The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.
I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.
There's an opera out on the turnpike, there's a ballet being fought out in the alley.
Me and crazy Janey were making love in the dirt singing our birthday songs.
In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.
I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done.
For me, once I count the band in, and I delve deep into my song, I feel a certain sort of integrity and integration that I rarely find in my daily life.
If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know.
I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.
And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.
A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.
You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.
I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?
The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.
Sometimes I do an automatic songs, songs that you don't really think about, or work on. You just look back and it sorta surprises you.
Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.
"Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song.
When you`re onstage you have a certain faith that somebody's gonna yell somethin' back. Some nights it's louder than other nights and some nights they do, and on some songs they don't. But that's the idea. I think when you begin to expect a reaction from an audience, it's a mistake.
I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.
A great singer has to learn how to inhabit a song.
'Darkness on the Edge of Town' came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs.
Every rock song is some variation of 'Pull down your pants'
You may not be able to hit all the notes. That's OK. You may not have the clearest tone. You may not have the greatest range. But if you can inhabit your song, you can communicate.
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