I don't make music for the radio. And when I was being played on the radio a lot, I didn't.
I've had a nice career. I'm no David Bowie or Bruce Springsteen out there. I'm not an icon. I'm just a working artist.
Sustaining a narrative in sentences and paragraphs is very different from songwriting. But the dedication to the craft and just the endurance that it takes, you know, to stick with it and believe you can pull it out and make it real and finish it, I learned that a long time ago writing songs.
As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.
I'm a vulnerable guy.
I wrote a song a good long while ago, 'I Ain't Livin' Long Like This,' that has been around and been recorded by a lot of people, but it was basically childhood memory.
I'm a pretty successful songwriter and known in some circles, but I didn't think the story of my career was of any real entertainment value.
The beautiful despair is never fruitless. It keeps you going. Like when I first heard Bob Dylan do 'Things Have Changed,' or any time I see any work of art really beautifully done, like Michelangelo's 'The David' or that movie 'Lost in Translation' - it inspires me to try and find my own version of that.
Over the years, I've come to realize that writing 'I Ain't Living Long Like This' was an exercise in combined musical influence, mostly that of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan - artists no one has ever heard of.
For me, my career has never been about what I've done. But it's been about becoming, achieving, and pushing myself further.
Invariably, collaboration leads to new forms of self-expression and to the things that move you.
Collaboration allows me to challenge myself to find a new passion for music.
So much of inspiration comes from collaboration with other musicians.
I concern myself with timelessness all the time. If you're not swinging for museum quality, your mind is not in the right place. It doesn't mean you get there, but at least it's the intent.
I will say this: I've always sort of had maybe an inflated sense of my ability to sequence songs in a narrative flow.
As a poet, Will Rogers just had this natural conversational style.
At the end of the day, Johnny Cash was a poet.
The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.
My preference for female company is based for the most part on the fact that women are more self-aware than men, in my experience.
As an artist, one of the ingredients to doing good work is self-awareness, and that's something I cultivate.
