Pastoral Resources

To me, there's two types of songs, good and bad. And I just like to stick with the good ones.

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.

I was singing a lot of waltzes. And I was with Jerry Kennedy, my producer, and he was playing me some songs, and he said, hey, I want to play you this song that I'm going to get Jackie Ward to record.

But I like to listen to demos. I like to hear the finished product. It's like listening to a song - I mean, a story. If you're going to sit here and tell me a story, I just like to listen. I don't want to make them up.

It's not that I don't love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible.

I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.

I prepared five songs, I sang them, and he hired me. I started working about a month later at the piano bar.

Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.

My son walked up to Nicole on the beach and I was throwing the ball for the dogs in the ocean. I was like, 'Max, you get the dogs. I'll talk to the hot blondes.'

I felt (a) it was a great role and (b) I wanted to stay in town. I wanted to stop going to these four month and five month gigs up in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver or down in Mexico. I wanted to be around my son, Max. This came along and I was like, 'I really want to play this guy!"

Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.

I play a couple basic folks songs and break them down. I did that on a six string. I can't recall all the songs on it. There's some finger picking on it.

There's only one drummer. We all travel to his beat. Well, I couldn't sing his song. Because for me, it wasn't a truthful statement. Well, Linda sang it, and it was a monster for her.

My buddies worked with me for weeks, and I went up to take my test, and started crying because I couldn't remember the words. I can remember songs. If you put it to a melody, I would have sung it to 'em in a minute.

It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.

If you listen to the left track on their album, if you get The Best of the Mamas and Papas, you listen to the left track, you can still hear a little bit of my voice. My son discovered that once.

This thing that Colin Powell's son is expected to do is kind of scary when you think that television and radio and newspapers are what make people think what they think.

The process depends on the situation, and I don't think there are any two songs that have gone exactly the same way... well, actually, that's not true.