SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR SONGWRITERS
1. What makes you write?
I don’t know that I have much choice in the matter, every very so often I just get an urge to create. If it wasn’t writing songs, it would be writing short stories or making models or something. Not model trains though, that gets a little creepy.
2. Who is the greatest unknown influence on your music?
I think half the guys in high school played metal guitar, it was pretty competitive. I wrote songs for them because that’s the only way I was ever going to get to join a band. I couldn’t keep up with the cool kids, so I was influenced to compensate.
3. What is your most closeted, secret, guilty and humiliating musical pleasure?
Mediocre 60’s folk groups like The Kingston Trio or The Chad Mitchell Trio, even the New Christy Minstrels. God help me, I love it. I caught every joke in “A Mighty Wind.”
4. What established artist made you want to write songs, and why?
I grew up with my mother’s music, John Denver and Pete Seeger mostly. Paul Simon was a bridge to rock music, and that probably got me playing the guitar. I always wrote, but I didn’t WANT to be a writer until I heard Randy Newman respond to “We Are the World” with his fantasy telethon sing-along, “I Just Want You to Hurt Like I Do.” It was like watching a car wreck. I remember thinking holy hell, what sort of an awful bastard would record a thing like that?
I’ve been chasing it ever since -- one of my favorite songs that I’ve written is “Glad to See You’re Pushing Me Again,” which is musically fairly pretty, with lyrics that may inspire recoil.
5. Advice for just-starting songwriters?
If you don’t police your lyrics nobody will. An engineer or band member will tell you your guitar is out of tune or that they don’t care for a keyboard part. Nobody though, except maybe a producer you are actually paying, will tell you that a line of poetry about the love of your life or a deceased relative is cringe inducing.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, avoid any and all references to whippoorwills.
6. Why country?
Willie Sutton supposedly said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. Same deal, I guess. With the tragic demise of rock (March 12, 2000, in case you were wondering) and hip-hop doing its own flameout, the interesting songwriting has shifted to Alt-Country and Americana, and it seems to feel right at home. The magnificent pop hooks of mainstream country remain delicious, if lyrically horrifying. If this is where the good music is going, who am I not to follow?
Plus, in this genre you can still sell songs -- how cool is that?
7. Favorite backwoods expression?
“Meanness don't happen overnight,” officially, but I still have to laugh every time I hear “busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
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