go out and eat a lot, so it only seemed right, that if I was
going to meet up with him and to talk about all things Zevon, that we meet
at Warren’s favorite hang, Hugo’s, in West Hollywood. And Warren’s spirit
was ever present as we discussed the long list of miracle songs they wrote
together as well as touching on some of Warren’s infamous life and times.
I’ll admit my love of Zevon has been steadily expanding for some time
now. During his lifetime I admired the work I knew and listened often to
certain albums, such as Sentimental Hygiene. But during these last past
years it’s been an ongoing revelation for me to discover, one after the other,
countless brilliant songs he wrote that I had never heard. There’s not a weak
one in the bunch. His lyrics were always brilliant—erudite, unique, sardonic
—and enriched with a great love of language, both poetic and colloquial.
And his music was always just right. Pianistic but soulful and with a
visceral command of song structure to always bring home the chorus—or
the title—in a way both traditional and very modern, and always right.
Having a conversation with Jorge was heady and fun, as it was from
conversation that all the songs he and Warren wrote together were born.
And I could tell why Warren loved him so. He’s smart, funny, talented—
and nothing throws him. He has calm in the midst of the Hollywood storm.
There’s also the undeniable mixture of sorrow and joy. The joy
stemmed from the expansive spirit of their friendship and collaboration,
their love of songwriting bringing them closer, as that closeness enabled
many astounding songs to be written. Often Jorge’s eyes would flash with
exultant wonder describing Zevon’s passion for songwriting and his
celebration and elevation of the process. “This is high art, what we are
doing,” Zevon would say, and that flame still burns in Jorge’s aspect.
But there’s also the vast sorrow for this connection severed and for an
absent friend who is absent now forever, especially one who so often
laughed at death. Forever that light and darkness are intertwined.
And their songs remain.
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he’s a gifted guitarist who also plays
keyboards, percussion, and more. He became part of Stevie Nicks and
Lindsey Buckingham’s pre-Fleetwood duo, Buckingham Nicks, as their
touring percussionist and also worked with Fleetwood Mac, cowriting their
song “Kiss and Run.”
He was with Warren through the good times, and he was also there with
him—more than anyone, really—through the dark times, especially Zevon’s
final chapter, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Zevon had
avoided going to the doctor for decades, a decision he later darkly remarked
to David Letterman was maybe “a bad strategy.” But rather than float away
on a cloud of morphine mixed with misery, Zevon elected to make one
more album. It was The Wind. It was songwriter as real hero, making one
final masterpiece for the world before moving on and letting the kids take
over.
And Jorge was assigned and accepted the impossible mission of making
it happen. Not only did he cowrite the songs with Zevon—beautiful, deeply
sad, but shining songs like “Keep Me in Your Heart”—he also produced the
recording sessions, inviting in famous friends to pay a musical tribute,
including Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Ry Cooder, Tom Petty,
Emmylou Harris, Billy Bob Thornton, and others. If ever a songwriter had a
true friend, his name was Jorge Calderon.

“Veracruz” was the first song you wrote together?

Jorge Calderon: The first one that was recorded. The first song we did
was a thing called “Shy Girl.” It started out like all the other ones: in
conversation. I forget what I said, but he liked something I said, and it went
back and forth. It was never finished, you see. But he always thought that
was the first song we wrote.
After he passed away Crystal sent me a page where he had written the
lyrics for “Shy Girl,” the verse and the chorus. Typed by him on his
typewriter. Old-school typewriter. It said “Music and Lyrics, Jorge Calderon
and Warren Zevon.” He put my name first! [Laughs]
And I like it. Maybe one day I’ll try to finish it.

Was that unusual, that you would write one that you didn’t finish?
It was just one that we started, and he’d always bring it back,
sometimes, to me. He’d say something about the song.
Things started rolling along for him. And all of a sudden we were doing
Excitable Boy, and that’s when he asked me to help him with “Veracruz.”

Is it true you met him on the night he got out of jail?

[Laughs] Yeah. Yeah, I used to live here in Hollywood, around Norton,
up from Santa Monica Boulevard. And Crystal called me real late at night.
Or maybe two or three in the morning. Woke me up. And she said, “Can
you do me a favor? My boyfriend, I’ve got to pick him up. He was in the
drunk tank in jail. And he doesn’t have a ride, and I don’t have a car . . .”
Just a mess. So I picked her up, and I drove her to get him. Then we drove
to an apartment building, and she couldn’t find the keys to get into the
house. So that is how I met Warren. Because I said, “Don’t worry—I’m
Puerto Rican. I can get into anybody’s house.” He loved that.
So I went to the back and found some kind of window that was half
opened, and I got in and did my thing. And he loved that. He didn’t say
much, ’cause he was still coming down from being straight in the drunk
tank. But he had a smile on his face. And from then on, he kept wanting to
get together. He’d say, “Hey, man, you want to come over to my chili
party?” He was making chili all the time.

Had you heard his music before you started working with him?
No. I met him that night, and then I became familiar with what he did.

Did you have any estimation, when you started working with him, of
what kind of songwriter he was?
Well, by the time I worked on “Veracruz,” I sort of knew what he was
doing. I heard all the songs that he had. Demos of “Werewolves of London”
and early songs like “Carmelita.”

He’d made studio demos?

He’d made some demos with somebody before he got the deal with
Elektra through Jackson [Browne]. That’s when I met Jackson. Warren
asked me to come. He said, “I’ve got a deal. I’m gonna make this record.
Some guys are gonna produce me . . .” So he called me one day to sing on
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” So when I went to the studio I met Jackson.

What did you think when you heard songs like that or “Carmelita”?
I thought he was great. He was grittier than other guys from the West
Coast that I heard, like Jackson or Henley. He got deeper into the trench
with his songs. He was deeper. One thing that attracted our relationship is
that we were both big fans of hard-boiled books like Raymond Chandler
and Ross Macdonald. We were always constantly quoting books like that.
And then I heard his music; I heard that grittiness. He’d go for the
underbelly of hurt and despair, and all those things those books and noir
movies have. The despair, the place where you really get to the bottom of
things, instead of being flowery, which a lot of songwriters here [laughs]
were doing.

And such a beautiful use of language—

Exactly. Well, yeah, that’s the thing. Why he is the most unique and
greatest of all those guys, from here or anywhere else—it was a love of
language. He had a command of language, and he loved language. And also
the musicality. His piano playing and his ideas about harmony and all, were
different. And on top of that he had the blues, and the whole thing. He loved
Bo Diddley; he loved Muddy Waters—so all of that combined.

He could play classical, right?

Oh yeah, he was great. You know that song “Accidentally Like a
Martyr” with that passage of music? That was always amazing to me, and
later on, when we were doing The Wind, he showed me that and said some
classical piano player showed him that pattern and how to use it in every
key. He said, “Every little piece of thing I learn in my life, I try to use it in a
song. Yeah, that’s all we do.”
The language, that’s the thing that attracted us. Both big readers. And he
liked that English was my second language; he would laugh at the way I
would say things sometimes. Because I was translating from a different
language to say something. Or I would come up with phrases that were
different, and he’d never heard them before. That is what attracted him to
want to write with me. Because he was always looking for a way to say
something different in a song. That’s how we clicked a lot.

And that comes across. The songs are fresh—to this day. They are not
the same as other songs.
Exactly.

And he was capable of writing beautiful melodies but also great rock
songs. Something like “Porcelain Monkey” is a great groove around a
good riff. Did you discuss the musical setting ever before doing the
song?
With that one, “Porcelain Monkey,” we wrote the words first, no idea
what the music would be.

The whole lyric?

Yeah. That was 1999. He was doing Life’ll Kill Ya. He called me and
said, “I’m working on this album, and I need two more songs. I want you to
be involved. I need help here. I ran out of ideas.”
So I said, “Okay, let’s give it a try.” I went to his house. And for freak
circumstances I brought a notebook I had. Because I was the guy, if we had
any idea, who would write them down.
He wouldn’t do that himself?
No. He’d keep it in his mind. And if it was really good, he’d sit down
and write it. Or let me write it.
I had been on the road with David Lindley for about a year. And we
went to Graceland. And I went across the street and was buying postcards
of Graceland. One of them had that room they called the TV Room. It had
three TVs, a lounge area, and a table with this big porcelain monkey. A
white monkey with big dark eyes. You can Google it. I pasted this thing to
the cover. I had it for years. When I brought it out he said, “What’s that?” I
said, “That’s a porcelain monkey.” He took out a magic marker and in big
letters wrote “Porcelain Monkey” and said, “That’s what we’re gonna write
today.”
So I gave him the whole story about Elvis and that monkey and how
Elvis would go in this TV room, and the three TVs, and then we started
writing that song.

But he liked that title before knowing the story?

Yes. He loved to get titles first. When he chose that title I don’t think
either of us knew where it was going. But he knew that it had to do with
Graceland.
He had the first line. “He was an accident waiting to happen.” We wrote
that down and kept going and going and going. We wrote a little piece of it,
a part of it, and I phoned him back and said something about “Hip-shakin’
shoutin’ in gold lame / That’s how he earned his regal sobriquet.” As soon
as I said that to him, he said, “Oh, we just opened the garage door and
parked the limo inside.” Meaning, now we got something.

And that was pure lyrics, with no music?

Yes, just thinking of lyrics. Without thinking of where the song should
go. Because once you got the lyrics, then when you read them, you get
some kind of beat to it, where you can grab onto something.
Yeah, and I told him about Elvis and velveteen. And the great thing,
where he started at a “shotgun shack singing Pentecostal hymns / Through
the wrought-iron gates to the TV room / He had a little world, it was
smaller than your hand / It’s a rockabilly ride from the glitter to the gloom.”
Wow.
That’s one of my favorite verses.

I love that too. Often his rhymes are not perfect rhymes, but that one
does have perfect rhymes.
That’s one thing I learned from working with him. His big thing was not
to ruin the context for rhyme. It doesn’t have to be a perfect rhyme; it has to
be a close rhyme, and you get the message clearer.

Sometimes I am surprised that they are not perfect rhymes, ’cause they
work so perfectly.
Yeah. A lot of Dylan songs were like that. At first he was rhyming,
rhyming, rhyming, but after a while he was rhyming less perfect rhymes,
and it’s wonderful. I remember when Warren and I wrote “Fistful of Rain.”
He said, “You’ve got to write the hard verse.” And I said, “In a heart there
are windows and doors / You can let the light in / You can hear the wind
blow.” And “doors” and “blow” don’t rhyme. So I asked him, should it be
“let the wind soar” or “let the wind roar”? He said no. And I said, “You’re
right.” It passes by—it’s perfect and it’s not perfect.

And it comes across that this wasn’t contrived to be a rhyme; these are
the words that matter.
Exactly. He liked to do the thing that hit you. It wasn’t intellectually
great, trying to say, oh, he’s a great writer ’cause he rhymed this with this.
No, it’s got to be gut level. His music would bring you to a place people
live, where you can walk the streets.

Seems like Warren really enjoyed writing songs, especially with you.
Was it fun?
It was always so much fun to be with him, writing or not. We had so
much fun. We’d be drinking Turkish coffee from Noura and get really lit
up. And he’d say, “I have this song called ‘Mr. Bad Example,’ and I have
one or two verses . . .” So I gave him a verse for that one, and he put it as
the first verse. The one about “I was the altar boy working at church . . . I
took it from a box labeled children’s fund . . . cummerbund . . .” We were
having so much fun, and we already had so many verses, so I said, “Let’s
keep going! Let’s do it like ‘Bob Dylan’s Hundredth Dream’ about Captain
Arab when he goes on and on and on . . .” [Laughs] So Warren said,
“Yeah!” So we wrote all these verses, and at one point we were on the floor
laughing. And I finally said, “I don’t think we can keep going.”

That is a long one, very expansive. So he had the title to start that one?
Yeah. He said he was on the road in Australia, and he was getting ready
for a gig and talking to some Aussies. And out of this conversation “Mr.
Bad Example” came out. So he wanted to do it. He had the verse about the
seven deadly sins and the verse about “I worked in hair replacement.” So he
had all these ideas, and we kept finishing verses. With his idea, my idea. It
was always a give-and-take like that. He would say something and I would
finish it, or I would say something and he would finish it. That is the great
thing about songwriting. You’re writing with somebody on your
wavelength, and you’re at the same place.

You guys were on a unique wavelength. Not many people at that

wavelength!
[Laughs] Yeah, well, that’s good. We hadn’t written for years before we
wrote “Fistful of Rain” and “Porcelain Monkey,” and I told him, “Man, you
know, it’s amazing, this one,” and he said, “I know! It’s high art! It doesn’t
sell for shit, but, you know, we’re doing it, man. You and I are doing it.”
And I said, “When I get together with you it’s like playing basketball
with Michael Jordan. Your game goes up when you’re playing with
somebody like that.” He said to me, “It’s the same for me, Jorge.” So that
was the best compliment ever. We had this thing. It was unique, and it
would elevate to this point. And that helped us with The Wind.

Of all people to do this with, Warren Zevon. Such an amazing talent.

Clearly your game had to be pretty high to even go there.
Totally. I understand that.

Musically and lyrically.

Totally. Let me tell you, man, I used to be a guy, and I still am
sometimes, who would get very insecure and would think that I would have
nothing. I would think, “I have nothing. I have to write something that is
good,” while I would be putting aside things that are really good. And he
used to tell me, “Jorge, what are you doing? This is great!” He was like a
cheerleader for me. He would say, “Man, you think this is nothing. But this
is something. This is great!” Kind of opened my eyes to things I was doing,
that I was knocking it down myself. He would chase me around in the
beginning because I would say something funny and he would crack up.
He’d say, “You are like the Puerto Rican James Joyce. [Laughs] Because
you say these things that are jokes, but your jokes are on a level that I love.”
And that is what started a lot of those gag songs, about laughing about
something.

And funny about those gag songs, they are all serious. All his funny
songs are serious.
Yeah. I call those songs Chauncey Gardiner songs. Chauncey Gardiner
was the character in Being There who says nothing but it means a lot to a lot
of people. Mundane things, and you go, “I know what you are saying!” And
they connect with something bigger. [Laughs] That is what I call that. You
are passing the time, but somebody sees more in the song than you actually
intended.

Yet your songs are so rich in terms of detail that they don’t require the
listener to bring a whole world to them. They are there. As opposed to
so many songs that are opaque, and you can bring a whole thing to it. It
was interesting to me that Warren loved Dylan so much, though
Warren’s songs were never abstract the way many of Dylan’s are. It
was more descriptive, story songs.
Yeah, he loved to get to the point. He loved to—and I’ve said this
before many times—he loved less is more. He loved the economy of words.
He loved language, but he loved the economy of words. There was a great
quote that Jackson [Browne] said about Warren. It was about the song
“Studebaker,” about one line that says so much. He brings all these feelings
from the beginning of the line to the middle to the end, with at least three
different images and feelings inside about this line. And that was what
Warren was great at too. Economize: less is more.
That is a great song. And he never officially recorded “Studebaker,”
did he?
No, but his son [Jordan Zevon] did.

That’s such a great song—why didn’t Warren record it?

It’s a great song. Well, you know, Jordan did a good thing because he
combined two early versions of that song into one and got the best out of
two. I think they had a couple of lines differently, and he made it be the best
of the two. I listen to that once in a while because that is a great song. I’ve
been thinking about doing it, ’cause it’s a great song to do live.

I wanted to ask you about his song “Tule’s Blues.” There is a beautiful
demo version of it, piano and voice, that is slow and great. And then he
did a faster version of it on the album Jackson produced. But I know he
wanted to include it on Excitable Boy, and Waddy Wachtel and others
talked him out of it ’cause it was a ballad. I wondered what you think
of that one.
I think it’s great. I always loved “Tule’s Blues.” I love Waddy. He’s a
producer, and he’s producing the album. And a different producer might
have included it. Maybe Jackson wanted that song on the album and Waddy
talked him out of it. I don’t know. You go, “Oh no, we need another fast
song and not a slow song here.” That kind of mentality. If it was me, I
would have left it there. [Laughs]

My understanding is it was because Waddy wanted Warren to be

thought of as a rocker and not a balladeer.
I don’t know. It happened on a later album that Waddy was producing.
Warren and I wrote this song called “I Volunteered.” And it’s all about
looking back at your life and all the things that you did. The end was “I
don’t blame you, I volunteered.” Meaning that I did all this shit, and I’m not
blaming anybody.

A great title.
We refined it, at the end, for The Wind. But then “Keep Me in Your
Heart” came out and we forgot about these other things.
So it wasn’t recorded ever?
No. I will do it at some point. I haven’t wanted to do it live because I
would like to record it first. Warren and I wanted to do that song on the Mr.
Bad Example album. Waddy heard it and said, “No, not for this album.” So
that was the end of that song then. Then it lived all those years until The
Wind, and I brought it back, looking for songs. I said to Warren, “Here we
are, and you’re looking at your last album.” So we looked at it, but it had
gotten washed away. Just like The Wind.

Were there other songs that didn’t get recorded?

Yes, there are a few. There’s one, “Give Me Back My Heart,” about a
horrible breakup. He was always breaking up with girls, and it was a
heartache all the time. He used to live on Barham Boulevard at the
Oakwood Apartments. He used to call them Gorky Park. I went to see him,
and my wife and I, though we have been married a long time, had this
horrible argument.
I knocked on the door, and he knew we were gonna write something. He
opened the door and said, “What do you have?” I said, “Give me back my
heart.” He said, “Great, come in.” And we started writing that song. It was
that—getting a title about some situation and writing a song about it.
I actually recorded it already, but I haven’t put it out. He wrote the
music for it. Sort of an organ thing, and we worked on the chorus together.
Like on “Porcelain Monkey,” we wrote the words, and then I would let
him come up with the music. Because it was his album. His career. If I’m
writing a song, mainly I would let him do his music because I trusted him a
thousand percent musically.
I always had a guitar with me. But we worked mostly on words, words,
words. He would ask me about music, but mostly he’d do it. It changed
later on with The Wind, when I had more to do. Because when he went
home he didn’t do much. “Mr. Bad Example,” he asked me where to go
with the chorus. But usually I let him do the music because I loved what he
did with music.
Sometimes he’d call me his lyricist. And I would think to myself,
[laughs] Warren Zevon is calling me his lyricist. A better lyricist than him
would be hard to find.
Yet your lyrics—like the “windows and doors” line from “Fistful of
Rain”—match his words and style so well.
You got it, man. His girlfriends used to say that all the time. Women can
read right through it. I was working on the phone with him on a lot of stuff
on The Wind. His girlfriends would say, “I read what you wrote and what he
wrote, and it’s seamless. It seems like one person is writing it.” Which is the
best compliment there is.
That’s what you’re looking for. When you’re collaborating with
somebody that has a career and a persona, it has to be tailor-made for him.
During the making of The Wind they prescribed him all these drugs.
One time he called me on his cell phone and said, “I’m on the corner of
Crescent Heights. I just came out of a drugstore and I’m numb as a statue.
And I’m gonna beg, borrow, or steal some feelings from you so I can have
some feelings too.” He was telling me that. He wasn’t giving me the line for
a song; he was telling me that to make me laugh. I hung up and started
writing a verse. When I called him back he said, “Yeah, that’s good, that
good.” We had a lot of fun with that song.

