Probably my favorite artists to listen to James Taylor, Stevie Wonder - I haven't gone back in a really long time and really listened to them - my first guitar influences. It's been awhile since I revisited that.
I was a huge Beatles fan. The Stones, Dylan. Later on, I got into Stevie Wonder, and Bill Withers - he's one of my heroes. Al Green, too.
And wasn't that a great moment in baseball history," Holly Grace replied with withering sarcasm. "Helen Keller pitching and Little Stevie Wonder catching.
I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey - like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.
I Have Found that If You Love Life Life will Love You Back
Having lost both my parents as a teenager, family is so important to me, and I cherish my time with my children and grandchildren. I have four children, and they all became lawyers - as I was myself before I got into music.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they want...
I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle.
These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I'm washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles. The ones that you sing when you're driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.
In Japan, they have TV sets in cars right now, where you can punch up traffic routes, weather, everything! You can get Internet access already in cars in Japan, so within the next 2 to 3 years it's gonna be so crazy!
You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.
I had braces; I was lucky, 'cause I had some snaggle teeth. I always try and keep my retainer on me 'cause I'm paranoid about my teeth. It was run over by a car, so half of it's missing, but it still works.
There's not a day that goes by that I don't bless myself with holy water and then get in my car and rub the medal of the Virgin Mary that she gave me and say a Hail Mary for my mother. And then I kiss her Mass card that's right there on the dashboard...
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.
My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but ...
I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.
When I was a kid, I remember trying to emulate Stevie Wonder's sound, and Donny Hathaway's sound. It's just part of who I am - I'm just a soulful kind of dude.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
If I wanted to make a quick buck, there's far easier ways of doing it. What I want is to provoke people. If you want a hit song, all you need to do is rewrite an old song. It might have been proven to work, but you won't be remembered the same way.
