It's a great gift in my throat. When you have a gift, you think about the giver. Who gave this to me? And this takes you to a spiritual sense of God. That has captivated me all through my life, serving that lucky gift.
I'm precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers, and I proportionalise.
Records have images. There are wet records and dry records. And big records.
It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions, and they would say, 'What were the Beatles like?'
Will I do another tour with Paul? Well, that's quite do-able. When we get together, with his guitar, it's a delight to both of our ears. A little bubble comes over us, and it seems effortless. We blend.
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'm always different. I'm an eccentric man.
When Paul and I were first friends, starting in the sixth grade and seventh grade, we would sing a little together and we would make up radio shows and become disc jockeys on our home wire recorder. And then came rock and roll.
I did have a lucky thing going on there in my throat.
Records became much cruder in the last 20 years. Let's put it that way.
I've been singing since I was five. It's my identity.
I'm the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you're not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do.
After all these years, I'm finally into soccer. The World Cup is on, and my band is an international group - they're all around me, cheering in the hotel bars.
I like working solo and it was a lot of fun joking around with the audience, saying things. I'm only just learning how to do certain things.
It was terrible. 2012, no voice. I would fall to my knees and look up at God and say, 'Oh, man, this is tough. I don't know how to be a person.' And finally, I would sing some shows where the voice crapped out. There were people in the audience. I did my best. I saw that there was lots of love and support.
I teach well. I used to really like teaching a lot. I enjoyed it a lot and I was good at it.
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.
Paul has more, I think, of a feel for the stage. Whereas I have it more for the notes themselves. I love record making and mixing, arranging, producing. That I love. I love to make beautiful things, but I don't like to perform.
Paul is a very creative artist but I'm more that thorough, meticulous, disciplined nut.
