Aerosmith's Pump is one of my favorite records, so you can go the other way and just have it be simple and loud. Or it can be as simple as a Hank Williams record. There's room for everything. It just depends on if it's done well.
As soon as I picked up the instrument I wrote 10 or 20 songs during the first year I was beginning to play.
Be true to yourself and believe in what you do and stick to it. Because if you're like me, you wouldn't want to bend yourself around so much to please someone, then get somewhere with it and then have to live with it.
Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long.
Every new project has its way of getting done. It's a process, and I thought I'd cracked it last time, because making that record was fairly smooth, but this record wasn't. It was harder to make, harder to get the songs out, and more time consuming.
Fleetwood Mac had just become big at the time and Bonnie Raitt was a favourite of mine; I would cover some strange things as well. I still do actually!
From stumbling upon my voice came a system, a security, a net, that I could fall into and do something that I really think was unique to me. And it definitely had to do with being confessional and personal.
Great songwriters don't always choose to hang in this lifestyle and this profession and try to make a go of it-they find other jobs, they have families, and they continue to write but you're never going to hear their songs.
Hopefully as an individual you grow, so the particulars change somewhat, but I've got a certain overview, a certain character, and that always pretty much stays the same.
I always wanted to write. I wrote a lot when I was a teenager and was learning the guitar.
I began playing professionally when I was about 19. I was in college, and the opportunity just arose to begin playing at these places. I no longer cared about being in school.
I consider myself as a singer first, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there's not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two fed off the other.
I don't feel butterflies; I feel ready to go.
I don't feel compelled to put to rest any ideas.
I don't know that I have a distinct style. I truly don't have any perspective on that, and when I hear myself singing back it's still difficult.
I don't like doing what's expected. I've always done best when I've listened to my instincts rather than following convention or doing what other people think I should do.
I got the first verse on the way to therapy.
I have a short attention span and even when I'm not completely satisfied with a line here and there I generally leave it as it is.
I have found that airplanes have been a good time for things to come out or for problems to be solved. Like if there's a section to a song that I can't seem to finish, I've had solutions come up when my mind's been suspended.
I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.
I moved to California in 1979 and was in a quandary about what to do with my life. I was playing music, but to pass the time I would write snippets of things. I never finished anything.
I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people.
I think you've got to be brave in this business or in anything where you become somewhat public because you're not allowed to really experiment or fail in public.
I try never to back away from honesty. Rather than move away from showing it, I want to show it all. I find a weird kind of comfort in showing everything. I don't mind exposing it.
I try to cut out everything that's superfluous. I'm drawn to making music that's close to the bone.
I wasn't writing and I didn't believe in myself as a writer. I really liked taking other people's material.
I worked hard at developing a guitar style that felt good and also would work to entertain people over a long period of time all by myself. Something interesting and strong.
I'm getting married, and the people who love the depressing, confessional kind of stuff go don't get too happy, you know.
I'm too quick to negate myself as a songwriter... that's part of what's taken so long.
I've never seen someone fail or miss out who wasn't kind of pushing ahead with the best of intentions and with the belief in themselves.
I've never written daily unless I've been under complete pressure to do so. I'm a very reluctant writer. I keep vowing to change that, but I don't and I'm in such admiration of people who do.
If anybody came and accused me of taking advantage of my position and opportunity to put anything I want on an album, I'd have to give 'em an ear, but I'm not sorry I wrote exactly what I wanted to say.
If it were a total drag, no one would do it. It's a rough way of life but you get to see amazing places under protected circumstances. People want to help you, to tell you what to see, though you don't have much time. You have very little control over where you go.
If you achieve fame, you should enjoy that every day for about five minutes when you get up in the morning and you realise you have plenty of money and that you're in a good position, and then you go on about your day.
If you get a groove going and you kind of say nonsense over the groove then some words come out that you couldn't have predicted. Some you keep, some you don't.
It began of course with Bob Dylan, and that must have been an incredible time; I think everything that's happened since then came from that energy.
It was just completely nuts to think of what we were doing and make any comparison between that and what was being played on Top 40 radio right then.
It's kind of fun to take a step back and create something fictional.
It's tragic when families are like mine, I believe, unhealthy and dishonest within their structure and everybody takes on these roles to try and make the whole thing balance out. It's destructive to everybody.
My motto is stick with what you know. I didn't have it in me to paint fictional pictures. I didn't have the skill to make an interesting story, and I don't know that I do now.
My records haven't sold millions, so as far as where I make my demands I've sort of bent toward the musical side of things. I can put my foot down real hard there. When it comes to marketing it wears me out.
Not every project can go smooth, but in the end, you just have to trust your standards.
One of the dumber things my manager said was, Stick to the melody. But I can't.
Some songs I would just go way overboard on the emotion and then I'd have to rein it back in to make it accessible.
The music that's affected me the most always stood up to repeated listening, and there was usually something interesting going on in the production.
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.
There were coffee-houses and there was a hang-out in a church that we used to go on Saturday nights when I was in high school; a few of us would always bring the guitars and I was kind of the resident entertainer.
There's a lot of desolation and pain and crisis being dealt with in my songs. But I do think, in writing about desolation, you're getting past it, too. And there lies the hope.
There's nothing quite like making a piece of something where there was nothing. Yet when you get up and play it and give it to people and you do a good job, that's pretty great.
There's only one song that I still feel funny about playing. I feel like it's maybe taking it a little too far, and that's Monopoly. I wrote it in 10 minutes and said exactly what I wanted to say. It makes me feel vulnerable.
There's tons left to do. I want to be a producer. There are not many prominent women producers. You know, there's your top ten list of producers and they're all men.
They're all in their 20s so they're called alternative and I'm in my 30s so I'm called folk. I don't wave a flag for any type of music.
Up until Sunny Came Home and another song from that record, The Facts About Jimmy, I never wrote about a character before. It was always first person.
What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality. People tell me they get a lot of hope out of what I do.
When you're slaving and sweating and you finish writing a song, that's good for a couple of days' bliss and then you're back to hell again with the next idea!
Without music, I could not get through.
You get thrown together with a group of people that you didn't necessarily pick to be your friends and you have to live with them. It's a great challenge and it's always interesting; it has its ups and downs.
You go get your picture taken and you go through 10 million rolls of film. I don't find it deplorable, but it's just a little too polished as far as I'm concerned.
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