So some of your songs came out of your own conversations with each
other?
Yes. And when he told me that, I made it more romantic, ’cause he was
seeing a lot of girls at the time. And he was having the time of his life,
doing as much as he could in his last days. I gave him “I don’t care if it’s
superficial / . . . Just bring enough for the ritual / Get here before I fall
asleep.” He was with all of these girls but was so out of it and sick.
When we wrote “Keep Me in Your Heart,” I said the lines, “Hold me in
your thoughts / Take me in your dreams / Touch me as I fall into view /
When the winter comes / Keep the fires lit / And I will be right next to
you.” There was silence, and then he said, “I don’t know, Jorge. I don’t
know.” I still have that page, and I scratched it with an X. If it didn’t work
for him, it was out.
A couple of months went by, and he asked if I had written any more. So
when we went to do it, he said, “Everything is great.” I put it back. The
point I am trying to make is that if he didn’t like it, even if I felt it was a
great line, if it doesn’t work for him, fine. Because you know why? Because
sometimes you slash something and get to something even better.
But at first he didn’t like it ’cause it was just too sad?
Yes. It was too heartbreaking for him.

The vocal sounds like he was sad. Was that hard for him to do?
Yeah. It was very hard for him, very hard.

I was so moved by the lines about “when you’re doing simple things
around the house / . . . I’m tied to you like the buttons on your blouse.”
It’s so intimate.
Let me tell you about that. He wrote the first verse, and I had to write
everything else. The only thing he helped me with there were the simple
things around the house line. I was saying something about when you are
doing things around the house, like watering the plants, and he said, “How
about ‘simple things’?” And then when I told him about the buttons of the
blouse, he wasn’t sure. He gave me a hard time about that too. I went,
“Okay, fine, if you don’t like it.”
Then he called me and said, “I changed my mind. It’s good. It’s great.”
He said his girlfriend really liked that line.
So there was a back and forth of him accepting things, more on this
song than any.

And of all the songs you wrote together, it’s so personal and close to the
bone. And he had problems with that but as a songwriter could see the
strength in it.
You know, he was going through so much. Knowing he was gonna die.
Going through all of this physical stuff. He started drinking again. I was
being a good friend, a good brother. Anything he was going through, I
would let it be. My job with him, aside from loving him dearly, was to
accomplish what he asked me to do. He said, “I want you to do this last
album. I want to leave my kids something that will help them. And finish
my career with something great.”

Was he sure it was the best thing to do, as opposed to taking time off
from work—
I tried to tell him that. I tried to say, “Maybe you should just take off
with your kids and get treatment.” And he said, “No, I don’t want treatment.
I want to do the album. You’ve got to help me do it. You’ve got to do it.” So
I jumped in.

As a songwriter, it was a heroic choice to make. I have one last thing to

do on Earth, and it’s to write more songs.
It was funny. I did say that, that it was heroic. But very painful. Because
at first we had a lot of fun, then Christmas came, 2002. He went home. And
he never came out. He just went into this deep depression. And the big
thing about this album that people don’t understand is that it almost didn’t
get done. Because he went home. I did the tracks in the studio for three or
four songs. Got the lyrics and everything. We had the songs, but he
wouldn’t sing them. He said he couldn’t. He said, “You sing them.”
I said, “Are you crazy? This is your fucking album.”
It was like that. And I was also worried that he just might die one day.
So finally, at some point, three months after going back and forth, his kids, I
think, Ariel and Jordan, went there with a doctor and told him he had to get
up from this depression. The doctor might have given him some
antidepressant medication or something. He had to stop drinking for a
while. Cool it down, and bring yourself up to finish this thing that you
really want.
So we came to him. Brought all the equipment to his home. And he
sang the songs. He sang “El Amor de Mi Vida,” “Keep Me in Your Heart,”
“Rub Me Raw.” But people don’t know: that almost did not get completed.
And that was the beauty of it, that it did.

Hard to imagine, knowing your life is about to end, that he could

summon up the energy to do any writing, let alone great writing. “El
Amor de Mi Vida” has such a beautiful melody.
When we wrote the words of it, he said, “You try something musically
for it, and I will try something musically, and we’ll see what happens.” So I
put it into this Southwestern thing that was good. He listened to mine and
really loved it. And then he did what he did with his music, which is what it
became. So when the Spanish comes, you don’t expect it. He was a big fan
of Richard Rodgers and all that Broadway stuff, and he said, “I channeled
Richard Rodgers and this is what I got.”
So it was his music totally. I loved it. It was gorgeous and wonderful.
And that Spanish section, with that melody, is so beautiful. You did that
in “Veracruz” too, in which you wrote a Spanish section.
Yeah. With “Veracruz” he gave me a tape with the section ending with
“Guernavaca.” And I came up with it.

Did he understand Spanish, or did you translate for him?

I translated for him. What happened is that he told me he wanted these
lyrics to be in Spanish, the chorus. I said, “Okay, what do you want to say?”
He said, “You’re the love of my life. I’ve been looking for you and can’t
find you.” He gave me the thought. So I translated it. And then I wrote a
few things in English: “I close my eyes, you reappear.” Then he said, “I
carry it inside, in here.” We went like that, line by line, and got the whole
song.

Were there ever any times when you really couldn’t agree about a
song?
With him it was like we had a brotherly thing, where if it wasn’t gonna
work, I would know he didn’t like it. We didn’t need to get into an
argument. He’d give some kind of facial thing that I would know. And vice
versa. He’d say, “Oh, you don’t like that?” We made it work. We never
went over the fence into where it wouldn’t work.

Was he someone who liked to always finish a song, or were there things
that he’d discard?
No. Everything we worked on, except for “Shy Girl,” got finished. It
was his main excitement in life, writing. During The Wind the creativity of
writing these songs kept him alive longer than the doctors told him. He was
so energetic, so thrilled. I have messages from him that he would leave me
on my machine. “Oh man, you don’t know how great this collaboration is.
These songs are great.” His manager, Brigette, who was constantly in the
car with him, taking him to doctor appointments, said, “Jorge, what you two
are doing is so great. He’s so excited about working with you and how
immediate everything is. You’re keeping him in a place where he’s not
thinking about anything except writing.” He felt very high about it for a
while, until after Christmas he got depressed and that spiral went down, and
it became hard to finish the album.
In this song cycle of so many intimate songs, you have “Prison Grove.”
Where did that come from?
When we were doing Life’ll Kill Ya we used to joke around a lot with
prison stuff. And they all started with my joke. I was singing this
unbearably high harmony on one of his songs. And he said, “What—you
can’t reach it? What’s your problem?” And I said, “Hey, I’m not your boy
in prison.” And he stopped and cracked up. And after that, everything was
about being your boy in prison and prison love. So I think at one point he
said, “Prison Grove.” He insisted I said it, but I think he said it.
He went to go see Letterman do his final show. I was working on The
Wind. I wanted to keep moving forward, so I suggested “Prison Grove.” But
this time I would make it serious, not a joke. So I started with a guitar riff.
When I was done, I had three verses. I played it for him, and he went, “Oh
man, Jorge, this is fantastic. This is the cornerstone of the record and
expresses what this album is.” But I wanted to write it together. I had
several verses, and he said, “You almost wrote the whole song.” But I told
him we needed him to write more verses, and we had to write the chorus. I
went to his house, and he came out with the last verse, about the “wacky
wack.” And we wrote together the chorus. He wanted to write something
about “the light shines” or “shine the light” and asked, “But shine the light
on what?” And I said, “These broken lives.” And he liked that. And we
wrote the chorus with this gold pen. Got a hammer and a nail, and he nailed
the paper to the wall and said, “We nailed it!” And that’s how “Prison
Grove” happened.

I love that on that last Letterman show he played his brilliant song
“Genius,” and with a remarkable string arrangement he wrote, which
was just pure genius.
He was a genius. From the beginning. You know that old joke, “I’m a
genius, and I don’t use that word lightly”? But he was. He was amazing. He
was a big Dylan fan, and Dylan has this song “Silvio.” Warren loved that so
much; he showed me. He wrote every part of the arrangement of the song
and showed it to me. “This is what the drums are doing. This is what the
girls are doing . . .” If I ever meet Dylan, I will tell him that.

Would Warren transcribe his own songs like that?

 Yeah. He wrote out the whole thing. Once he gave me one, and I
couldn’t read it. I told him, “Warren, I need a chord sheet!”
He loved writing stuff out. All of it. There was nothing more
pleasurable to him than writing a song.

OceanofPDF.com
Don McLean
 American Pie and Beyond
New York, New York 2010

Most songwriters don’t try to do anything new. They’re busy enough just
trying to write a good song. Stretching the form itself—that is something
rarely tried. Mostly it’s about working within the form and discovering
something new within the limitations given.
Which is only one reason why Don McLean’s “American Pie” remains
such a remarkable song. Sure, Bob Dylan had written multiverse songs that
blew our minds with epic verses of expansive lyrics before this. But except
for him, few artists had ever done something quite so bold as describe the
rise and fall of American rock and roll in an infectious and expansive pop
song. Till Don McLean did it.
He coined the term “the day the music died” to paint the scene—and its
aftermath—of the triple death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P.
Richardson (the Big Bopper) on February 3, 1959. It’s his magnum opus,
still in constant radio play, and it was covered a few years back by
Madonna, who took it up the charts again.
Had he written only “American Pie,” he would matter forever, of
course. But the same can be said about another miracle song, “Vincent.”
Which remains one of the most quintessentially poignant bio songs ever. To
write an effective song about a historical personage is never easy and
always prey to maudlin sentimentalism. But then we got “Vincent,” with its
brilliant descriptions of the artist’s art, heart, and mind and the great
culminating wisdom “this world wasn’t meant for someone as beautiful as
you.” Perfect lyric wed to the ideal tune, the essence of a standard. But a
new kind of standard, and one for the ages.
When I asked Randy Newman a few years back for an example of a
great song, he said, “I like a song like ‘Vincent’ by Don McLean. I mean,
there it is—it’s a beautiful goddamn song.”
But he’s also written every kind of song under the sun, always with
elegant, unique lyrics and rich melodics. From his beautiful reflection on
homelessness, “Homeless Brother” (a duet with the great Pete Seeger), to
the classic melodicism of “And I Love You So” (which not only became an
unlikely number-one hit for Perry Como but was also the last song ever
recorded by Elvis), his songs wed folk narratives with contours of
standards, rock, and country and the ineffable colors of human joy and
sorrow.

And I watch the river flow and I know I must let go

But it’s oh so hard
For the waves are all around my small canoe
I had always hoped this boat would carry two
“Oh My What a Shame,” Don McLean

Don played that song “Oh My What a Shame” for me several decades
before this interview took place. I was in college then at Boston University,
1978, and discovered that Don, one of my heroes, was performing an
outdoor concert on campus that night. I bicycled quickly to the concert site,
where he was finishing up his sound check. Even then—long before I
commenced this journey of interviewing songwriters—I knew that few
things flatter songwriters more than recognition of one of their lesser-
known but great songs.
So I told him of my enduring love for “Oh My What a Shame.” He
smiled, picked up his Martin guitar, and played it for me solo. And he sang
it beautifully. It was stunning, a moment I will always cherish.
It’s true that the song “Killing Me Softly With His Song” by Norman
Gimbel and Charles Fox was written about one of Don McLean’s
performances. The singer Lori Lieberman, who was working with the
songwriting team, heard McLean in a 1971 concert and was so knocked out
by the experience, she described it as McLean killing her softly with his
songs. They wrote the song to that title and idea, which she first recorded,
before it became a major hit for Roberta Flack. To this day most people
don’t realize it, but the one killing us softly with his song all these years
was Don.
Born Donald McLean III in New Rochelle, New York, on October 2,
1945, he suffered from asthma as a kid and had long bouts away from
school. It was a time he used to concentrate on that which moved him the
most: music. “The whole time I was growing up I was dogged with a lot of
sickness,” he said. “I was home from school a lot. And basically the record
player and the television became my best friends. I didn’t have any brothers
or sisters who were my age. I had a very much older sister who left the
house when I was very little. So I spent that time absorbing an enormous
amount of music. Just because I loved the stuff.”
By sixteen he bought his first guitar, a sunburst Harmony archtop.
Eventually he fell in with Erik Darling and Fred Hellerman, both members
of the legendary band The Weavers, along with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and
Ronnie Gilbert. Through them he connected with their manager, Harold
Leventhal [who shared an office with Marjorie Guthrie, as related on page
15], and launched a career as a folk musician. A gifted singer and guitarist,
he was a great interpreter of folk songs. But like Dylan and others who
emerged from that very world, he was more excited about writing his own.
And also like Dylan, Don could write all kinds of songs. But he never gave
up his folk roots, often joining Pete Seeger and others on the sloop
Clearwater, the boat built to promote the cleanup of the Hudson River.

“American Pie” is an iconic epic, a remarkable song and record. And

unlike anything you had written at the time. Where did it come from?
Don McLean: I was trying to create a dream. So there were lines in
there that were dreamlike, almost, in order to connect other concepts that I
had that were semi-real, but it was a dream, and the idea came from the idea
that politics and music flow parallel to one and other.
I wanted to write a song that summed up everything I felt about
America and music, and I did it, and it turned out beyond my wildest
dreams. It didn’t take a long time to write. The body of the song was written
pretty quickly once I got the gist of where I was going. The first part, the
opening part and the chorus, I had for a few months. I couldn’t quite figure
out where to go with it. Then I decided to speed it up and change it. So I
found a way to do it. The [Buddy Holly plane crash] is the start of it. But
then it moves into a whole other realm.
It was a well-written song, and I felt it was a really good idea. But when
I first played it people yawned. They didn’t know what I was talking about.
It was way too long. It was just verse-chorus-verse-chorus, but we broke
that up by having a slow beginning and a slow end. Ed Freeman, who
produced the record, deserves a lot of credit for making a record out of it
that was very, very special. And which was commercial. I also deserve a lot
of credit, because I made the band play it until it was right. I had to fight on
so many things with people who were my allies. Ed Freeman and I damn
near killed each other a few times over some of this stuff. I said, “This is
not right.”
Finally we got a guy named Paul Griffin, a black piano player. He came
in, and he just jumped all over that song. He understood exactly how to play
that song, and he played the living hell out of it. And I drove that guitar
right up his ass, in his earphones, my acoustic, and that’s what made him
jump all over it, and that’s how it happened. And then I said, “Now you’re
talking. Now we’ve got the track.” This stuff isn’t easy. If I’d have given in,
we would have had a lousy track and you’d have never heard the song.
You have to have great music in your head. Cole Porter, Gershwin.
You’ve got to put good stuff in to get good stuff out if you want to write
songs. You’ve got to go back to the Irving Berlins and The Beatles and the
good stuff from the 1950s.

Randy Newman, in describing what he considers a great song, named

“Vincent.” And I agree. It’s one of those miracle songs, musically and
lyrically. How was it born?
I read a book about [Van Gogh] and decided to write a song. But how
will I write a song about him that doesn’t sound stupid? And I figured the
way to do that was to look at the Starry Night picture. And I came up with
this idea to use him, to use all these images I see and tell the story with a
verbal or poetic representation of the colors and energy [of his work]. That
was the plan, and it just clicked.
The miracle line is “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as
you.” That line does so much and in such simple and poignant
language.
That line came while I was writing. A lot of people feel that way about
themselves. It’s one of those lines that people take to heart. They think,
“Well, it is hard to be in the world, and maybe I’m not right for the world.”
A lot of us feel that way.

So you were writing about yourself in this song?

Of course. About being an artist in this world.
I was completely devoted to music making in those days. I was in love
with the record business, and I was in love with making records, and I was
in love with the studio. It’s all gone now. I don’t like what they replaced it
with. It used to be about creating something beautiful, something that would
last. Now it’s computer music, and it’s nasty, mean, and negative. It’s music
that doesn’t help anyone.

Your first songs were quite sophisticated. How did you learn to be such
a good songwriter?
I didn’t come from a musical family. And my parents were not the type
of people to encourage me. All these songs came out of my life.
You asked me when I wrote my first song. There was nothing in my
background that would give me an indication that I could be arrogant
enough to think I could write a song, do you know what I’m saying? My
family were very quiet people; they didn’t want to be noticed. There were
just really your run-of-the-mill American family. My father and mother
were older than the other parents. I was born when they were in their
forties. So basically they were quiet people.
The first thing I did—what got me going was when all this music I had
absorbed my whole life started to get focused. First on rock and roll: Elvis
Presley, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, doo-wop music. I’d heard James
Brown, stuff like that. And then—because there was no fashion element
attached to music, you just liked what you liked—next thing I knew there
was this folk thing going on. And you could play guitar and sing by
yourself. You didn’t have to be in a group. And I wasn’t very good at
getting along with people and being a group member. I wanted to do it all
myself. And so I started down that path, and the simple folk songs that I
heard started me thinking maybe I could write a verse and a chorus, a verse
and a chorus. That’s what made me think I could possibly do something like
that.
Prior to that, I was interested in just being a singer and a guitar player.
Singing songs. But as an amateur, everything I wanted to sing had already
been sung. So I had to start looking around for songs that nobody sang. And
that was the first thing I started to do. I slowly began to find a song here or
there. Or I would adapt a song that nobody else would do. Like I used to do
a version of “Angel Eyes,” the Matt Dennis song, when I was fifteen. And
I’d also sing “Hard Travelin’” or “This Little Light of Mine.” So I was
already mixing these things up and really drawing on the multitudinous big
mixture of things that was on the charts that I grew up hearing on the radio.
I liked “Summer Place” a lot. I thought that was a beautiful thing. I still get
chill when I hear that wonderful song. “A pretty face . . .” I loved that.
There was nobody there like Rolling Stone to say this isn’t good and this
is. It was a magic time because music made it somehow—it was a mystery.
Nobody really knew how these songs managed to find their way from
Philadelphia or Memphis or New York or wherever. Record companies
were really artistic institutions. They were like impresarios. They had their
Sol Hurok, their Goddard Lieberson at Columbia. They put out The Student
Prince or whatever. Then they would have folk music and all these different
things. They thought of themselves as being institutions of culture. And not
bottom-line, what’s-the-next-hit kind of thing.
Those were the days I grew up. That was the environment that was
around. I chose folk music because it was what I could do solo. I wasn’t
sophisticated enough on the guitar to really do a groove.
Then by the midsixties I was trying to write a song and write about
ideas that meant something to me. I really made an effort never to repeat
myself stylistically. If I wrote “Castles in the Air,” I would turn around and
do something entirely different.

