I went to SUNY Purchase, where a lot of musician friends of mine went, and other film friends, artsy friends. It’s like a state art school, or something like that. And the school freaked us out so much about the corporate art situation in general. The music business, the movie business, all of the businesses… We left school absolutely terrified of them.
I’m so behind on pop culture that I was just listening and learning, and learning and listening.
I’m really bracing myself! You know, it’s kind of intense! I prefer recording records and playing live shows to doing television things. They feel terrifying to me. But I also feel absolutely amazed that they’ve invited me to play there!
I feel like all the people who work in plays or in film or write a novel, they have to have so much patience. They’re in it for the long haul, unlike musicians who go write a 3-minute song and immediately get to go play it.
Even today, I get to play [college shows] and we always put a few in, in every tour because I love schools so much and love college kids.
I know it’s ridiculous, but most of the time when I feel the audience I’m always just like “wow, these people are really good people.” And that always just gives me inspiration to play with them.
The amazing thing to me about live shows is that anybody could write about it or try to explain it to someone, but really it’s just this very personal experience shared between the people that are there in the same room.
It’s a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don’t have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don’t really like that kind of writing.
if you take the average person from today or the average person from the time of Homer, its still the same person, only he was working the land and wearing a toga. But the mind, the soul, the everyday existence
you know, love, death, worshipping God, music, drinking—everything was there.
All of the songs on Songs were one take each, almost for archiving purposes. I had like 28 of those, and then I narrowed it down to 12 and slapped on a cover and put it out as Songs. And then I never listened to it again.
