The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
The thing about albums is just coming up with new material. I just got tired of that syndrome of putting out an album and then some reviewer claims that this song or that song has something to do with x y or z.
[The music is about ] for the purpose of getting people to an excitement level. They feel something, they feel emotions. They're going to go home after that concert and remember it.Maybe they got something out of the experience rather than intellectualizing about what songs mean which is the whole head trip.
If the spirit comes through in a Madame George type of song, that's what the spirit says. You have very little to do with it. You're like an instrument for what's coming through.
I wrote a couple of songs that had gypsy references in them. The only reason it happened was because that's what was coming through and I liked the idea at that period of time. But that doesn't mean that it's a myth or that I'm a gypsy. It's gotten totally out of context.
I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.
There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that.
Somebody's going to hear a song that will key in a nerve or something in their experience that represents their own vision. And the next person is going to see it completely different. So even what it means to me is probably irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. What matters is what it means to each person listening to it.
I think I opened up an area with Astral Weeks that hit a lot of peoples' nerves. But you can't really say that they're my favorite songs.
Joyous Sound evolved from a gospel influence. Actually it evolved out of sitting at a piano and just picking out a riff, a gospel type riff. It just seemed to come joyously-something about the song, about living in another place of joyous sounds. I'm not quite sure-that's one I'm trying to analyze. It just came out.
Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.
I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.
I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say.
You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.
If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.
In the media, a reviewer has his personal vision but it's passed along to a million readers or whatever. He might think that this particular song sounds like Jo Blow. Or like a Bo Diddley record that he heard six years ago. But the artist who made the record may never have even heard the Bo Diddley song. We all respond differently.
Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.
Little kids sing a song called "America the Beautiful." They sing a song called "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land." To me, those songs are not just nice little ditties. They are marching orders. They are commandments that we must protect America's beauty from the clear-cutters, the strip-miners, the oil spillers. They are pledges we have made. They are promises to keep.
Even the sad roots songs have a lot of good stories to them, and the murder ballads are good too. I mean, who doesn't like to watch a nice gory murder film on TV?
I met PJ Harvey when I was in England, and the first thing I want to do when I meet a songwriter I admire is to ask them how do they receive songs.
I love to read things that have moral messages, and I love to hear stories where it's not just a hook, you have to follow the story, you have to listen to the message of the song, and get it and use it in your everyday life.
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
I think one of the reasons that I love the fans that have stuck around, because I really enjoy writing different kinds of songs. I don't know if I write them well or not, but I can write them.
I don't how many of us get to go to the next level, and I don't know how many people on my level get to go to the next level after that. I think it is the songs that can take you there.