I loved your album Homeless Brother, which you made with the
producer Joel Dorn. It was a beautiful collection of songs and so
lovingly produced.
 Thank you. I read some Kerouac and decided that I had a bunch of
ideas, and they started to come together. I saw the homeless brother idea. It
was a complete package. My brother-in-law was a genius Spanish painter,
and I gave him a photograph of a woodcutter in the Ozarks and the other
was a picture of my little white dog. And I asked him to make these
elements in a boxcar, and he created those paintings. Those paintings are
much more important than the album, I can assure you.
I went to visit Lee Hays of the Weavers toward the end of his life. I read
about this hobo who lost his legs, and he was taken in, mummified, put in a
tuxedo, and billed as the Amazing Petrified Man and taken around. And
that led to the song “The Legend of Andrew McCrew,” which is also on that
album.

The song “Wonderful Baby” is wonderful—very odd—and such a

great-sounding record.
Joel Dorn made that record like a cartoon orchestra. I had spent the
summer listening to Fred Astaire records. I didn’t realize that maybe a third
of all the great popular songs were all written for Fred Astaire. I didn’t
know that. And I studied his movies, like Swing Time. When he and Ginger
would do this dance and jump over the railing at the end, I almost would
want to cry when I would see that. Something so beautiful about being a
human being. And I felt this is what music and art are supposed to make
people feel. Now so much of what we see is ugly and negative and nasty
and mean, and it doesn’t help people.

Do you recall writing “The Grave”? It is one of the most haunting of all
songs. It seems ancient.
That was a dream I had. It was a vivid dream that I had that here was a
soldier digging in the ground to save his life; he was actually burying
himself. I woke up and ran right to the guitar and sang it into the tape
recorder. I just went with a chord that felt right for my voice and started
working off that from there.

Your song “And I Love You So” is a modern standard and was a hit as
recorded by Perry Como.
 That came out of all the great music I’d absorbed. “And I Love You So”
was the last song Elvis ever recorded. His people called up and said Elvis
wants to do this song, and he wants the publishing. And we said, “Sorry, we
can’t give up the publishing.” So he did it anyway. You can’t deny a good
melody.

OceanofPDF.com
Richard Thompson
 Inside the Beeswing
Santa Monica, California 2009

It’s a crystal-blue morning in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the Pacific,
and Richard Thompson is waiting at a table in a little coffee shop. Around
him there’s a tranquility and a warmth, and although this legendary British
songwriter lives in this vast city during much of the year, he seems
untouched by the volume and vagaries of an Angeleno existence.
When I first interviewed him about a decade ago, he answered my first
query into his songwriting methodology with “Hey, there’s a lot of
competition. I’m not about to give away my secrets.” Reminded of that
response, he laughed and said, “The competition must have thinned out.” In
fact, he’s right—so many contenders have fallen by the wayside, while
Richard Thompson, somewhat miraculously, continues to write astounding
songs. Not only is he one of this world’s most distinctively gifted
songwriters—as inventive and inspired with words as with music—he’s
also one of the most prolific. As a teenager he founded the folk-rock
supergroup Fairport Convention, with whom he wrote a profusion of
amazing early songs before branching out into a stellar solo career—and
sometimes duo with his wife, Linda Thompson.
He also happens to be one of the world’s greatest and most distinctive
guitarists, and as an instrumentalist alone he could easily have a
distinguished career—if not for the fact that he’s one of this world’s most
gifted songwriters. He also happens to be one of the most brightest and
most eloquent songwriters alive, which is why sitting down with him over
coffee to talk songs is a privilege not to be taken lightly.
Born in London in 1949, he absorbed all the music his family had to
offer—first his father’s jazz collection and next his sister’s rock and roll—
so that his leap from Django Reinhardt to Buddy Holly, a fusion forever
instilled in his own work, was natural. As was his early love of folk ballads
both Scottish and Irish, books of which he pored over for years. It all came
together in his own work—richly detailed narratives that reel like timeless
ballads, propelled by the rock in his veins and the jazz at his fingers.
Now in a world where the entire concept of making albums is
increasingly arcane and much of the music-buying public is downloading
single songs, he’s determinedly swimming against the current, writing both
a song cycle and a folk opera. “Songs like to be together,” he says with a
wry grin.

Your songs stay alive over many years. Is that something you work at?
Richard Thompson: I don’t think it’s something you can consciously
think about. But I studied the old ballads—that’s the music I grew up with.
In the house there were these books of Scottish and Irish ballads. And I
liked to read the stuff when I was a kid.

You’d read them as opposed to listening?

Yes, it was my only source. I didn’t have anywhere I could listen to the
stuff, and I didn’t really get into records until later. When people like Dylan
came along—the first Dylan album, my sister’s boyfriend had it—it was
very much the same school. That’s what he learned as well, Scottish and
Irish ballads. When he started to write those longer songs he was very
schooled in those traditions. So it was a familiar thing when Dylan came
along; it didn’t seem that strange.
But that’s a great place to learn songwriting.

Other British songwriters and people outside of America listened to

Dylan and American blues and their music seems very American.
Whereas yours does not. The Scottish, Irish, and Celtic influence is
very much a part of your work musically as well as lyrically—
 Yeah. I think it’s a good thing to write from where you come from. To
express something of your own culture. That can be influenced by other
cultures, but if you have a kind of roots that is yours, then the music is
going to be stronger. It’s got that firm foundation, and it expresses
something of the time and place of where you come from. It’s more
individualistic, I think. I always felt with British blues and R&B acts,
people like The Kinks wrote more from home. When Ray Davies was
expressing more of a British musical tradition, then the music was more
interesting. When The Yardbirds were writing their own songs when they
were writing “The Shapes of Things” and “For Your Love,” these things
mixed blues with things that came from home, and this was more
interesting music. The Yardbirds playing “I’m a Man” compared to the
Muddy Waters version, it’s trivial. If you were going to judge The Yardbirds
by that, you’d say, “Well, there’s no comparison.”
Muddy Waters grew up in the blues tradition. He embodied the spirit of
Mississippi and the spirit of Chicago. This is as good as it gets, Muddy
Waters singing a blues song. The Yardbirds were imitators. They’d only
heard him on records. They’d never been to America, let alone Chicago or
Mississippi. It’s like a Japanese bluegrass band or a Swedish jazz band. It
can be very good and accomplished, but it will never be as good as the
original.
So I’ve always been concerned to put something of the culture I come
from into the music. It can always be a blend. It always is a blend. There’s
always a bit of rock and roll in there and other traditions that get in there.
But I like the strongest element to be British.

It’s interesting to me also that your guitar solos, that they don’t seem as
bluesy as electric guitar solos we hear, even by British players. Your
solos never seem to use riffs and scales we hear in other people’s solos.
I think consciously at some point I said, “No blues.” When I was a
teenager, when I was in school I’d be playing Chuck Berry riffs; I’d be
playing B. B. King riffs. Otis Rush. So I could do all that stuff, but I really
didn’t want to be a secondhand musician. I really wanted to express
something different. And at a time when everybody and his brothers were
guitar players, to be individualistic and have your own style seemed to be
almost the most important thing. So it was a conscious decision to really
turn away from the blues, and if I used bent notes on guitar to make them
more Celtic than blues, to bend notes on the guitar.

How do you bend a note to make it more Celtic than bluesy?

There are overlaps. You’re bending different intervals sometimes.
You’re bending up from the tonic rather than up to the tonic.

Are you using different scales too?

Yes. I am probably using more of that scale that doesn’t have a third in
it. Like a Scottish scale, where if you’re in D, it’s like D, E, G, A, C, D. It’s
more of a pentatonic scale, a real Scottish bagpipe scale, or using the third
in a passing sense rather than stating the scale. But I do use a lot of that. It’s
a lot more ambiguous, and the music floats a little bit more.

It’s a great sound—and uniquely yours—both on electric and acoustic.

Yeah. Well, on acoustic guitar, well, one of the things you want to
achieve is size. If you’re gonna strum, strum, strum, strum, that gives you a
certain size of accompaniment, but it’s quite small. If you use finger-style
and a tuning, as many songwriters do, that gives you more orchestral
possibilities on guitar: you can play bass sometimes, you can play the
chords, you can play lead. You can widen the whole thing out. And if
you’re using open tunings, you can have more notes that ring out. So this
gives the illusion of size, of a bigger accompaniment.

That’s something I’ve heard in your playing—

Excellent. [Laughter]

I just watched a video of you playing “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”

solo acoustic, and you’re playing it so effortlessly, but it really sounds
like two guitars because you’re playing bass notes, a high lead part,
and there’s rhythm. Actually maybe it sounds like three guitars—
Okay, three. I was hoping for five. [Laughter]

And it looks so effortless—

Well, it looks effortless. That’s a good showbiz trick, to look effortless. I
think some of the things that we think of a pianist doing—having two hands
and being able to separate rhythmically the hands, you can do some of that
on guitar. People like Blind Blake and Chet Atkins. You’re playing the bass
and the rhythm and the tune over the top. These are possibilities as
songwriters and accompanists that we should look at because they make the
experience broader.

It’s interesting that you said to me last time that when you work on a
song you really don’t want to bring it to the guitar too soon. You want
to work on the music in your head before you lock it down on the
guitar. Is that generally true?
I think that before you pin music down, while it’s still floating a bit in
your head, it always sounds fabulous. It’s never that good again. It’s almost
celestial when you haven’t quite figured out what it is yet. It’s kind of still
floating around, and you haven’t quite grabbed it and defined it. It’s almost
like music of the heavens. But at some point you have to bring it to earth,
and I suppose at that point you pick up an instrument. And you decide
actually it’s in A and there’s three other chords. And it becomes a little
more mundane, more of this world, and it’s a little bit of a sad time, but it’s
rewarding that you capture it. It’s a bit like there’s a butterfly floating in the
air, this beautiful butterfly, and you really enjoy watching it and you think,
“I’ve got to have it.” So you get your butterfly net and your grab it and
you’re really excited to see what it looks like when you take it out of the
net, and you find the colors have all faded and it’s become this kind of gray
thing, and the colors have all faded, but you can still see the suggestion of
where the color was. It’s become this sort of slightly less interesting object.

It’s interesting to hear you say that, because as you know, most
songwriters use a piano or guitar as a tool to reach that butterfly, and
find it within chords—
Well, I must say I do that as well. But sometimes if I have a chord
sequence I like and I am looking for a tune, I find I can sit and play for a
while, but I find it’s good to leave the guitar alone and go out for a walk and
stop thinking about chords. Because things are looser in your mind. They’re
not so defined. Your fingers fall into habits. If you think about guitar
playing rather than actually playing it, it’s a looser thing. You can imagine
your fingers going places. You can see your fingers making chord shapes.
But somehow it’s not so defined. There’s a slightly more ambiguous
element in there that can be created, that can take you other places.

It would seem to me, because of your skill on guitar, that it wouldn’t be

mundane when moving it to guitar—
Sometimes that does happen, absolutely. But sometimes it doesn’t.
Especially if you’re stuck and you can’t find the way forward in a song. If
halfway through it you can’t see where it will go, it’s helpful to get away
from the instrument. I do some rhythmic activity like walking or surfing.

Do you surf?
No. [Laughs]

You said that when you bring it to a guitar you’ll decide on a key, like
A. Do you choose that key because it fits the melody or for the specific
color or mood of that key?
That’s a very good question. I suppose ultimately you have to pick a key
that will suit your voice if you’re a singer-songwriter. But sometimes your
voice is flexible enough that you have a few possibilities of key.

Do you find in your experience that keys have different colors or

moods?
Absolutely they do. It can really change the way that you perceive a
song. Suddenly a song will sound right in a certain key. Sound better. You
might choose a key because when you move up to the IV chord you get a
low E or a low D-tuned D that suddenly gives the song a lift at that point.
There’s desirable things about different keys. And it’s only through
experimenting that you realize what the possibilities are. And it’s different
with every song. Depending on the range and the emotion that you’re trying
to express with the song.

Do those natures of each key exist for you separate from the guitar?
I think it’s really how they sound on each instrument. Some things
sound particularly good on a guitar that don’t sound that good on a
keyboard, and vice versa. Something will sound fabulous on piano and
puny on guitar. Or perhaps the best a song ever sounds is accompanied by
solo mandolin, for whatever reason. Sometimes you say, “This song is
better without chords underpinning it. So I’ll play this song just with penny-
whistle playing the tune along with voice.” Because then the tune floats, it’s
ambiguous, and people can fill in the chords with their own minds. But I
don’t want to pin it down.

When you do have a melody in your head, separate from a guitar, how
do you preserve it? Do you tape it?
I write tunes down in notation because I don’t trust cassettes. And I
don’t trust digits as a way of preserving things. Because I lose things,
especially electronic things. I have to be very careful, and I back things up
forever. I don’t trust the recording process just because I’m frightened of
losing. So I write down tunes in notation, and I write down the lyrics.

And then is it pretty clear to you what chords will go with that melody,
or do you try different things?
I think it’s usually clear. Sometimes it changes, but it doesn’t usually
change very much. That’s interesting—it’s something I’ve never really
considered before. Usually the first way you hear it is the harmony you end
up using. Sometimes the revelatory moment of writing the song can be
when you do change the melody. Just that one little twist somewhere. You
think, “Whoa, that’s it!” I’m thinking of, like, Buddy Holly writing “Peggy
Sue,” and he gets into the studio and says, “How about third time through
we go to an F chord?” You know, it’s in A. Singing the same note over an F
chord. It’s the big moment of the song, the defining moment, which
otherwise is a twelve-bar blues. So things like that. You find a harmonic
opening that you weren’t expecting. Certainly in the musical component of
a song that can be a big lift as a writer, an exciting thing.

Do you think anything affects the melodies that come to you? Like if
you’re in LA or London do circumstances affect what you come up
with?
I don’t think so. I kind of think you carry a culture in your head. For me
Los Angeles is a blank canvas. It’s not as if someone has already painted
The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean up there that you have to pay attention
to. To me it’s culturally blank. You can be who you want in this town. If I
lived in New Orleans, it would be different. The local music is so strong a
characteristic that you would have to absorb it, and you would want to
absorb it.

Yet it’s a mostly sunny place, pretty warm all year round so that you
can go outside and feel happy. Does that affect things?
Yeah, but creatively, internally, it’s a bleak Brontë-esque moorland.

Is it?
Yes. Always. I can’t write sunny songs. I could be lying on a beach in
the Caribbean, but what I write is still grim and Dickensian. I don’t know
why that is. But I’m glad it’s that way. If I was a painter, it probably
wouldn’t be that way because you paint what you see. But perhaps I’d paint
what I feel. Perhaps it would come out like Francis Bacon as opposed to a
pretty Matisse.

You talked about the influence of folk ballads on your work, which is
about storytelling, and you’ve always been very good at telling a story
in songs, which is not something every songwriter can do. Did that
come naturally to you?
Well, I enjoy doing it. I think every song really tells a story. Some are
more fleshed out than others. Some are more linear than others. But most
pop songs, apart from pretty basic dance music, is telling some kind of a
story. Usually a love story, sometimes a political story.

But often not a narrative—

No, not a narrative. But I think in modern songwriting there is a lot of
cinematic technique, where you jump in in the middle of the action. And
you might be writing in first person through the eyes of the protagonist.
And you jump out before the end of the story. It’s just this little cinematic
scene, and you do these hard cuts through the song. And some more is left
to the imagination. And I do a lot of that in addition to the narrative songs.
And I enjoy doing both kinds. And I’m probably surprised by how popular
the ballads are, the story songs. So in a sense I’m reacting to what the
audience would like.
Why does it surprise you that the audience likes those?
Well, you wouldn’t think that that would be a way that people still enjoy
receiving a story. In the old days of ballads, in the sixteenth century,
eighteenth century, before the gramophone and the cinema, the way people
heard news was not from newspapers; it was from ballads. You’d hear about
the local murder, and it would be a ballad. A song like “Tom Dooley.” It
was a local murder in Appalachia, I think, in the twentieth century. And
that’s how that local murder was defined and delineated.

It’s interesting to me how much people hunger for stories about other
people. There’s nothing people are more interested in, through the ages,
than stories about other people’s lives.
Yeah, it’s extraordinary. And I’m surprised people have the attention
span to sit through a five- or six-minute song that’s telling a story. I’m glad
they do. I’m very rewarded to know that this process, which goes back
thousands of years, still works—in the age of so many distractions and so
many different ways of mediating information.

There are some songwriters, like Lennon, who felt writing about one’s
self was more important and put down McCartney for writing story
songs. Do you feel one kind of songwriting is more powerful than
others?
I don’t think there’s a difference, really. When McCartney’s writing a
story song, it’s still about him. It expresses McCartney’s worldview; it
expresses McCartney’s morality. It’s McCartney with a different hat on. So
you can be dazzled by the hat for a while, but it’s still McCartney. When
Lennon’s writing about some of his own life, sometimes it becomes very
surreal and abstract.

Like “Strawberry Fields”—

Yeah. “I Am the Walrus.” Which, in my personal interpretation of that,
the “I” is not Lennon. It’s probably Brian Epstein. But I have my own
theory about that song. So we won’t get too esoteric here.
So you start off writing about yourself, and you end up with some
universality. Because we are all humans. So Joni Mitchell writes very
confessionally about her own life, and we like it because we recognize her
dynamics in our own lives. But she’s one of the few. She and Loudon
Wainwright are the two great confessional songwriters, the ones I can stand
to listen to. Because of their honesty. There’s a lot of kind of whiny singer-
songwriters who write confessionally about their lives and it’s of no interest
whatsoever. There’s too much self-pity there. There’s too much of looking
for a reaction. Unless you’re scrupulous about that process, you flirt with
failure. I tend to avoid that area because I’m not sure I can pull it off. It
takes real discipline.
So it’s a process where you start out writing a personal song and it
becomes universal, and you write a song about other people and it ends up
ultimately being about you. So it’s almost a different process, arriving at the
same midpoint. And if it’s a good song and the song is honest and you tell
the truth about the human condition, through self-examination and
examination about other people, then you kind of arrive at the same thing.

