Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.
I think I drift toward sad love songs.
Sometimes you work with somebody you've never heard of because you just feel like working.
What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It's never about you stepping out and showing you can play something fancy.
I'm playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there's Howie. Tom's in the middle and we're playing all this stuff I love. It's great.
Fortunately, as we all know, it's impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.
I loved Mal Evans holding one note down on You Won't See Me from Rubber Soul.
Besides, I'm fairly incompetent. I can't play that fast.
I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes.
We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.
Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.
I think we've always been better live.
I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.
If you call attention to yourself at the expense of the song, that's the cardinal sin.
You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.
I loved working with Bob Dylan.
I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.
Working with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson takes you up another level.
I've always written songs since I was a kid - always.
In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.
