I think the true test of a pop song, for me, and I've talked to a lot of other writers about this, is you take your demo, you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica, and that's the Hollywood car test.
The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not ...
I paid my dues. I have crawled to gigs. I have served people coffee. I worked hard selling all these records out the back of my car. Girl, I'm ready to sell one the real way now.
The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It's part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.
Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday. I love everything about it, from the event that inspired it, hoping for a white one, to wrapping presents. But mostly I love having family and friends gathered, and sharing traditions.
The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.
I went along doing the one-salad-a-night routine for a year. And I remember feeling so tired and depressed and irritable. I had no personal life. I was always flying someplace - weekends, holidays, vacations. Dinners at night were no fun because I co...
We had idyllic summer holidays, building sandcastles with my father on the beach at Bridlington. It might sound strange, but I think that secure cocoon of familial love was so nourishing, it gave me the strength to live life on my own.
I said I didn't want to spend most of my life in Holidays Inns, but I've checked and they've all been redecorated. They're marvelous places to stay and I've thought it over and that's where I'd like to be.
Probably to me the greatest singer, female voice, is Billie Holiday. And one of the most moving for me, I don't know why - maybe it's nostalgia, maybe because my life is one of constant partying, whatever.
I love out-of-the-way, rugged places. For me, holidays are about the experiences, and the people, and the memories, rather than sitting on a nice beach getting tanned. I try to plant myself where I am and embrace what is there in front of me.
Yeah, it's more like playing what you think is appropriate for the moment. It's not about trying to force any particular style within the parameters - and the parameters we play in are pretty large!
Yeah, well, it did earlier - but as Bobby and I have played together, our thing as a unit has become so strong that they kind of had to get in where they fit in. And most people do.
But I've come to the point in my evolution on the instrument where I realize that I can't play the same stuff that just a guitar player or organ player would play - and I need to embrace that in a big way.
That's the thing that we said about the horn before: it's a focus issue. It's like a singer versus a drummer. If a drummer's playing a drum beat, and a singer starts singing, what do you think the audience is going to do?
Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.
We're going to do something that's really unprecedented in the industry by launching the console in all three major markets for the same holiday. It's never been done before.
I knew there was something I had to do yesterday. I couldn't remember what it is. I can't figure it out. I know it's a holiday. I know I don't have a meeting. It's very confusing.
In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.
If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.
While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town.