When you write a story song do you give any thought to the moral of
the story or what people will take away from it?
I suppose you shouldn’t think about those things because they’re a
distraction. But I’m sure they go through our mind from time to time. You
do think of what will people think of this. I suppose the part you should be
concerned with is communication. You want your song to communicate.
And you want to speak to people in a language they understand. But that’s
about it. In terms of whatever morality you’re expressing, that shouldn’t be
your concern. Your morality will be expressed.

Is being too conscious about your intention, while writing, something to

avoid?
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. ’Cause I think it can stop you in your tracks. If
you think, “Oh, here I am being creative again—isn’t this great?” Because
you can outmaneuver your own subconscious. You want to get to the point
where it’s almost a semiconscious or unconscious act of writing. And if
you’re looking at yourself the whole time, you’ll never get to that point.
You know, Picasso said, “I never question my own work. I don’t question
the morality of my work—that’s the critic’s job. People think I make these
sexist pictures. That’s not my business. I just create and I put it out there.” I
think that’s basically correct. As an artist, you are your own first critic. But
you apply that to certain things and not other things.

Are you able to keep that critic out of it?

I think it’s unconscious. I think sometimes you can’t express or bring to
the front of your mind what’s good about something or what’s bad about
something. But I think after doing it for a few years your instincts become
hardened. And you might say, “I don’t know what’s good about this song,
but I trust in this song. I believe this to be a good song, but I don’t know
why. I don’t know what it’s about. And I’m going to sing it anyway.” And
maybe a few years down the road you think, “Oh, I see. Now I get it. This is
really about my mother, or my cat. But I couldn’t see it at the time.” The
process was so unconscious. And I trust my unconscious. I trust my
instincts.

It is involving the unconscious, yet consciously so, using rhymes,

guiding it. Is part of the process conscious?
Yes. I think making music, either creating it or playing it, is sort of a
handshake between the two sides of the brain. I forget which side is which.
The intuitive part of the brain is kind of flying, and the logical part of the
brain interjects occasionally and says, “Four bars left,” or says, “Key
change,” or says, “F chord coming up,” or says, “What rhymes with
‘bush’?”

Do you sometimes put up a rhyme and then work backward from it?
Yeah, absolutely. Totally. I think sometimes you can write a song totally
backward. You get this killer line that ends the song and you think about
how you get back from there. Or you start from a title or an idea. Something
that sounds cool, an oxymoronic title or something. And you build from
that. You can hear it in writing by Dylan, when he has some line he wants to
use and he writes backward from there. And occasionally, I’m happy to say,
you hear the oddly laid line in a Dylan song. Where he doesn’t really care;
he just wants to get to the good line. Which means he’s human after all.

And the real brilliance comes when the setup line is as perfect as the
rhyming line.
 Yeah. Alexander Pope, which is all rhyming couplets, his skill at the
setup line is just incredible.

Dylan, like you—and Byron—often uses intertwining rhyme schemes,

ABAB, where every line is rhymed. And he does it quite well.
Yeah, so does Byron. Obviously, that’s harder to do. But with certain
songs you can do it, or you’ll have internal rhymes that run through a song,
and it doesn’t distract; it just fits right in.

Is it a fun process for you? Is it enjoyable?

The whole process is enjoyable. I think that’s what gets you writing in
the morning. The whole thing is fun. You might put it off and feed the cat or
empty the dishwasher. But actually once you sit down to it, it’s an enjoyable
process. I really like it. Even the darkest possible theme is actually fun to
write about.

That comes across in the writing and is probably one of the reasons
your work hasn’t diminished over the years, that you enjoy the process.
Whereas other songwriters don’t like it at all.
Yes, that’s true. Some people can only write when they’re in pain. Some
can only write when they’re young.

That’s pretty common.

Yeah. There are different curves. Everybody has their own curve.

In terms of the lines that are good that you set up, do you have any idea
where they come from or how to reach them?
I don’t know. We’re getting into a difficult area where it’s hard to talk
about. There are all kinds of things which start your mind rolling. You
might overhear someone say, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes,” and you
might think there’s a song there. Or you might just think that’s a good line.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and there’s a rhythm or a rhythmical
phrase in my mind. And I don’t know where that comes from, if it’s from
dreaming about it or when you’re half-awake. Probably when you’re half-
awake. Or you wake up with some solution to a problem that you’ve been
thinking about. When your mind’s in a relaxed enough state, you can almost
dream of the solution. Sometimes if I’m writing during the day and I take a
nap, a ten-minute nap, and I wake up, everything seems clearer. Sometimes
solutions seem to have been located. I don’t know why. It’s hard to say.

Interesting that you talk about seeing or overhearing a phrase. I think

of “Beeswing.” Isn’t that a word you saw?
Yes. It is the name of a village.

It’s such a great word for something very delicate. Interesting that you
found it and also recognized how to use it in a song. Also “Wall of
Death” is another title you found in the world.
I suppose these are just symbols that you latch onto or pick up.

Seems part of it is always being open to the possibilities.

Yes, that’s absolutely true. The more that you’re awake to possibilities,
the more success you have with writing. If you’re basically on twenty-four
hours a day, the more awake you are, the more stuff seems to come in. It
can be exhausting as well—to be on all the time. I think sometimes you
switch the TV on and watch Wheel of Fortune just to stop the process for an
hour or so. [Laughter]

I can’t imagine you watching that for very long—

Well, yeah, culture is interesting. I wouldn’t watch it every day. I have
watched it at least once. [Laughter] Because it’s interesting what people do
and what the media says to people, how TV culture impinges on people’s
lives.

Yes. In a huge way.

Yes, it’s huge. It’s a huge component of culture. In some countries—I
won’t mention which—it’s a dull culture. And it’s hardly giving you
anything.

Do you find you’re almost always in the place where you can connect
with ideas, or are there periods when there’s nothing?
Well, when I’m touring or performing I don’t tend to write much. I
almost have a performing brain that’s different from a writing brain. Where
I’m having to remember stuff I’ve already written. I’m remembering forty,
fifty sets of lyrics. And I find that’s a distraction from writing. So when I’m
on the road I’m still open to ideas and looking for ideas, but it’s more taking
notes than getting anything finished. I can’t get any serious writing done on
the road. I know other people really do very well, writing in a hotel room. I
find that quite difficult. So I jot stuff down. But when I get home or
somewhere where I am for a few days anyway, where I can really get stuff
worked out.

When you are in writing mode do you have any schedule or find that
any time of day is best?
I find I get more done the earlier I start. I get up early these days—it’s
an old person’s thing. I’m up at six. Sometimes I can work before I take my
son to school. Otherwise I’ll start when I get back. I’ll plan to do the
morning—six to twelve or eight to one. And then if it’s going well, I’ll keep
going into the afternoon. But normally I look to be writing about six hours a
day. But then it could be sixteen hours if it’s going well. Especially if I have
a project coming up, like an album or something. Then I’ll be writing most
of the time, like fourteen, sixteen hours a day.

Do you find you can perfect a song, or do you have to settle sometimes?
It’s got to be right. It has to be as good as you can get it. There is no
perfect, but you do it as well as you can. Then you say, “Right, finished,
done it.” But then a year later or five years later you might think, “That’s a
bad verse, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Will you rewrite a song after you’ve recorded it?

That depends. Particularly with older stuff, I think you want to write
some changes. A song like “Meet on the Ledge,” which I wrote when I was
nineteen, is an immature song. And it’s very hippie-dippie sixties in that it’s
elusive. And rather ill-defined, and the imagery doesn’t always work. It’s a
song I’d like to change. But that song is sort of owned by the audience at
this point. It’s become anthemic to the point where I couldn’t really change
the lyrics, so I have to forgive myself for being immature and say, “Well,
that’s that.” And I’ll find whatever I can in it when I play the song. So it has
some meaning when I perform it. In that sense the elusiveness in it is a
good thing because I can say, “Well, I take this to mean this. When I was a
kid, I probably meant it to be this, but I now see it as this.” So I can
interpret it in a different way. I can’t change it, but I can live with it.

You spoke about your surprise that people’s attention spans can take in
a six- or seven-minute song. Have you ever wanted to do a longer piece,
something extended far beyond a typical song, like Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed
Lady of the Lowlands”?
Sometimes. Mostly I edit things down to a digestible chunk for the
audience. “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is probably not a song Dylan
performs a lot, if ever. I don’t know. Again, it’s quite a personal song, I
would think, so maybe he’s not comfortable doing it. But I’d like to think I
could do a ten-minute song or a fifteen-minute song and people could listen
all the way through. But then you have the other burden that if people
absolutely love it and are screaming for it every night, then you have to play
it every night. It becomes “Alice’s Restaurant,” which Arlo refuses to play
anymore. He’s sick of doing it. So if you create a monster, then you have to
live with that monster.

Some songwriters, like Dylan, will change a song drastically in concert,

while others present them pretty much as they were recorded. Do you
ever feel that urge to reinvent a song?
Only occasionally. With other artists I like to hear the song more or less;
it doesn’t have to be the same song exactly. I like to recognize the tune and
the words.

Do you think songwriting will continue to evolve, and are there new
places to go with songs?
I have to believe that’s true, otherwise I would not see the future as very
interesting. I think it’s absolutely possible to write a song and in the process
to go somewhere where no one’s been before. You come up with an idea, a
tune, and it’s uncharted territory. And I think as a writer, that’s what excites
you. I think the other great thing is to write a song that has three chords,
like a Hank Williams song, but it’s emotionally naked and honest. But to
write a song like that which has a couple of tweaks in it that makes it an
original song but an instant classic is one of the great things to aim for. And
I think the other thing to aim for on the other extreme is a song that’s
charting new territory. I think I try to do that. On records, often the failures
—the ones I consider failures—are often ones that are trying to be
something different, that are trying to go somewhere no one’s ever been
before. And you can’t always succeed at that.

You seem more ambitious than most songwriters in doing that,

especially in terms of content you get into songs that nobody’s
previously used.
I try to. But in terms of content, I see limitations where there should be
none. I know there are things I wouldn’t write about. But that shouldn’t be
the case. You should be able to make a song out of anything, out of any
situation. But I’ll think it’s just too ridiculous. Or it can’t be done. It’s too
mundane; it’s too something. But that’s a lack of imagination. That’s a lack
of my being able to put a spin on whatever that is.
Edward Elgar’s wife said [to him], “You think you can write about
anything, don’t you?” And he said, “Oh, absolutely. Anything is an
inspiration.” So she said, “Why don’t you write about your friends?” And
he went away and wrote The Enigma Variations, which is probably his
greatest, most recognizable piece of music. Each piece is about a friend, but
it’s also cryptic. But it’s a fantastic piece of music. But it’s Elgar seeing the
possibilities in everything but having to be reminded of it by his wife. But
then taking that step to write about something he wouldn’t think of writing
about.

Is it harder to write about something closer to you, like your son or

your wife?
No. Well, if it’s too close to home you turn it into a story. You change
the names to protect the innocent. I certainly do a lot of that.

You’re very good with dialogue. Not many songwriters do that, yet
you’ll sometimes start right in with dialogue, such as “Said Red Molly”
[from “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”].
Well, again, that’s the folk tradition. That’s the old ballads, you know.
“Where can I get me a skeely skipper to serve this mighty boat of mine?”
That’s powerful language, but it’s just speech, just spoken word. And the
one I just quoted would not go down well with the modern listener. But the
trick is to make speech in a song sound natural, to make it sound like it is
someone you overheard on the bus just talking as naturally as possible.

You’re a songwriter who seems unafraid of filling your songs with

details and speech that is outside the American realm of culture, which
is nice to hear. And it works. It challenges the listener to move beyond
his own little world.
Well, I think so. For a long time American folk music really dominated
the West. The blues is so universally popular. You go to Italy and everyone
wants to hear the blues, which is very strange. You know, it’s exciting
music, and America taught the world to improvise. So it’s deservedly the
most popular culture in the world. People around the world love American
culture. They hate American politics, but they love American culture.
Especially the culture of the underclass. We’ve all been subjected to “got
my mojo working.” What the hell’s a mojo? No one knows, but they sing
along. Or Little John the Conqueror or whatever. All these kinds of obscure
things. And place names that we don’t really know where they are, or train
names we don’t know. But it all comes as part of this exciting musical
package. So you go along with the lyrics. And so I feel it’s America’s turn
to be slightly baffled and bamboozled by other cultures. Just as Americans
don’t get the references in Jamaican music. They might get some of them,
but they don’t really understand the culture; they don’t understand
Rastafarianism, which is all over Jamaican music. But again, it’s got a good
beat, and they’ll go along with the package. So really I’m just doing the
same thing. I’m expressing my culture and hopefully enough that people do
understand and it pulls them along and glosses over the bits they don’t
understand. And if they’re real fans, they might research and find out what
stuff is. I mean, The Beatles were singing “fish and finger pies”—

Yellow lorry slow—

Yeah, obscene or obscure references.

And we loved those because they were exotic to us—

Because it’s different. Well, I’m very willing to be exotic. I’m very
happy to be exotic.
Your songs also have specific details with concrete nouns, which many
don’t have. Do you feel the more specific you are, the more universal a
song can be?
Yes. Though it depends. It depends on the song. What you’re trying to
do with something is hit the nail on the head—emotionally and in terms of
telling the truth about the human condition. And sometimes that means
being very specific. If there’s a rule about it, it’s only there to be broken.
I think very visually about songs. I always run little movies in my
songs. And I like to be sensual. I want to express taste, touch, sound, smell
in a song. Because I feel that really puts you in the moment. You want to
put the listener right there, and that does require the songwriter to be
specific.
Always there are gonna be bits that the listener fills in with his mind.
That’s true of any song. You’re not writing a novel.

Do you appreciate the fact that songs are short? Is that a pleasing form
to work within?
Well, it’s less work. It’s easier than writing a damn novel or something.
Much easier.

But because it’s such a short form, every line has to really count.
Well, it should count. But it should be succinct. If you look at Scottish
ballads as the ultimate pared-down succinct language, not a word wasted,
not an image wasted, everything is relevant, everything is beautiful. And it
pulls you forward to the next verse. It’s a neat place to go to school, I think.

Another great aspect of your work is the phrasing of your lines. There’s
a great rhythmic propulsion there. Dylan said that phrasing matters
more than anything.
Singability is crucial. A couple of times I sat in on a songwriter panel—
that’s the big difference between amateur and professional song-writing.
Singability. Sometimes a singer is so good, such as Joni Mitchell, that she
makes her songs in situations where no one else could sing them. She can
get words out really quick, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. But if you
want somebody else to sing your songs, singability it crucial. There’s a lot
of other factors in singability. Assonance, alliteration, internal rhymes,
open-sounding, closed-sounding words—all of that matters. And I don’t
think about these things, but you get instincts for what works. It’s one of the
reasons Hank Williams is good. For the singability. And the words are good
too. I can remember every word of every Buddy Holly song perhaps more
than any other writer. He was so good at the sounds of words. Just making
all that flow and the words blending into each, it’s just beautiful.

OceanofPDF.com
Rob Zombie
 Doing the Impossible
Los Angeles, California 2013

“Doing anything interesting seemed impossible,” he said with a smile about

his formative years. Sure, he loved the idea of making music and making
movies. But it didn’t seem real. “I was just a little kid dreaming of things.”
Now he’s a big kid dreaming of things. Things of horror, often, and
things that rock. And where those two come together. He followed in the
cherished footsteps of his friend and hero Alice Cooper (see page 563) to
not only make his own kind of horror rock but to invent his own kind of
horror rock star. To become a song and then to sing it. And Rob Zombie
was born.
Before that happened, though, he was born Robert Bartleh Cummings
on January 12, 1965, on the banks of the Merrimack River in Haverhill,
Massachusetts. It’s from Haverhill that many of the accused witches of
nearby Salem came. It’s a haunted place, no doubt forever darkly coloring
his imagination.
He formed his band White Zombie in the mid-1980s, and they released
their first album, Soul-Crusher, in 1987. In 1993 came La Sexorcisto: Devil
Music, Vol. 1, with the greatly loved single “Thunder Kiss ’65.”
In 1998 he went solo and made Hellbilly Deluxe, which included some
of his biggest and most beloved songs: “Living Dead Girl,” “Dragula,” and
“Superbeast.” He’s since done five albums, including Educated Horses
(2006), Hellbilly Deluxe 2 (2010), and, most recently, Venomous Rat
Regeneration Vendor (2013).
The man contains multitudes—it’s no secret. He’s created a creative
empire, from which not only music springs but also movies. He also has a
monumental parallel career as a director, writer, and producer of films in the
horror genre, including House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects
(2005), Halloween (2007), and The Lords of Salem (2013).
In concert he puts on a ferocious show, ferocious in every way—
sonically, visually, and even texturally. He’s assembled one of the great live
bands currently touring around, starring the astounding John 5 on guitar as
well as Piggy D. on bass and Ginger Fish on drums. Just weeks ago I saw
him and the group at the Roxy, an intimate venue on the Sunset Strip in
Hollywood that is, as Zombie told the audience, smaller than their rehearsal
space. They were there as a valentine to their lucky fans and to launch their
summer arena tour.
Seeing them there at the Roxy was not unlike seeing a jumbo jet rev up
and take off in a Starbucks. To behold that much sheer power in such a
small space was staggering. Yet it was exhilarating and great, and Rob and
the gang seemed to enjoy it as much as the audience. Mr. Zombie was on
fire all night, spinning like a dervish with the dark gravity of an ancient
prophet wearing war paint. He delivered the crowd-pleasing Zombie
anthems with deep passion, none so resonant as “Living Dead Girl,” to
which the entire audience bounced vertically in beat, singing the refrain.
“Dragula” burst out of that gate propelled by a deep, killer groove as Ginger
and Piggy laid down a rhythmic bed so solid that both Rob and John could
rocket off of it and yet return where they started. It’s a rock and roll lesson
in abandon and restraint, as Rob and the electric guitar seemed ready to
careen off into orbit while the drums and bass, like gravity, kept them
tethered to the earth.
I’ll admit, having known him only from that roaring incendiary
character he plays onstage, a character always cloaked in darkness and
blood scarlet, I was a tad apprehensive about interviewing him. The man
does horror rock, after all, and horror movies, so there’s a real horror vibe
around him. But like Alice Cooper, he proved to be anything but scary in
person. As usually happens, when he recognized he was talking to a fellow
musician and that we spoke the same language, we had a great
conversation.

