About a year ago, out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.
Attempting to write vocal oriented songs to me felt like going through the motions and if you are going to go through the motions you might as well just do any gig that caused you to do repetitive motions like banging a hammer or serving fries.
The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, these are just some of the people who threatened to sue if we used their songs.
We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.
You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.
We recorded several of Kenny's songs in the living room of my home.
I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.
I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.
I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.
I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.
I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.