Pastoral Resources

My songs always speak of love, that's the way I like them.

I've come to understand my role. On some level, I provide the context for them to shine. I also know my role is the steward of the songs, and the center point, the artist that the stuff all revolves around. But I really try to honor that.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.

I write songs about real things... The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

I really just tried to make a record full of great songs, which is the goal I always have.

I am happy that women can relate to my songs, and hopefully men can too.

I knew the words to 25 rock songs, so I got in the group. Long Tall Sally and Tutti-Frutti, that got me in. That was my audition.

They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs.

Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through.

I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now like the old Irish minstrel, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung.

My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.

You know, I get a lot of people pitching songs to me.

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.

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 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.

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.