I so love the grooves of your music. When you do “Living Dead Girl”
live, for example, the groove is amazing.
Rob Zombie: Yeah, I like grooves. All the music I grew up with
grooves. Like Led Zeppelin is like the fucking grooviest band in the world.
Somehow groove left hard rock after a while. But in the seventies all that
shit really grooved, and it stuck with me.

I was wondering if you liked Zeppelin. Asked about your influences,

you once said it was only Alice Cooper. But I knew there had to be
others.
It’s everything from the seventies. I loved Elton John, Alice Cooper,
KISS, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath—everything. That was when I was pretty
young. And as I became a teenager I started discovering The Ramones and
the Dead Kennedys. So it’s always been a mixture of arena rock and punk
rock, in a way.

You also once mentioned your other heroes growing up, and you named
Steven Spielberg, Bela Lugosi, and Stan Lee. Back then were you
thinking of this kind of career, as both a musician and a filmmaker?
No, I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was more like a little kid
dreaming about stuff. I never had a plan. None of it ever seemed possible,
growing up where I did. Doing anything interesting seemed impossible, so I
didn’t think about it. I say that now kind of flippantly. But it was kind of
this thing where I loved movies, I loved comic books, I loved TV—I knew I
wanted to be part of that. But being part of it seemed absolutely impossible
and seemed a million miles away. So the fact that I eventually got there, on
some level, is still a mystery to me. That’s how it happened!

Was making music and making movies all part of the same dream? Or
was music more of the aim?
None of it seemed real. Truthfully, until punk rock really came along, it
didn’t seem like you could be in a band. If you looked at Queen or Led
Zeppelin, they just seemed larger than life. Like you had to be a complete
virtuoso in every way to think about being in a band. So it seemed beyond.
You didn’t look at Alice Cooper and KISS and think, “Oh yeah, I’m one of
those guys.” It was like they were from another world.
But when I got into punk rock and it had the look and feel, I could see
that happening. I always say The Ramones launched a million bands. Even
though they were, of course, brilliant songwriters, there was an element that
you could see yourself in them to some degree.

As a kid, were movies and music equally compelling for you?

Kind of hand in hand. I loved them both. That was my whole life, 24/7.
I didn’t care about sports; I didn’t care about hanging out with other kids or
anything. I’d watch TV, watch movies on TV, and listen to music. That is all
I wanted to do, every day.

When did you start writing your own songs? Was that after hearing
The Ramones?
Yeah. I was never in a cover band or anything like that. In high school
me and a couple friends bought some instruments and tried to play, but
somehow it petered out after two days. It wasn’t until I moved to New York
City to go to college, to art school, that White Zombie came together, which
was the only band I ever had. And that was a great time. It was 1984, New
York City, so there were still a lot of the remnants of what I thought New
York City was from before. So that was a good time.

So the very first songs you ever wrote were ones for White Zombie?
Yes. The very first songs ever written went on the record. I am not
saying they should have gone on a record. [Laughs]

You wrote those first songs with Scott Humphrey. How did that
collaboration work?
Well, he never wrote lyrics at all. Nobody ever has but me. And then we
would collaborate on music. Basically the first record I made was just me
and Scott. I didn’t have a band yet. White Zombie fell apart. I was just with
a producer I really didn’t know at all. And we just started working, and
slowly it came together. And as we were working, different musicians
would come in to play. Like Tommy Lee, who had been with me in the
studio at the time. That’s how it came together. Now, 3 million copies later,
it seems like a great idea. But at the time nobody really wanted to work on
it because it was a typical, “Oh God, this is a solo album. It’s gonna be a
huge failure.” Nobody really wanted to be a part of it. It had disaster written
all over it. [Laughs]

Back then would you write the lyric first before working on music?
Usually what we would do is find a drum beat or something to set the
tone. I could usually write lyrics to that. Sometimes we’d write a section,
like a chorus or a verse. I’d sing over it. And I might even remove the
music, and when we had the vocals, put some other music behind it. It was
always a very cut-and-paste process. It wasn’t a very specific manner of
working by any means.

I read that you once said you liked titles, and titles would come to you.
Do you often get titles first for your songs and write to the title?
Sometimes. I don’t really have a method. It’s pretty haphazard.
Sometimes I’ll just hear a groove idea or a guitar idea that might work. I
might have a vague notion of the kind of song I want it to be and relate it to
whoever is gonna play. Now I have a band and it’s solid. But back then it
was very haphazard.

It’s hard, musically, to figure out your songs. Like “Living Dead Girl,”
it seems it’s mostly on one chord but hard to figure out what that chord
is.
Sometimes when we do that we’d almost find a piece of noise and loop
it, and it would sound like a guitar. We did this with “Dragula.” We had
found this messy guitar loop that wasn’t from anything. And when we
turned it into the song we thought we would replace that with real guitar.
And when we did that, we thought, “Now the songs suck.” There was some
magic in just the mystery of “What is that?” It’s like that with a lot of
things. There are a lot of bands I love, and their records sound terrible. And
they’d go back and rerecord and remaster it. And now it sucks! There is
magic in that chaos you created, which is all missing in your attempt to
make it perfect. Which is why, especially now, I don’t worry about the
records being perfect. That was what I tried to return to on the last record. If
there’s mistakes or feedback or noise, leave it. That’s where the beauty lies
sometimes. It’s too easy to sit there with Pro Tools. You can make
everything absolutely perfect all day long. But it’s a bore.

And then it doesn’t sound like real music—

No, it’s boring. It’s like all pop music. We’re one step away from where
all music sounds like it comes from robots. [Laughs]

Those sounds in your music match the mystery in the lyric.

Yeah, I am trying to make each song have its own vibe, if possible.
Make them different from each other but with an overall vibe. Make them
pretty dense as possible. Sometimes I’ll go back and listen to old records
and I will hear stuff that I forgot I did, all these layers.

Recently you said you don’t finish songs before going into the studio. Is
that accurate?
Yeah, that’s the way I’ve pretty much always done it. A long, long time
ago with White Zombie we’d go into the rehearsal space and jam, and
record everything, and jam, and record everything. And I felt, “This sucks.”
It would feel like we’d been jamming for hours and get nothing.
But now we just go into the studio with nothing and just start. There are
days with every record when you walk into the studio in the morning with
no idea, and by the end of the day it’s a completely mixed song that is done
that we never touch again.
You’ve got to have good musicians. That is one of the great things about
working with John 5. He’s such a phenomenal guitar player that no matter
what I say to him, he can do it. He never says, “Oh, let me think about it
and go home and work on it.” Because he knows I’m not gonna want to do
that. So he can just do whatever I want on the spot: Play banjo here. Or
make it sound like a Spanish guitar. He can just do it—he’s just so talented.
It’s a luxury having him in the band. It’s not always like that, you know. It
used to be a big struggle.

I just saw your show in Pomona, and it was such a great night. And as
always I was just amazed by John 5’s playing. It is extraordinary.
 Yeah, he’s so great. We’ve been playing together now for almost nine
years now. It’s a really good match; I’m so glad we hooked up. It is a luxury
to have all these guys in the band. For me it’s the best, perfect lineup I’ve
ever had to work with. After all these years. Which I think is why things are
going so well at this point.

Where did “Living Dead Girl” come from?

I don’t recall where it came from. But I know we wrote it and threw it
away as we were putting the record together. And I found a cassette and
played it, and that song was on it. And I thought, “This song is great—why
did we throw this song away?” So that almost didn’t make the record. It
was literally something we wrote and thought sucked, [laughs] for some
reason, never finished it, and then I just happened to find it on a cassette.
That’s what happens when you record sometimes and are just writing and
writing and writing. You don’t hear it at the time. And I thought, “Why did
we hate that song? That is pretty good!”

That song, like others you have done, shows us you don’t need a lot of
chords to make a great song. It has, I think, two chords. And it is such
a compelling song.
No, I think that’s a mistake that people think. I see a lot of young bands,
and people will overplay so much. That doesn’t mean it’s a good song. And
you ask them what their favorite band is and they say, “AC/DC!” Yes, the
epitome of not overplaying. [Laughs]

OceanofPDF.com
Joe Henry
 With Blood from Stars
Burbank, California 2015

It all started with a black Bakelite AM radio beside his bed growing up.
From that source emanated music mysterious, grand, and even terrifying.
And it changed his life.
“My first and most visceral memory,” he said, “was hearing Ray
Charles on the radio, and he wasn’t singing ‘What’d I Say.’ He sang
‘Yesterday.’ And it absolutely scared the piss out of me. It terrified me.
Hearing that song from a twenty-two-year-old Paul McCartney, it sounds
like lost love. But even as a boy of not quite seven, I feel like I understood
in no uncertain terms that what he was talking about was mortality, the fact
that we were going to die, and that there were more yesterdays on the books
than there would be tomorrows. And it got under my skin.”
Born in 1960 in North Carolina, he moved to Atlanta at five and then
grew up near Detroit. After Brother Ray’s rendition of “Yesterday” other
songs soon entered his consciousness: “When I was seven and eight I heard
‘Rain’ [by The Beatles], I heard Glen Campbell doing these great Jimmy
Webb songs, and I heard Dusty Springfield do ‘Son of a Preacher Man.’ I
can practically remember where I was standing when I heard those things
the first time. They were movies that played in back of my eyes.”
But there was one songwriter, above all the rest, who changed his life.
“Like so many songwriters of my generation,” he said, “my life was
changed by Dylan. I heard him when I was eleven, and I do remember
where I was standing when I heard it, and I didn’t know why it mattered to
me, but I absolutely knew in the most fundamental way that my life was
different. I felt like somebody with really poor eyesight who didn’t know
they had poor eyesight until somebody put a lens in front of me. It changed
everything.”
He went to high school with Madonna and eventually married her sister,
Melanie Ciccone. But he knew Madonna first. They both acted in a twelfth-
grade play, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. “She played the wife of Ralph
Waldo Emerson,” he said, “and I played their son.” Slight pause. “I don’t
like picturing that now,” he said.
He was my esteemed guest on Songwriters on Songwriting Live at the
Songwriting School of Los Angeles on June 25, 2015. This talk is from that
interview, conducted in front of a live audience of songwriting students and
lovers of music. We spoke, and he also sang some of his remarkable songs,
such as “Odetta”
The list of all his albums plus all those he has produced adds up to a
voluminous profusion of work. The Joe Henry albums begin in 1986 and
include Talk of Heaven, Murder of Crows, Shuffletown, Short Man’s Room,
Kindness of the World, Trampoline, Fuse, Scar, Tiny Voices, Blood from
Stars, Reverie, and Invisible Hour. All were self-produced except for two,
Shuffletown, produced by Joe’s mentor, T Bone Burnett, and Fuse,
produced by Daniel Lanois.
His productions include ones for Mose Allison, Solomon Burke, Elvis
Costello, Aimee Mann, Meshell Ndegeocello, Loudon Wainwright, Rodney
Crowell, Aaron Neville, Bonnie Raitt, Billy Bragg, and more.
I read all these names and more in what was a very lengthy
introduction, for which I apologized. “Didn’t bore me,” he said with a
laugh.

There’s a lot there in your intro. As you know, in music, people have a
hard time if you do more than one thing. It confuses them. And being
such an accomplished songwriter and an accomplished producer, do
people have a hard time with that, or can they accept that you can do
both?
 Joe Henry: I don’t have any trouble walking up the street, if that’s what
you’re talking about. [Laughs] But from the very beginning, because I’ve
never aligned myself with a particular genre of music, it has worked out for
me. I think that those labels—I’m not being coy—I just don’t think they
serve us very well. And people who grew up in my generation, we had
access to everything, and we were authentically influenced by everything.
So of course, we start writing songs, and they don’t adhere to one particular
discipline as people understand that.
People didn’t know what to call what I did, and in the beginning every
interview sort of started that way. After there was a couple of records that
didn’t sound like each other, people would say, “Well, what do you call
what you do?”
And I said, “Well, I don’t call it anything. That’s your job.” [Laughs]
They say, “Don’t play hard to get. You go in a record store—what section
do I look under?” “You look under the Joe Henry section. I don’t know
what else to tell you.” [Laughter] But I did have a problem. I still have a
problem with it in some regard, because people are brushed back on what
they don’t know how to identify. If they can’t name it, if it’s elusive in that
way, then they think you’re not being faithful to their expectation.
Some people love that. I came up in an age where the artists that I most
admired, all you knew about their next record was it wouldn’t sound like
the one that you just heard. And I thought that was part of the bargain, part
of the job description.
You got to make a different movie, you know? Scorsese makes a
gangster movie, then he wants to make a Western. We should have that
same autonomy as artists and songwriters to say, “Well, you know, I did
that. I don’t need to wear that uniform anymore.” I didn’t join the Boy
Scouts. I don’t have to wear that uniform every day. That embodied a
certain sonic landscape because that served that batch of songs. And far
from wanting to be trapped by that after it’s happened, I felt liberated by it.
There’s an idea I don’t have to babysit anymore, it has its own life, and now
I’m free to do something else.

The industry knows it’s easier to market people when you put them in
separate bins. But musicians have always known that we’re all
connected. Pete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain,”
which is the guiding principle for this book. But even when I was first
trying to get it published, people said to me, “You know, you can’t have
Mose Allison and Pete Seeger and R.E.M. in the same book—they’re all
different. You can’t mix that up.” But it is all songwriting, and
songwriters understand that. We’re doing the same thing. It’s words
and music.
I think we’ve grown to have a very limited idea in our culture about
what’s acceptable, what’s musical. We all know people who, for instance,
will tell you a story that they grew up in Catholic school, and they said,
“Well, I had to go to choir every morning, but the nun told me not to sing
because I couldn’t sing.” You know, we have a very limited idea about who
we decide can sing. They say about some artists, “Oh, that person, they
can’t really sing.”
Just because it doesn’t speak to you, maybe, for you to decide that that
is not a valid human expression is really unwarranted. There’s all kind of
ways. It’s a very human impulse to want to give voice, to sing out. It’s
instinctive. And I think we do ourselves a great disservice to limit who we
allow to do that and who we keep behind the velvet rope.

And that concept of who is a singer has shifted so much in our lifetime.
Sure.

Especially since Bob Dylan came along and changed it. But still to this
day you have people going, “Oh, Bob Dylan. He can’t sing.” Actually,
he is an amazing singer—
I think he’s the greatest singer of his generation, actually, of the rock
age. I think he’s a tremendously great singer because what he does is make
the song vivid, and to me that’s the whole job.

Yes.
I love singers that people refer to as classically great singers. I’m a great
fan of Édith Piaf. I’m also a great fan of Mississippi John Hurt, and he
probably had a five-note range, but don’t tell me that I wasn’t moved by it. I
was. I am. I just don’t think that serves our humanity, to limit people to a
very particular sort of expression as being: “This has value. This does not.”
The industry is telling artists, “Stay within your own confines if you
want to get airplay.” Especially now, with niche radio and all the
Internet radio, if you’re going to do a folky thing, keep it really folky if
you want to get airplay. Otherwise you’re not going to be understood.
It encourages people to stay in narrow confines.
We’re always invited into what’s familiar. It comforts people if they
think they know what’s coming. That’s as old as time. But for people like
me, when the record industry really collapsed as we understood it, I found it
as liberating as it was disheartening because I came up in a time where even
though nothing I did really was going to get any airplay. There was always
the label insisting that there had to be something on the record that they felt
they could, in one way or another, take to radio and beg them, pay them,
whatever they had to do to get them to pay a moment’s attention to it.
At the moment when I realized—and a lot of us did—that the industry
as we had all been seduced to imagine it had sort of vanished, I said,
“That’s fantastic. We don’t have to talk about a song being under four
minutes. We don’t have to talk about it working a certain way.” They were
never going to pay attention to us anyway.
We were still forced to genuflect to the idea, even though we were not
going to be led into the sanctuary. We still had to stand outside and be on
our knees to that idea, that it still has to be tailored to somebody else’s idea
of what is acceptable and what is engaging.
I personally believe that most of us have a much wider palate of musical
experience than the industry has ever wanted to acknowledge. I think most
people do. Not everybody obsesses over records and digs them out and goes
searching for it. But plenty of people are enriched by song, and I think that
if we went tomorrow and we all took over KROQ—I don’t know if there is
such a thing still [laughter]—we could take over KROQ at drive time
tomorrow and put on Édith Piaf, and there would be a certain number of
people who would pull over to the side of the road and say, “I don’t know
what this is, but my life is different now.”
But, you know, we’re so busy telling people that “This shouldn’t matter
to you. This music’s too old for you” or “You’re too young to accept this”
or “You’re too old to participate in this kind of music.” That doesn’t serve
any of us, and I pay it no mind.
I know Dylan changed your life.
He did. I was really coming out of a folk tradition, and I did what so
many of us did: I started peeling back the onion. I went deep into whatever
Bob was doing, and when I wanted to know, “Well, what did he come out
of?” I went back to Robert Johnson and Woody and Leadbelly and
Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Willie McTell—who’s still really heavy for
me—Skip James, but also Hank Williams, Jimmy Reed. I just followed the
trail. And it’s a deep and a rich mine. It’s still a mine that’s producing.
That’s all still a living organism.

