Pastoral Resources

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.

Songs are life in 80 words or less.

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.

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.

I live for my sons. I would be lost without them.

Any sane person would have left long ago. But I cannot. I have my sons.

When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don't do songs from outside people.

Rather, I believe that it is very good, if, with the aid of his songs, we can be reminded, among other things, of the social conditions under which Schubert had to work.

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.

On her son Rene: Oh my God, when he's 20 years old what's going to happen to me? I'm gonna marry him.

The advantage is I have my family with me all the time. When your daughter takes her first steps or says her first words and your son is going through potty training, I'm not missing any of those things.

The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

I had life threats, because people accused me of approaching Brando as God and his son was Jesus. I literally had people saying my blood would run in the streets for doing that.

I loved it, it's such fun. I like that people are seeing it and then talking about it. Like when I took my son and his friends to see Napoleon Dynamite last year, we spent the next six weeks trying to explain it.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The sooner you treat your son as a man, the sooner he will be one.

Go miser go, for money sell your soul. Trade wares for wares and trudge from pole to pole, So others may say when you are dead and gone. See what a vast estate he left his son.

I don't think Ed Sullivan had anything to do with Carib Song.