Pastoral Resources

I was never encouraged to do it and I played the accordion, which I hated. I wish I had taken piano because I definitely would have written more songs of my own, but I didn't.

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English.

A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs.

I think the fans really wanna hear the songs the way they sound on the record.

My songs grow on people - like warts.

There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe.

I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me.

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs.

As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.

These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

I just feel like the songs that come out are the songs that come.

Just because people play songs with great technique doesn't mean the records are better.

I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don't catch flight. They just flop. It is hard to tell until they are out there.

I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.

I've always written songs, even when I wasn't doing anything with my personal life in music.