Music Quotes

I'm making music for other people to listen to for pleasure. And hopefully, later on maybe they'll listen to it and go, "That bass line, boy, did you hear the way those drums interacted with that?"

I think everything happens in time. There's a time for everything. There's a time to be in a group, and there's a time to be solo.

As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.

If you listen to people talk when people actually talk, they talk in melodies. If they get angry, their voice rises, and it's more of a staccato thing. When they ask for something, they're real sweet. It's all music.

A lot of 'em are falling or getting ready to because all kinds of things. Mainly the distributors are getting bought up. And you're doing good if you're supporting yourself with an independent label, Right now, you're doing excellent.

On the best day, there's no context for the moment. Often, the best writing and pieces have been lost to not having been digitized.

Even when I was a mailman. That job required no great skill, so once you got it down, you had a lot of free time to daydream and make up songs.

If you're out there day after day, going around playing the same places, you pretty much think you've reached your audience. But there's more people finding my music every day.

If there had been a tornado or something that took the town, it would've been the same song.

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.

I knew Fred since I was 14 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.

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.

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.

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.

All the girls over there in Ireland are well versed in American country music. Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline are like king and queen over there.

The Songwriters Hall of fame, that's the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.

Even when I was coming up in the singer-songwriter ranks during the early '70s, I thought that people who were stylists and stuff shoulda still been up on the pedestal. I mean, it's fine to recognize people who write songs, but it kinda got out of hand, you know?

I think the best duets are those where there's a dialogue back and forth, and then the two singers go into a thing together.

I wrote most of 'Hello in There' in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I'd go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on 'Hello in There' inside the relay box.

I don't like to see Christmas trees torn down.