“There was a period when I wrote in Nashville for Maverick and then Warner/Chappell, and it was interesting.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 did enjoy Nashville a lot of the time, because I made really good friends who were really good songwriters, and they would be a joy to hang out with.”
“I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.”
“I learned to play piano in a rock n' roll context or band context from country records - you know, Floyd Cramer - and from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Stax. And none of those are keyboard records.”
“I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.”