When You Work With Somebody For A

There Are Certain Records From The 80s And Early 90s That You Love Because The Songs Are Great, But You Don't Go To Them As An Example Of Great Production. Over The Last 20 Years, Myself And A Lot Of Other Musicians My Age Have Tried To Discover Things In 50s, 60s, And 70s Recording Techniques That Were Lost Or Discarded. We've All Been Trying To Crack This Code. It's Been An Important Period In The Last 15 Years, Reclaiming Some Of Those Lost Approaches To Making Records.

In Japan, You Get On The Bullet Train Or The Airplane, And I Loved The Little Speeches The Stewardesses Would Do. They Even Do Little Speeches Before You Play Gigs.

I'm Always Looking For Older Equipment And Ways Of Recording, But You Can't Escape The Fact That It's All Going To Be Digitized And Reduced. I Do Think Music Sounds Better When It's On Tape And More Simply Recorded. I've Been Arguing With People For 10 Years About Tape Versus Digital, And I Believe Tape Is Absolutely Essential In Getting The Sound That's Conducive To The Enjoyment Of Music. I Wonder If It's Going To Go Back To That. Sometimes I Think It Has To. As Music Becomes More Computer-based, It's Lost Some Emotional Impact.

I'm More Critical Of My Songwriting Than Anybody, But I've Worked Really Hard In The Last Five To 10 Years To Improve. I Didn't Take It All That Seriously When I Started. It Was A Little Bit Of A Stigma To Being A Songwriter Or A Folkie Back Then. I Did A Lot Of Send-ups Of Sensitive Singer-songwriter Stuff When I Was Starting Out, Which Limited My Development As A Songwriter In A Way. I Wasn't Really Fully Given License To Explore That Until The Mid-90s. I'm Still Working On It; I'm A Little Bit Of A Late Bloomer.

Sometimes Things In Life Take A Few Years To Digest, And They Find Their Way Into The Work Later On. Sometimes I'm Writing About Things From Eight Years Ago-they Just Took A Long Time To Distill And Come Out In The Appropriate Way.