Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life.
I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.
I'm lucky. Hard work is the key, but luck plays a part.
I think probably Australians have just a little more taste than most people.
I still need practice in enjoying the fruits of success.
I came back to performing with a different attitude about performing and myself. I wasn't expecting perfection any more, just hoping for an occasional inspiration.
Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.
I've looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I'm in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.
Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.
Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song.
I don't like all of the music to be serious and deadly.
There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.
If it can affect me, if it has meaning to me, if I feel I can do it well, I will do it and record it and thats why I recorded these songs.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.