It’s nice how Dylan connected so many of us to those traditions and

those people. I remember Woody Guthrie had a lot of impact on me
because I knew he was Dylan’s hero.
I probably wrote the first song when I was either fourteen or fifteen. I
don’t remember what it was called. I sort of just have a vague memory of its
tonality. It probably sounded a lot like “Boots of Spanish Leather,”
something like that.
But at that time I was also following the trail of other very singular
American songwriters: John Prine and Randy Newman, very particularly. I
heard Randy when I was, I think, not quite thirteen. It was right when Good
Old Boys came out, because on the encouragement of my older brother, I
bought a vinyl copy of Good Old Boys right when it came out. And it was
sort of like my epiphany courtesy of Bob Dylan. I felt like I understood in
some instinctive way that it was a theatrical statement, that he was writing
in character.
So even though this was 1974, I think, and the very earnest singer-
songwriter movement was well in place, I rejected the idea that a good song
was your diary set to music, that the truer you were being within the context
of the song, the better song it was. I heard Randy and I knew that he was
not from Birmingham, and I didn’t think he was married to a woman named
Marie. [Laughter] I didn’t think he had a dog named Dan. I knew that I was
being put on, and I was completely seduced by it.
I think that informed my whole landscape, that I entered that picture
believing fully that in my job I was completely free just to make up a lot of
shit. [Laughter] I look at my life, and I still don’t think that my life as I live
it is in and of itself interesting enough to be the focus of song. I do
recognize after the fact, when I recognize elements of my own life that I
see, it’s like taking an X-ray. It’s like, “Oh, there’s the spot.” I know where
it is when I hear it later. But I can count on one hand how many times I ever
wrote a song and I was consciously in any way trying to articulate some
particular personal experience of my own. That’s just not what’s interesting
to me as a songwriter.

Randy had a similar effect on me too, and Tom Waits too—that you can
write about a character. And when I talked to Dylan I asked him who
he thought was great, and he pointed to Randy Newman.
Yeah.

He said something like, “‘Sail Away’ or ‘Louisiana’—it doesn’t get

better than that.”
It really doesn’t.

Yet any song a songwriter writes is about the songwriter, about their
choices. From Randy Newman’s songs you get a lot of idea who he is.
All the songs are about him, are they not?
It’s impossible not to write about yourself ultimately. But I think, at
least for me, I’m not interested in being self-conscious. I write to get
liberated. I’ve said before that it’s really my ethos. I’m not big on writing as
self-expression. I write for discovery. I write to find out what I’m writing
about.
There are many great songwriters who—my dear friend and sometime
collaborator Loudon Wainwright, he mines his own life in a way that very
few people, in my opinion, do successfully. And I believe that when he sets
out to write a song, he has a very fully formed subject in mind. He might
not know for sure how the arc gets drawn in the course of the writing of the
song, but he knows what he’s after as far as what story he needs to tell. He
knows it in advance. And I promise you, I’ve never known in advance, ever,
what I was writing about.

Is that right?
Pretty sure that’s true.
You never come to a song with an idea of what it will be about?
Not as a subject. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever approached a song
and thought, “Oh, I’d like to write a song about this particular thing.” I just
start writing, and I discover as I’m writing. It just sort of gets revealed.
And I work really hard to keep myself off-balance that way. I think it’s a
really particular and important balance, as writers, to marry our hearts and
minds, but we can’t let one ever overtake the other. And when I say that,
I’m talking about your intellect and your instinct.
I think it’s a really interesting thing as a songwriter to keep yourself as
off-balance, in some ways, as possible. I will get a song going and sort of
know that there’s something alive on the line there, and I will just begin the
next verse in the most random way that I might. It’s an image that strikes
me; it’s a tonality; it’s a particular rhythm that feels good to me but is not
necessarily, in a linear way, connected by thought to what’s just come
before it. So I tend to just write a line, and then I employ my intellect to try
to find my way through that dark room that I’ve just opened the door to.
[Laughs] You know, I just start and then say, “Okay, now I have to make
sense out of what I’ve just begun, and when I get to the other side of this,
I’ll know whether it’s of any use to me.” As opposed to saying, “Here’s an
idea that I already have—how do I put it in a very clever way in four verses
that rhyme, four lines that rhyme, so that people can carry it away easily?”
That’s just not how it works for me.

So the process becomes more about following, though you are also
leading.
Well, you try in that really particular balance—I think that’s when you
know that. We engage a song in process, and we know that something there
is beckoning us forward. We know that there’s a living thing there in the
midst, in a way. And you walk toward it with a bit of good faith and
courage. But I think it’s really important not to be too sure about what you
think the outcome should be, to stay out of the results business as much as
possible.
I’ve cowritten with people who think really, really differently.
[Laughter] And when it’s worked, I think that’s probably why it’s worked.
But I’ve had awkward moments trying to write with people. And I don’t do
it a whole lot. I mean, over the course of many years I’ve written with
Madonna, I’ve written with Meshell Ndegeocello, I’ve written with Mose
Allison, I wrote with Billy Bragg, with Loudon, with Rosanne Cash.

Some good ones. [Laughter]

Jakob Dylan. People I’m forgetting. But I’ve almost never been in the
same room with somebody when I was doing it, because to sit there and
have to account for what I might just have written after sitting with
somebody and they go, “Why would we start the next verse there?” I’d say,
“Well, I have no idea, and I don’t want to know. [Laughs] And keep your
voice down.” [Laughs] And you know, the whole thing. A song is
inherently mysterious, and I promise you—I’ve said it before—that it’s not
about dispelling mystery; it’s about abiding mystery. It’s about staying with
it and letting it move around you like weather. Again, back to the idea of
not letting your intellect drive everything. Your intellect is the problem
solver, but you want to somehow create a problem first because when
you’re thinking your way out of a dark room, it’s frequently where a song
comes from.

Yeah, and embracing the mystery and enjoying the mysterious aspects
of it is a big part of it.
Yeah.

A lot of people feel that the song almost is—they’re discovering it, but
they’re uncovering something that’s perfect in form almost. Is that how
you’re looking at it, or are you looking at it like you want to keep it
more random?
It’s probably a little distracting to talk about it as random, though I
believe in the way that the random occurrence alters our field all the time as
we’re working. You know, John Cage said that we have to be really careful
not to confuse the creative mind with the analytical mind because if you’re
writing something and you’re already thinking in real time about how it
works and if it’s working and whether it’s going to be of any use to you or
whether anybody might like it, you’ve already stepped out of the living
stream. You’re already standing on the bank, evaluating. You’ve just ended
the séance.
Yes.
So I work really hard, when I talk about staying off-balance, to not let
the editorial mind come into it at any part of the stage where you’re just
spooling off raw fabric. If you catch a good wave as a writer, I would think
of it as just creating raw fabric. It’s really easy to go back later and tailor
that into a pair of slacks you can walk around in. But what you really need
to do is create that fabric. You can’t be trying to cut an inseam while you’re
creating that bolt of cloth.

Randy Newman said a similar thing: don’t let the critic become bigger
than the creator while you’re doing it because then you can squash the
creator. Rickie Lee Jones said too, it’s like a living spirit and it’s very
delicate—you can destroy it. But some people say they don’t want that
analytical, intellectual mind in there at all while they’re doing it. But
you seem open to both.
Well, I think at a certain point, for it to be a piece at the end of the day
that has its own integrity, you have to have applied your intellect to it. You
have to bring yourself to it, and the great jazz pianist Brad Mehldau—who
I’ve worked with on a number of occasions both on record and in
performance—he’s got an incredible mind, and he talks about Beethoven
the same way he talks about Shakespeare, the same way he talks about Bird.
He says, “You have to meet it halfway. You’ve got to bring your intellect to
it.” You can’t just lay back with your arms folded as a listener and expect it
to wash over you and hand it all the responsibility to move you. You have to
bring yourself to that place where you are available to be moved. You’re
willing and anxious to be, and I think as a writer we can’t let the intellect
overpower everything because almost nobody’s smart enough to make
something that is timelessly evocative.
Depending on how spiritual you want to be in your language. Quincy
Jones said, “As a record maker, you always have to leave room for God to
enter the room. You have to leave a door open.” And I think in whatever
language you use to talk about that thing outside of us that is this spiritual
weather moving us all the time, I think any kind of great art is an active
engagement with that mysterious other. Your intellect has to be aware of
that. Your intellect has to be the thing that is the crossing guard that says,
“Stay back and let it go through.” You have to be awake, but it’s a mistake,
I think, to try to steer it. Because it’s like trying to go to sleep at night and
trying to dictate in advance what you’re going to dream. You will not be
successful in anything, and I think the day we step away from it, it still feels
like a living thing.
To me, as a writer and as a record maker, that’s the entire game. I don’t
care anything about genre distinction, really. Nothing. My job as a writer
and my job as a producer is to make something meaningful come out of a
pair of speakers, something that stands alone, walks away from us, and
exists without us. And then you’re free to go to the next thing.

So when you’re creating that fabric, does that mean you write a lot and
you put a lot more down on paper than you’re going to use?
Oh, sure. I’ll write until the Ouija board goes cold. [Laughs] Because
you can always get rid of stuff. I just try to stay as active in that process as I
possibly can and keep my analytical mind, my judgmental mind, as far
away. Because if I start thinking about how it works and whether anybody’s
going to like it—me, my wife, anybody who’s paid attention to anything
that I’ve ever done—I know that I have to stop working because I’ve taken
myself out of the real game.

And that’s an odd process for most people to consider, that it’s more of
a discovery than something you’re going to invent. Normally when
you’re making something you just build it. But to discover something is
a whole other thing.
Yes. Having an idea can be like you’ve got a compass that says, “Walk
in this direction.” The compass is not telling you what you’re going to find
when you get there. It’s not going to tell you what obstacle you may
encounter. But it sets you off in motion, and that’s what I look for—
anything that will put me, as a writer, in motion. It might be a phrase, an
image, just a certain rhythmic tonality, but I find that any time I’m set into
motion, I can make something out of it.

So do you work on music and words at the same time, or sometimes is

it just words?
It happens every different way. I’m not the first to say that the best
songs, the ones that live with us longest, are the ones that seem to just show
up fully intact. That happens once in a while. But I do feel like I have more
control over what I’m doing as a lyric writer than I do as a musical
articulator. I love playing guitar, although I don’t think I’m a great guitar
player. So I’ll have pieces of music going, and I’ll have hunks of fragments
of lyrics going, and I try to keep them all floating off the floor just enough. I
don’t want to nail down anything as far as a lyric. I don’t want to nail down
meter. I don’t want to get too boxed into a form until I have to. But I’ll have
some fragment of music going, and then I’ll start to see how they might
start pairing off and influencing each other. If the melody’s strong enough,
I’ll wrestle the lyric into that service. But if the lyric seems to be the really
dominant character in what’s happening, then I will try to leave the melodic
idea as open as I can so that it might be in service to wherever that lyric
might be trying to go.

Speaking of mysteries we embrace, melodies are mysterious. Some have

said we have moved beyond the age of melody. Do you think melodies
always matter? And what makes a melody strong?
Oh, it’s a good question. It’s like saying, “What makes blood good?”
[Laughs] Because it moves through me and animates me.
Melody is the delivery system for so much, and I find for somebody
who’s as lyric oriented as I tend to be—and I really did come into it, not
exclusively, being lyric obsessed, though the songs that I most gravitated to,
I knew that there was something about the story, about the narrative that
was riveting to me—but the delivery system of the music had everything to
do with how that was able to penetrate. I think great melodies are timeless,
and they cross every genre, every culture.
I’ve had amazing experiences in my working life recognizing
connections between music from different parts of the world and how
people respond to so much of the same thing. And I don’t know why that is,
but there’s a default base human response to melody.
And again, to quote John Cage, who created random operations so that
he could make music that was free of his ego, he said, “I’m not trying to
write what I think is pretty. I want to work like nature works.” He said, “I
want to set up a system where music happens, and then I want to hear,
‘What does that sound like?’” It’s not about whether it would play well over
dinner in the distance.
 He talked about that idea that anything becomes melodic if you repeat it
long enough. The most random-sounding thing becomes melodic. The most
random noise becomes rhythmic if you hear it enough times that you start
identifying a pattern, because patterns have integrity and they don’t come
out of nowhere, and they are not just immediately recognizable to us. That’s
why a lot of music works on us and gets through to us in ways that we don’t
know how to guard against. You can be somewhere and be really
unprepared for some piece of music that drifts by and brings you to your
knees, literally or spiritually, psychically. And you’re going to be
unprepared for it. Music is incredibly stealth that way.
Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman said that every art form desires to work the
way that music works, and I think that music is only music when it is in the
air. Vinyl, CD, my iPod, a piece of sheet music—it’s just a road map, but
it’s not the road. Music is only music in that real-time moment that it is in
the air, and we’re defenseless against that when we encounter it.

Yeah, it’s about very simple things, like a I to a VI chord can be so

powerful. You mentioned Jimmy Webb, and like a lot of great
musicians, he probably knows almost every chord there is, and yet I
asked him about writing music, and he said he just throws himself in
new places, puts his hands in new places. So it’s a process where you’ve
been doing this and you’re an expert for years, and yet you’re just
trying new things, putting yourself in a whole new area where you’ve
never even been before. When you’re writing music, is that what the
process is like for you? How do you get to the melodies?
Oh, very much so. I play almost exclusively in open tunings now, and I
have for years, and I got there because I needed to get out of a very
rudimentary way that I approached guitar. I wanted it to be more orchestral;
I didn’t want to know so much about what I was going to habitually do.
So I started playing in open tunings, and even the most basic changes,
once I found out how to articulate them within this new tuning—because
I’d been working like a blind man in a dark room. It makes no sense,
[laughs] you know what I mean? That in the process of blindly trying to
find in this new tuning—you know, “Where is a IV chord?”
I hear a new voicing in the way that I’ve approached it. In fumbling to
find it, I’ve found something else that I don’t know how to make. All the
time when we’re recording I work with really great musicians who can read
and write. I’m an illiterate. I learned how to play music like people learn to
speak a language on the street. You might learn to speak; you might even
learn to speak really well and be grammatically correct. But you don’t
know, consciously, the rules that are underlying what you do.
I learned from sitting in front of a record player, putting on a record, and
trying to play, in some way, everything that went by. And you learn some
very basic things, and you start recognizing the ways in which they keep
reoccurring in our Western idea of how music is shaped, how a song is
shaped. And it’s like being on the street in Spain, and you don’t speak the
language, and over a few days you learn how to ask for a very few things.
“Can I have another coffee?” “Where’s the library?” “Does she have a
sister?” [Laughs]
And pretty soon your vocabulary expands out of necessity. And I found
out as a writer that playing music—I started recognizing things that I was
doing because they were the threads that kept connecting everything that
moved me. But at a certain point, because I wasn’t schooled as a player, I
find that I write in open tunings because I do a lot of things by accident that
come out really well. And I’m forever being in the studio with people and
they’re saying, “What chord is that?” And I say, “It’s this one.” [Laughs]
And they say, “Play a string at a time.” Okay.

I know, because today I was trying to figure out some of your chords,
and I couldn’t figure them out. But there’s a lot in G—are you in a G
open tuning?
I live in open G. [Laughs] I mean, I don’t always stay there. Irving
Berlin, he only played in C.

Actually F sharp.
Was that F sharp?

Yes, but he had a transposing piano. So he could play in any key but
still stay on those black notes.
Yeah, I play in G a lot. It’s really funny, because I had been playing for
a really long time. I was already probably forty before I really had that
happen to me, and it completely changed my relationship to the guitar.
 My friend, who is a very significant guitar player named Doyle
Bramhall, he and his family were at the house for dinner one night. I can’t
watch what he does—he plays left-handed and upside down, and even when
he’s playing straight chords, they’re not recognizable to my eye. But he left
a guitar of mine in open G tuning, and he said over his shoulder as he was
leaving, “There’s a whole folk score in that tuning.” [Laughs] And then left
the house. And for whatever reason I understand myself in that tuning like
somebody sitting at a keyboard. I can visualize where I am, and I reach for
things that I do not know how to do in a standard tuning. I can take some of
that back with me to a standard tuning if I need to, but I really had a
completely different relationship with the instrument once I started to treat
that as my default place from which to work.

That’s another concept a normal civilian might not understand, that to

really get someplace new you have to put yourself in kind of an
unknown area. Because we’re so used to playing the same patterns, and
you get in the same routines. To get out of that, you want to consciously
break out of the stuff you normally do.
Well, in every aspect of life, not just your creative life, you have to stay
vulnerable in every possible way. I mean, I’m not the first to say that; I
didn’t make that up. It just happens to be one of those truths. If you’re
going to be a great spouse, a great parent, a great artist, you have to be
vulnerable. And that’s, again, what I was talking about when I said, “Keep
your intellect in check” because as soon as you think you know what’s
going to happen, you start consciously or unconsciously trying to steer
things there, either in your personal life or in your creative life.
I don’t want to be limited by my own experience only. And I don’t want
to be limited by my own imagination. Same way when I’m producing a
record: I don’t want to tell anybody what to play. I’d never tell anybody
what to play. You don’t invite people into the room just because of the
instrument they play; you’re inviting them in because they’re bringing a
lifetime of experience.

Another musical mystery—earworms, when a melody gets stuck in

your head. And I have listened to so many of your songs, but the one
that haunts me the most is “Odetta.” It is an extraordinary song.
 Thank you. People have asked me, “Is that song about Odetta?” Well, I
only know one Odetta, and so do you. It’s not her story, but the character in
the song, I really think is just calling upon her countenance for good
courage. And the character’s in some kind of struggle, and he’s—like a lot
of us—looking for some kind of affirmation, and in this case, he’s looking
to her, who’s not on this earth anymore.

It’s a wonderful song. It’s almost like a prayer to Odetta.

That’s how it felt to me.

And Odetta, like Woody and Pete, has kind of a holy quality to her.
These are our saints.
People tended to talk about her, even when she was still alive, that she
was an ethereal, spiritual rock.

Yeah, you hear that in her voice, the soul in her singing. In your song I
so loved the second chord in the chorus, on her name. Which is an A
major. The song is in G, and you go to the A, which would normally be
minor but here it is major, which is such a great sound. When you come
up with something like that, are you thinking in terms of the chords, or
is it just pure sound?
As much as possible, again, I try to be thinking about the sound. Again,
playing in open tunings has allowed me to be a lot freer. For whatever
reason I can reach for what I hear a lot more easily than when I’m in a
standard tuning and thinking I need to know the name of the next chord I’m
going to land on.

You were saying you don’t think of songs beforehand; you discover
them. You had no concept of writing a song about Odetta or with that
title?
One day I woke up and I just heard her name, and then I thought that
that would be a really good name to sing. I have a number of songs that
have in their title a reference to some cultural figure or songs that reference
culturally known people. I have a song called “Curt Flood.”

Yeah.
 A sixties baseball player, African American baseball player who took a
stand against the baseball owners. And I have a song called “Edgar
Bergen,” and I wrote a song very important to me called “Richard Pryor
Addresses a Tearful Nation.” So that day Odetta’s name was in my mind,
and I just thought, “Oh, I need to create something that allows me to sing
her name out.” I don’t know whether chickens came. [Laughs]

Did you write a book as well, about Richard Pryor, with that title?
I did. It was not called that; it was called Furious Cool. My brother
David and I wrote a book. It’s not a traditional biography of Richard Pryor;
it’s as much a cultural study trying to look at the world that he came out of.

