Music Quotes

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 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.

Now Jesus, he don't like killing, no matter what the reason is for, and your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore.

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

Bewildered, bewildered, you have no complaint. You are what you are, and you ain't what you ain't.

Soon as I could play one guitar chord and laid my ear upon that wood, I was gone. My soul was sold. Music was everything from then on.

I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.

Because of my song 'Sam Stone,' a lot of people thought I was interested in writing protest songs. Writing protest songs always struck me as patting yourself on the back.