Pastoral Resources

Just because people play songs with great technique doesn't mean the records are better.

I don't think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing.

I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don't catch flight. They just flop. It is hard to tell until they are out there.

I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.

With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there.

In an attempt to amuse my friends and family, I would do impressions of Dean Martin, singing Everybody Loves Somebody. I secretly really enjoyed singing the song.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.

I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.

I would start seeing, in just the sense I was saying now, the kind of record it was going to be and what the arrangement demands, and what my vocal part should be in the record. This was all emerging as the song was emerging.

We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.

I've always written songs, even when I wasn't doing anything with my personal life in music.

Each song is a lifetime, it begins and ends, and there's a journey taken within the songs.

I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words.

I am truly my mother's son.

Those songs are about getting out; they're not about getting out of family. It wasn't about how family life was curtailing because I didn't know family life.

Like father, like son, four years and this president is done.

I'm currently raising a 15 year old son and an 18 year old daughter, which a guess is my punishment for a wild youth!

A song without music is a lot like H2 without the O.

Well yes, my son was bar mitzvahed last April, after I made this film.

I have three sons, a husband, parents, and I'll fight and get angry, but what is very important that I have found as I've matured, is that I have to move on.