Did the song come first, before the book?

The song came first. The quickest way I can tell the story is that I wrote
the song “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation” when I was listening
to a lot of Sinatra. I listen to a lot of Sinatra, all the time.

Really?
All the time. And I was trying to write something that was going to be
orchestral and like this languid blues, but not a rocking blues. I wanted to
do an orchestral, sort of Ellington blues piece. And that worked, at least
initially, with the vocabulary of the standard. I’ve written a lot of songs that
I think began in the mode of what we think of as standards. I wrote this
song, and very quickly I was into it. I was singing in the first person, as I
almost always do, but for whatever reason I realized really early on—I was
driving in a car and hearing this first verse unspool and realizing that I
thought the “I” in the song was Richard Pryor, and that he was lamenting
something and that what he was really at odds with was his place with this
country, desiring its acceptance but also being completely at odds with its
culture.
I wasn’t intellectual about it; I’m just thinking this was an instinctive
thought. And I went deeper into it, thinking, “Okay, if it’s going to be about
a character as volatile as Richard, and it’s going to be this languid,
orchestral blues, I need some musician, some musical voice to sit in the
middle of this and represent the magnitude of Richard’s importance and the
chaos at the heart of his life.”
 And just as a bookmark, to identify the idea, I thought, “You know, I
need an Ornette Coleman to be a soloist against this orchestra.” The next
day, just serendipitously, I had an in to Ornette Coleman. So I created the
song around this moment of Ornette playing, still, to my ear, the most raw
blues I ever heard in my life.
I was on a label owned by Disney, and they wanted nothing to do with
me using Richard Pryor’s name without his permission because they were
so afraid of him as a volatile character, even though I had a song on the
same album called “Edgar Bergen.” Ain’t no problem with that. [Laughs]
But what they did was they forced me to find Richard, and I became
friendly with Richard, and he gave me his permission to use his name in the
song.

Even writing a song about Richard Pryor or Curt Flood is different

than how it was. As you know, back in the days when Sinatra was
young, almost all songs were about love, except Broadway musicals.
Then along came Dylan and other people who showed you could write
a song about anything, really. It changed it. You’re known for writing
about really adventurous content and content that hasn’t been in songs
before. Can a song contain any content?
I’ve never encountered an idea that couldn’t be musical, I don’t think.
There are some words that just aren’t musical. If I’m writing a poem, I
understand that it’s something different than a song, that sometimes I can
take something that began as a poem and then find a way to mutate it into a
song, rob its bones and make a song out of it. Because I know what to do
with a song; I don’t always know what to do with a poem. But they show up
as different animals.
So there’s words sometimes. I would think, “If this was a poem, that
would be the right word. If this is a song, it’s not the right word.” That’s not
a musical word coming off my tongue. It’s not rhythmically what this
phrase needs. A different dynamic at play.

Often songwriters are called poets. Even you have been.

Well, usually that’s a little bit of a backhanded compliment, I think.
When people say, “You know, you’re not just a songwriter, you’re a poet,”
what they’re really saying is, “That’s really pretty, and I don’t know what
you’re talking about.” [Laughs]

Yes. And there’s the idea that a poet is a more elevated job than a
songwriter.
Yes. I think a great song is as great and as powerful as any great poem.
So the idea that you get elevated to the top of the totem pole by being a poet
—I think there’s no higher place for me than songwriter.

I’m with you.

As long as it’s a powerful song.

Absolutely.
But people have a tendency, because they have such a skittish
relationship with poetry, so many people do—then they sort of elevate it
just to keep it away from them [laughs] and protect themselves from it, like
power lines. Keep them way up there so you won’t get hurt. [Laughs]
Back to that idea of if there’s a subject that’s not approachable, I think
there’s nothing that’s not approachable in song. Buckminster Fuller was an
amazing mind, a poet, architect, inventor, philosopher, every such thing.
And I always remember him saying, you walk out on the beach, you get lost
out on the beach—he takes a stick and he draws a circle in the sand. He
knows he’s drawing a small circle. He doesn’t realize he’s also drawing a
big one. And everything in the circle. And you also just described
everything outside of the circle. So I think with song, you can imply a lot. I
really believe in specificity, being really detailed.
I remember when I was producing a record for the great Irish songwriter
Lisa Hannigan, who I just think the world of, and she was writing a song,
and a question she had of the opening line of the song, if it should be “in the
winter” or “in December.” I said, “Oh, absolutely in December.” Put them
in a very particular place, not a vague notion. If you’re in doubt, details are
what hooks people in because it’s more intimate to say what something
actually is than to allude to a vague abstraction. Keith Richards wrote
“Angie”—you attach a name. You don’t have to know who Angie is.
There’s an intimacy to calling out her name, and that detail is the great
hook.
Yes. And that’s one reason I love your songs so much, because they’re
so rich with detail. You can create a song that has a sense of time and
place just like a novel. There’s no limit to what you can do. There are
so many songs that almost don’t even have nouns in them, songs such
as “Emotions.” Or “Feelings.” As in “I’m feeling feelings.”
Yeah. It’s very vague.

But some people think if you’re too specific, you’re likely going to lose
the audience.
I think there’s a difference between leaving things open and being
vague. Nobody’s seduced by vague, and every song needs to seduce in
some way. I don’t only mean in a romantic way. But if you make people
believe that the story you’re telling is a real story, not a conceit, they’re
much more inclined to listen.
You mentioned the novel. I happen to think that for anybody learning to
be a songwriter out in the world as a practicing songwriter, I think it’s really
limiting to only talk about songwriting in terms of other songwriters. I will
say in all honesty that when I was twenty-two, Gabriel García Márquez did
to me what Bob Dylan did to me when I was eleven. And it was just as real,
and it impacted my musicality absolutely as powerfully. It remains with me
as powerfully as Bob’s turning the key for me in whatever way his work
did. I find sometimes that when we’re talking about songwriting it’s almost
too on-the-nose to talk only about other songs. When I’m in the studio
making a record, if we need to reference something, I almost never
reference another record while I’m trying to make a record.

Is that right?
It’s just too on-the-nose. You’re not offering any new perspective. I
reference film all the time.

Do you think there are still new places for songs to evolve to and new
kinds of songs and new places to go with songs?
Oh, I have to believe it. But also, I don’t think in terms of “new” as
means we must invent a new form or a new language. Think of the ways in
which a song is a delivery system. You could be a genius and create an
entire new language of your own, and nobody would understand you. But
the idea of using language that we share to then say whatever you want, and
the thought is what expands—that’s what takes us into someplace we
haven’t been before, not coming up with a radically new musical form.
For instance, the blues form has held up. It’s durable like a haiku or a
sonnet is durable. We understand that form itself has authority. The blues
form of two pairs—a couplet that repeats and then another couplet that puts
paid to it or puts a new light on it or puts it on its ear in some way. That is a
really powerful form, and we keep going back to that in some way. So I
don’t really think it’s about that we’ve stopped inventing; I just think we
might have got a little bit bogged down in focusing our inventive energies
on the new technology of how music gets recorded and passed around.

I read you said once that your wife, Melanie, had really good instincts,
and she heard your song “Stop” and she said, “This might be a song for
my sister to sing.” And her sister happens to be Madonna.
Yes, she did. I’ve always had a great relationship with [Madonna], and
for many years I believed that the reason I had a great relationship with her
is I never asked her for anything. If she ever saw me coming, I didn’t have
my hand out. I considered my sister-in-law’s and mine to be completely
different lines of work. And it was tricky, because when I got married,
Madonna was the only professional musician her father knew, so he looked
at me and thought, “You’re trying to do that, and you’re failing miserably.”
[Laughs]
I’d say, “You know, that’s not where I’m going.” But anyway years
went by, and I never tried to pitch a song to her over the Thanksgiving table
or anything. But when I wrote the song “Stop”—and it’s one of those things
that happened in about twenty minutes—we had just moved house and I
had set up a new studio in our little guest house in South Pasadena, and I
needed something to record. I’d set up the room, and I thought, “Well, the
only way to find out whether everything’s working is to just start recording
something and see where I hit a snag. See where a line is not connecting.” I
could have done a cover of something, but I just thought, “Well, I’d better
just write something up, and then I will just record it.” And it happened
really fast. I invited Melanie to come out and hear it, and I remember I
thought it was so trivial that I was blushing. I was embarrassed by it.
 Madonna was in London working on a new record at the time, and
Melanie said, “You know, I don’t know why—I really think that she could
do this song.” And I said, “Well, if I was going to pitch something to her, I
have some things I would pitch, but it wouldn’t be this.” She goes, “Well,
will you burn me a copy of it?” I said, “Sure.”
So she FedExed it to her sister, and thirty-six hours later I get a call
from Madonna. “What are you doing with this song?” “I’m not doing
anything with it. It’s on a pile.” You know, songs go on a pile until I need
them. And she said, “Can I do something with it?” And of course I said,
“Knock yourself out, sister.” [Laughs]
And I never heard any more about it. She’s just that way. A month went
by, and then Christmas Eve I got an e-mail from her wishing us Merry
Christmas, and she said, “P.S. I recorded your song. I hope you’ll like it.” I
did. [Laughs]
It’s funny how many people asked me about it later—because it’s so
radically different from my version of it—how many people are so willing
to assume that you’d be offended that somebody did something with your
song other than what you would do with your song. People said, “Oh, so
what did you think of that?” I said, “What do you think I thought of it?” It’s
like the sound of my children’s teeth being straightened. [Laughs] It’s the
greatest thing I’ve ever heard.

It’s interesting: she changed it around and she made a part into the
chorus that wasn’t the chorus and gave it a different title.
Yeah. But every word of it was from my original. I wrote it like a tango,
and when I recorded it on the album Scar—that has the “Richard Pryor”
song on it—we recorded it and put orchestration on, and it’s played like a
tango. But she went somewhere else with it entirely, as I hoped that she
would. And it was a great lesson for me. I didn’t hear where there was a
chorus; there’s no chorus in my version of the song. But she took a pair of
lines and repeated them like a chorus, and that became her thing. I didn’t
hear that.

She’s in [Volume I] of Songwriters on Songwriting. People don’t know

that she’s a songwriter, but she’s quite a talented songwriter and good
at taking elements like that and putting stuff together.
 She’s an alchemist, you know? She’s not only a fine songwriter; it’s not
all that she is. In the way that she constructs songs, she’s supernaturally
gifted in some ways. I hesitate to compare her to Bob Dylan, and I certainly
don’t, as far as their intention, not as far as their writing, I don’t. She’s
better. [Laughs] When Highway 61 happened, you can still go back to that
and understand; you can hear all the pieces. You can hear Jimmy Reed and
you can hear Hank Williams and you can hear the beat poets. He just put
them in a cocktail shaker in a way that nobody had and shook it up and
poured it out, and we all drank from it. He didn’t invent any of those
elements, those varying elements. It’s like salt—it’s a mineral that was
around in the earth—those reference points.
And Madonna, in a similar creative way, is really great at, “This person
who is doing this with rhythm and this person is doing this with lyric and
this person is doing this coming out of hip-hop music.” She’s really gifted
at taking those elements and reassembling them in ways that become new
because we’ve never had that perspective of those elements before.
I’ve written at this point four songs with her that she has recorded. And
we’ve never sat in a room passing the guitar around. We did it in front of a
fire once in England; I was playing old folk songs or something. I don’t
know, but she was just into that. But as far as writing something, we have
never been in a room trying to do it. I’ve sent her something that I had
known that she thought was interesting. I would say, “Here. This might
interest you,” and she’ll run away with it, because that’s how our
collaborations have happened.
I used to have a ritual, because every time I heard that playing in a
department store, I bought a pair of shoes. [Laughs]

So you’ve got a lot of shoes now?

I’ve got a few shoes.

OceanofPDF.com
Sia
 On a Chandelier
Hollywood, California 2014

It was hearing Sia sing “Chandelier” over and over in a sound check that
introduced this song into my head and my heart. I was outside in
Hollywood, behind the former Masonic Temple on Hollywood Boulevard,
now the home of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the nightly ABC late-night talk show.
Musical artists performing on the show often film their segment on a big
outdoor stage set up between their building and Hollywood High School.
The song had yet to become the cultural phenomenon it became, and it
was the first time I heard it. From the start I was entranced. Her great vocal
leap to the start of each chorus, to “I’m gonna swing on a chandelier . . .” is
one of the most dramatic melodic ascensions since Tom Petty’s “Free
Fallin’,” which does the same thing, leaping a full octave in range to lift
that chorus—and the song—into a whole other realm, one of anthemic
passion. It’s a beautifully and classically structured melodic hurtle, both
triumphant and anthemic. Hearing her sing it over and over only affirmed
what I felt from the start: this is a remarkable song here, performed by a
powerfully soulful singer.
But what I didn’t understand is why she stood toward the back of the
stage, facing away from the audience as she performed. And why, in her
stead, a young female sprite of a dancer took center stage.
 I also didn’t understand that this chandelier-swinging song worked on
two levels at once. That although it resounded like a perfect party anthem, it
was deceptive. And as I came to discover, with delight, it’s an antiparty
anthem, that it’s not about the joy of swinging on chandeliers but about the
darkness of addiction, the false sense of bravado that drinking can create.
It’s about drowning out the world and all surrounding concerns to live
instead for this one night “like tomorrow doesn’t exist.”
She was born Sia Kate Isobelle Furler in Adelaide, Australia, in 1975.
Her first band was the Australian acid jazz ensemble called Crisp. From
there she did some solo work and the duo Zero 7. She went solo again and
released several solo albums, including Some People Have Real Problems
(2008), We Are Born (2010), and 1000 Forms of Fear (2014), from which
came “Chandelier.”
That such a song could become a monster hit is a good sign for this
music business, which often enables unworthy contenders to reach the top
of the charts. There are weak songs that are tremendously catchy records
and catch fire all the time. But to have a song like “Chandelier,” not unlike
“Umbrella” by Terius “Dream” Nash, performed by Rihanna, soar to these
heights shows us that people still love a powerfully constructed melody wed
to a compellingly dark lyric. This is Randy Newman territory, as the
narrator of “Chandelier” is untrustworthy yet delivering her message with
music as beautifully seductive as the music in “Sail Away,” Randy’s
beautiful invitation to America sing to potential slaves by a slave trader. It’s
a marriage of opposites, which is often more powerful in song than a
marriage of words and music that match in every way.
Sia, though, the world has come to learn, is not comfortable facing the
camera and emoting while singing her heart out, as she does in this song.
It’s one of the reasons she resisted being the singer of her own songs for so
long, preferring to write them and have Rihanna or another popular artist do
the singing. And she wrote “Chandelier” with Rihanna in mind, but when
she heard the sound of her own voice on the demo she recorded, she
realized, as she explains in the following discussion, that this was a song for
her to sing herself.
To answer the questions everyone asked about why she didn’t want to
do what is the dream of so many—to face the camera, to accept fame—she
wrote an “Anti-Fame Manifesto” for Billboard in 2013, in which she
explained why she didn’t want to be a famous person. “Imagine the
stereotypical highly opinionated, completely uninformed mother-in-law
character and apply it to every teenager with a computer in the entire
world,” she wrote. “Then add in all bored people, as well as people whose
job it is to report on celebrities. Then, picture that creature, that force,
criticizing you for an hour straight once a day, every day, day after day.
That’s what it’s like, even the smallest bit of it. Of course, that’s if you even
allow yourself to stay in touch with the world using public media. If I were
famous, I wouldn’t.”
She added, “I’ve worked with a lot of famous people, and I’ve seen a lot
of their mothers-in-law. And I can tell from what I’ve seen that I don’t want
one of my own. I’ve worked with a lot of artists who have mothers-in-law,
and on occasion I’ve inherited their family. Even that is not something I’m
interested in. I have a family I love. They tend to say, ‘Great job!’ Or ‘You
work really hard! Good for you!’ Or ‘You look nice today!’ Or ‘Don’t be
ridiculous—order the fries!’ Or ‘You are hilarious.’ That’s all the family I
need. So me and fame will never be married.”
But how do you get around the need to perform on TV? Every show
wanted her when the song became a hit, including Saturday Night Live,
Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and others. She said yes to
each but with the unprecedented requirement that she not be forced to face
the camera. Instead, she proposed, she would have the eleven-year-old
dancer Maddie Ziegler (discovered at the age of eight on the TV show
Dance Moms) perform an interpretive dance to the song, while she, Sia,
sang toward the back of the stage, facing backward. This was how she
performed on each of these shows, linking to the music video of the song,
which also stars Maddie. So striking and unusual was this approach that it
was quickly mocked on TV—Jim Carrey did his version of the dance on
SNL, as did others. And on the 2014 Grammys, for which the song was
nominated for Best Song of the Year, the song was performed again in this
style, but this time Maddie was joined by Kristen Wiig.
This led many to conclude that it was all a gimmick, that Sia turned
away not out of any genuine need to do so but simply to garner attention.
Which isn’t the case. People often assume the worst of those in the public
eye, especially in showbiz, but what this was in fact was a brilliant solution
to the stage fright that has crippled so many great artists. Whoever knew
that facing away was even an option? Well, Miles Davis did, often
performing with his back to the audience. But Miles, though a genius, was
also considered crazy. But Sia did what she did so she could reach those
stratospheric notes in the chorus without being self-conscious of what she
looked like while doing it and bringing us this song of triumph and
vulnerability with purity. After all, it’s not an easy song to sing. Yet on each
of these performances, as Maddie danced up a little storm, Sia sang
stunningly and brought it home each time.
But she enjoys facing journalists as much as facing the camera and
resisted doing this talk. Eventually a solution was found—we would do the
interview by e-mail. I sent my questions to her publicist, suggesting she
skip any she didn’t want to answer, and waited. Two days later the e-mail
came back, and she’d answered every one.

How was “Chandelier” born?

Sia: I was playing around on the piano in Greg [Kurstin]’s studio when
Jesse [Shatkin] came in and started playing on the marimba. I recorded it on
my phone and sent it to Jesse, who built the track over a few days. He sent
it back to me and I wrote the lyrics, thinking it’d be good for Rihanna. I
recorded the lead vocal on it for the demo. But once I had recorded the
vocals, however, and we heard the sound of it, I realized I had accidentally
written a pop song for myself. I felt I couldn’t give it away.

