I'm a Buckeye at heart. I spend more time giving concerts in Ohio than I do in any other state - perhaps more time than I spend performing anywhere else in the world. I have a great relationship with the people of Ohio, and it's great to be near the OSU when I come to Columbus.
I slept fourteen feet from a polka tavern as a kid growing up. I heard polkas all night long, people singing and drinking beers and having a great time. I know more polkas than Frankie Yancovic!
I love connecting with the audience, and there's more ways than one to do that.
I really do see it as the start of the second half of my career.
Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I'm introducing some new music that people haven't really heard me do in quite this fashion.
I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.
I have been with the record company and Tommy was there doing records with other people.
We are just fanatics about using the technology to make it all wonderful. We laughed at the fact that we were having such a great time working this way.
Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.
That's the way I try to live. I think it's the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.
I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.
That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.
I've thought about doing it as soon as it is possible with this new CD getting some wings and getting out there. I don't know how soon that will be.
I'm really looking forward to it because it will give me the opportunity to do the whole other kind of approach to the music live that I haven't had a chance to do. and I think is important for me to do.
More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don't happen in the studio.
Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.
I've got an odometer on my voice that has out-odometered an odometer on an automobile.
I was singing doo-wop on the corner under the streetlight with four other guys when it wasn't called doo-wop. We just got together and sang, so that music is inside of me. It's a lot of stuff that has been rolling around in here and becoming this compost and has made me who I am as a singer.
I'm not sure it's a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There's less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.
I say what's on my mind and have a good time. I try to give people a show. It's all about giving people a good time once you get out under those lights.