Where did the title come from? Did you have it before starting the
song?
Yes. Often if I find or see a word or object that I think could make a
strong title or concept, I add it to my “song ideas” list in my notes. That was
one I had in there.

Jesse is credited as cowriter. You said he made the track. But did he
also write the song?
I think I wrote the chords, but Jesse brought so much to the table with
production. So I gave him 25 percent of the songwriting credit for his mad
genius.
It is such an amazing chorus. Truly one of the most beautiful and
triumphant choruses in pop music.
Thank you! It really just fell out of me that way.

At first it sounds like a song of triumph, of pure celebration. But then

we realize there’s more there—it’s a song of escaping. Was that part of
the original idea?
Well, when I saw a chandelier, I remember thinking that I could write a
song about swinging from the chandelier. A party anthem of some sort. But
as I was writing it, it turned into a song about my battles with addiction,
inadvertently. And so that is where I took it.

You have sung vocals on other demos of songs you wrote and then gave
away to Rihanna or other singers. What was it about this one that
made you want to do it yourself?
I sat down with the intention to write for Rihanna, but as the song took
shape I realized it was personal and that I was attached to it somehow. My
intuition told me to sing it myself.

Is it true you’d rather write songs than perform?

Yes, that is true. Performing takes so much time and energy, and I would
rather devote that time to writing songs and making records and putting out
my music into the world.

OceanofPDF.com
Matisyahu
 Darkness into Light
New York, New York 2012

He radiates an ecstatic, timeless spirit, a connection to ancient, beautiful

wisdom, both in his music and his performances. His is a courage of
creative proportions unlike really any songwriter before him or since, a
bridge to a whole world in song almost universally untouched, emerged
whole from a miracle wedding at the intersection of what’s most modern
with that which is ancient.
He was clothed at first in the Hasidic garb of a rabbi but wrapped
deeply by the music of his soul, a delicately dynamic union of reggae and
hip-hop with melodics informed by both the jukebox and the shul. Out
came beautiful exhortations of Jewish wisdom, reflecting on modern times
and subjects rarely broached in popular song, even by legions of Jewish
songwriters—the Jewish experience itself.
So the assumption that he is more holy prophet than earthbound human
is an easy one to make. In fact, he’s both. He is human—and a very funny,
brilliant, and exultant one. He is also deeply religious and in love with the
infinite and always unfolding wisdom that he first discovered as a teenager
and has inspired and informed his life ever since. He’s all this and more. He
is Matisyahu. Friends call him Matis. His is a story and a career utterly
unlike any in the annals of American popular song.
 None of which would matter if the songs themselves weren’t imbued
with greatness. But they are. And have been since the start. Passionate,
triumphant invitations to open new doors abounded at the electric
intersection of techno-reggae tinged with hip-hop, deliciously deep-pocket
beatboxing, and the romantic, ecstatic wisdom of a devoted student of life
and lover of wisdom both brand new and ancient.

Givin’ myself to you now from the essence of my being

And I sing to my God, songs of love and healing
I want Moshiach now, time it starts revealing
(“King Without a Crown,” Matisyahu)

After all, the chief mantra for Jews who emigrated here from Eastern
Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century was assimilation. To gently
melt in the big melting pot. To blend in. If you’ve got a yarmulke, wear it in
temple on Shabbos (the Sabbath), but not on the street. And if you’re a
songwriter, such as George or Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, or
Irving Berlin, don’t focus on temple music; write songs for the masses. For
America. And so Berlin famously, in “White Christmas,” took Christ out of
Christmas and made it about snow. All the other Jewish songwriters wrote
great Christmas songs, such as Livingston and Evans (interviewed in SOS
I), who wrote “Silver Bells.” Berlin also famously wrote a beautiful love
song to America in which he invoked the creator, bringing religion and state
together forever: “God Bless America.”
Such has been the tradition of Jews writing songs in America:
submerging the Jewish identity. Even among the next generation of Jewish
songwriters, such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Leonard
Cohen, and others, rarely is Judaism directly mentioned. In “Ring Them
Bells,” Dylan offers, “Ring them bells so the world will know that God is
one.” But that’s about the extent of it, whereas he also devoted several
albums of songs to Christ.
Matis, though, from the start has proudly and bravely examined the
Jewish journey and the meaning of this ancient identity in songs of stunning
courage and deep passion. Whereas many Jewish scholars and writers
would condemn any reference to the Holocaust in secular song, Matis shed
arcane chains to shine a light even into this darkest, most forbidden place:
 Rebuild the temple and the crown of glory
Years gone by, about sixty
Burn in the oven in this century
And the gas tried to choke but it couldn’t choke me
(“Jerusalem,” Matisyahu)

His courage transcends the art. By recently shedding his iconic beard
and stepping away from the Brooklyn sect to which he long belonged, he
has angered those who feel he’s abandoned Judaism itself. Which he hasn’t.
(Nor has he committed to being beardless. “The world has not seen the last
of my facial hair,” he said.)
Asked why he walked away, knowing many would interpret it as
abandoning Judaism itself, he said, “I used to think that being devout meant
following a lot of rules. And that if you simply followed all the rules, you
would reach the goal. But now I know it isn’t about rules. And it isn’t easy.
People will believe what they believe. I haven’t abandoned my faith, and
those who understand me know that.”
Born Matthew Miller in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1979, he grew
up in White Plains, New York. He became a Phishhead, following Phish
around the country, and became Matisyahu in 2004. Clothed in the garb of a
Hasidic rabbi, he created stunning streams of spiritual exhortation in
remarkable songs such as “Jerusalem,” King Without a Crown,” and others.
Opening for Phish in 2004, he was introduced to a world that had never
before experienced anything remotely like him. Many presumed he was a
novelty act until they witnessed the heartfelt authenticity of his work.
On Light, he brought astounding epics like “Darkness into Light” as
well as one of the most beautiful songs about peace ever written, “One
Day,” which resides along side Lennon’s “Imagine” as a classic song of
peace. Adopted as the official song of peace for the 2010 Olympics, it’s a
song that proves there’s nothing this man can’t do.
Akeda is his most recent album, a collection of expansive and
remarkable spiritual journeys such as “Reservoir,” which explodes the song
form into many directions at once, unified by soul and spirit focus.
He’s one with whom any conversation seems incomplete. So what
follows is by no means the ultimate dialogue with Matis. But it is a start. On
a cold winter night in New York we began.
You’ve spoken about being conscious in your work. How conscious was
your decision to go in the music direction in which you’ve gone?
Matisyahu: It was a natural, organic outgrowth of my life.

I know you were a big Phish fan. Was there other music you loved
growing up?
I was always very passionate about music from being a kid listening to
Michael Jackson and listening to my parent’s records, like Paul Simon’s
Graceland and some really classic music. And then a lot of pop music in
the eighties. I always loved music. Phish, I guess, was really a life-changing
musical experience I had when I was about sixteen. I got introduced to their
music and really connected with it and realized that’s what I wanted to do in
my life, to make my own music.

How did you make that happen?

I guess I started out—I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do—I
started writing poetry and lyrics, and I started singing songs that I liked,
Bob Marley songs, and then I started beatboxing. That was a big thing for
me. At a certain point I got really into the beatboxing and realized I could
create music just with my voice and without an instrument. I started to
really get into that and practicing beats and melodies. And then I started
performing with different people, friends, and putting little bands together,
little acoustic shows.

How did you get so good at beatboxing?

I started doing it in high school, in party settings with friends who were
rapping. And I was beatboxing, and I really enjoyed it and got really into it.
And when I started listening to Phish I found myself when I was alone or
walking I started writing songs through beatboxing. And I’d record them. I
spent a bunch of time just trying to create music through the beatboxing.

Your songs have a very spiritual message. Was that what you did from
the start?
It was always a spiritual message or some kind of spiritual
consciousness, even before the time I was religious. Growing up in a
relatively secular household, as a teenager I got into spirituality, and then I
wrote from that place. Also, my mentor, my hero for songwriting, was Bob
Marley. Those were the kinds of songs I wanted to write, that had meaning,
wisdom, consciousness, and, those days, listening to Bob Marley, a lot of
quotations from the Bible. Even though I didn’t have that much knowledge,
I had some understanding of Judaism, and I started to incorporate my
Jewish identity and Jewish imagery, just like Rastafarian imagery, into my
lyrics.

What brought you to Marley’s music, and what about it spoke to you?
I don’t know how I got introduced to it. I must have been in high school
and an older kid played me some of his music. I don’t remember how
exactly I got into it; I remember at some point I really felt really passionate
about it. I am sure there were a lot of reasons why his music spoke to me,
but the biggest reason is when you hear something that resonates inside of
you in such a powerful way, it’s just truth, and the words, they come out.

What is your writing process?

It depends. “King Without a Crown” came from a certain melody that
occurred when I was singing. I went into the studio and I sang the melody,
and we played it out, put chords to it. I beatboxed the beat into the
microphone, and we copied the beat with programmed drums. Then we
added a few parts, and once we had a basic track, we looped it, and then I
started writing stream of consciousness for about thirty minutes. And then I
went into the booth and just kind of spit it all out without constructing it too
much. And that was the first recording of “King Without a Crown,” which
developed when I had my first trio. We kind of created more parts, a solo
section, and different parts. And that developed into something else.
My process has been really different for different songs. On the last
record there was a song that came out on the Shattered EP called “Two
Child One Drop” a year ago. On that, my guitar player came over, and we’d
record these jam sessions where we’d play for forty-five minutes straight,
an hour—

You’re singing and he’s playing?

Yeah. He’ll play guitar with his pedals and a lot of different sounds.
And then I’ll sing and beatbox. And when I beatbox, it’s bass line; it’s
drums and other melodic parts. And then we’d listen back to it and we’d
find one part we really liked, which was a very simple bass line with a beat
—the thing I was singing. So we’d loop that, and then a friend of mine who
was a producer with this group The Glitch Mob came out, and we sort of
programmed glitch sounds and drums to that. And then I brought in a bass
player to play a bass line. I bring in people who I know their taste and who
have a certain style or feel they want on a record. So I reach out to different
people depending on what that is. Then we went in and I wrote lyrics.
The lyrics were based on a process for me, sort of a two-year process, a
study of a certain story and a sort of Kabbalistic, mystical Hasidic
philosophical ideas behind that, and then creating an actual story. So I put in
lyrics and brought in the producer, and we had Sly and Robbie lay down
real drums and bass. And in the track we combined beatboxing with
programmed real drums.
A lot of the Shattered record was made that way, bringing in different
sounds and styles mixed together. So my point is that my process can run
the gamut from something that comes together from a stream of
consciousness, real free-flowing, to being a real process where a song, the
whole process, can take two years.

So generally, when we see other names on your songs, those are people
who bring in different musical elements, but you write the words
yourself?
It happens all ways. I have a cowriter for the words. A teacher, Ephraim
Rosenstein. We study together, and before a record we’ll study and have a
certain focus. On the last record we spent two years developing the
concepts behind it. And then I will elaborate those concepts into song
lyrics. But a lot of the original words that were used in our teachings I will
sometimes use, and then I will credit him as a cowriter.

Are these teachings from the Torah?

From the Torah and also not. We look at mainly ideas about
existentialism and God. Our starting point is usually within the Jewish
canon, the first rabbis, philosophers, writers, mystics, sages. Then we try to
cut away and get to the core of what it is they are saying about the world
and about God. And then we spend time in meditation, really delving
deeply into ideas and trying to write songs about it.

So many great songwriters are Jews, from Irving Berlin and the
Gershwins through Dylan, Simon, Leonard Cohen, and beyond. Yet
they rarely if ever wrote songs that mentioned being Jewish. Yet you
started at this place they have mostly avoided.
Yes. When I was a teenager and I started to write songs I was writing
about spiritual ideas. And when I came across classic texts, whether it was
Hasidic texts from hundreds of years ago or whether it was line quotations
from psalms or from the Torah, I would find certain lines that could really
be sparkplugs for me. And I would develop songs around them. So most of
my writing was inspired by the texts and the ideas, and then in terms of the
style now, that I was writing in, that was initially informed mainly by
reggae music—you know, Bob Marley or a lot of conscious reggae artists
that are out there and were the ones who were able to bring those ideas out
in the most authentic way.

And that music adds such a grace and beauty to the message you are
delivering.
Thank you.

As everyone knows, reggae music stems from Rastafarianism and the

smoking of weed. You wrote, “I don’t need no sensimilla,” and you’ve
taken on reggae music but not that aspect of it. Does that dynamic
confuse people who love reggae?
I guess, you know, what’s happened is music in general and ideas and
inspiration have become pretty generic over the years. There are reggae
artists who have their song about smoking weed and their song about Jah
and their song about natural living. I think that the original Bob Marley, in
his canon of lyrics and words and ideas, it’s so much deeper and more
authentic than that. That is what I was looking toward. If there were certain
ideas I didn’t jive with, I didn’t feel I needed to dwell on them just to make
authentic reggae music. It wasn’t about that for me.
Your closeness to Marley is powerful. Your record of his “Redemption
Song” is beautiful, and it sounds like it’s your song.
Thank you. I think that’s how it is, how I always felt: when you have a
music connection or a soul connection to a certain piece of music, then you
totally immerse yourself in it. You kind of go through what that artist was
going through when they were writing or singing that song.

Your song “One Day” is so beautiful. How did that come together?
My record was pretty much finished, and I went back into the studio to
work with some guys who had produced a song that I really, really loved by
an artist called K’naan called “Wavin’ Flag.” And I really liked the style of
that song, and I felt, since the time I had started, I wanted to make a song
like that. A very accessible and basic song about hope. With a big beat and
a nice chord change. Simple. So I went into the studio specifically to create
that type of song. The guys I worked with were really good at doing that.

It has a beautiful simplicity in its music and message. Reminds me of

“Imagine.” Was Lennon or The Beatles an influence on you?
It really wasn’t, actually. It wasn’t until a little later that I got into The
Beatles a bit.

How about Bob Dylan?

Yeah, I did. I loved a lot of his earlier, classic works. It wasn’t that big
of an influence for me.

Did the words to “One Day” come quickly?

Yes. Very quickly.

Is that how it usually happens—the words come quickly?

Yeah. There’s the back-end development of construction and a whole
educational process behind the songs. So it depends. At that point I had
kind of exhausted my journey and my studying for the record, so this was a
summation. Going for a very basic idea.

When words come quickly like that, do you have any thought as to
where that comes from and how to control the process?
 A big part of it is the music. I think when it’s one of those things when
you turn on the track or the music, the words sort of write themselves, and it
comes very easily. And certain ideas make themselves known. And when
something comes quickly like that, the music is really the source of
inspiration for it.

Your lyrics, unlike the lyrics of many songs, seem quite intentional.
They are poetically energized, but your message is clear. Do you bring a
lot of conscious intention to the words when writing, or do you get out
of the way of that kind of thought?
I try to get out of the way when it’s that type of situation. Then it’s just
about what’s the easiest way to let it flow. Whereas other times it’s more
about calculating and really trying to get down to the core of the idea with
very calculated words. The way it works is that I sort of, after studying this
story, this process I went through for a couple years, I got together with my
teacher and outlined the core ideas that we’ve explored. And maybe it was
twenty-five ideas. And for each of those ideas we had hours and pages of
discussion about. We would then try to write it in very intuitive and very
primal language. To express each of those ideas in maybe four sentences.
Maybe one of those ideas was, for example, Rosh Hashanah. That was the
idea, and the question was: What is the philosophical and mystical and
spiritual meaning behind Rosh Hashanah? And what was it for this Rebbe,
or what was it for this Kabbalist, and how did they differ in terms of their
vision of Rosh Hashanah and the creation of the world, the birthday of the
world, and God’s place in it? And maybe one of them is more connected to
the idea of wildness or madness in God creating this world, or tragedy in
God, and maybe one is more connected to the idea of a spiritual, scientific-
almost outline of how God created the world.
So I pare down these ideas into very primal language, and I was
walking around with this packet of ideas, each one maybe a paragraph long.
And then when I would go in and write the music and get a basic track
together or a rough sketch of the music, I would turn that music on, listen to
it to get the inspiration, and then go through my packet and I would say,
“Well, the music really lends itself to this specific idea emotionally. It’s
connecting to this idea.” And then I would take that paragraph of intuitive
language and I would develop a stream of consciousness, a flow, almost
like a rapper would write, based on that idea and those words.

That’s a fascinating process because it’s a conscious mixture of the

conscious deliberate message and the unconscious inspiration, which is
always the challenge of songwriting—to put across an idea but with
language that is both simple and inspired.
Yes. It’s always about trying to get to the core language, the intuitive
language. It’s not how many words or how big of a vocabulary you have. To
me it’s really about what’s the most basic line that just says it all. Just like
poetry.

And I love the freedom in your lyrics, that it’s almost free-verse poetry
at times. It’s so musical but not restricted by conventional song
structures or rhyme schemes. Was that a natural progression, to move
away from that?
I think it was pretty natural for me.

It’s always been interesting to me how many of America’s greatest

songwriters have been Jews. Do you have any idea why that is?
It’s a great question. There’s another question too, which is how such a
small group of people in numbers have excelled in so many various
subjects. There’s so many subjects where the Jewish community has
excelled: business, the music industry, in psychology. I don’t have the
answer to that. But I do think that music in general, and things of a spiritual
nature, I think there is some kind of link to Judaism in some kind of
removed way. I think it’s part of our DNA or part of our history of
searching and knowing through our spirituality.

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 About the Author
Paul Zollo is a singer-songwriter, author, photographer, and music
journalist. Currently the senior editor of American Songwriter magazine,
he’s the author of several books, including Songwriters on Songwriting (the
first volume), Conversations with Tom Petty, Hollywood Remembered: An
Oral History of Its Golden Age, The Beginning Songwriter’s Answer Book,
and Schirmer’s Complete Rhyming Dictionary. He’s released two CDs as a
solo artist of all original material, Orange Avenue (which features Art
Garfunkel on the song “Being in This World”) and Universal Cure. He’s
collaborated with many songwriters, including the late Steve Allen (“Blue
Stars”), Severin Browne, Bob Malone, Steve Schalchlin, James Coberly
Smith, and Jeff Gold. With Darryl Purpose he’s written many songs,
including all eleven on Darryl’s most recent album, the critically acclaimed
Still the Birds. He’s recently finished his first novel as well as a book of
photo essays and is beginning work on a book with Matisyahu. A Chicago
native, he lives in Hollywood with his wife, son, and several cats.

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