Brandi Carlile on writing the songs for Give Up the Ghost, 2009

"I’ve been made aware of the fact that it takes a band their whole lives to write their first record, and then they’ve got a matter of months to write their second. Nothing happens between the time they put their first record out and the time they put their second record out, and it’s boring. On your first record you have so many life experiences to draw from—coming of age and love and loss and heartache and all of these firsts—and it’s really hard to write an album of seconds. So I wanted to transcend what is happening right now in the moment, on our tour bus, on the road, and not make an album full of highway songs, because I just think there are enough of them in the world.

"So we did a lot of songwriting exercises where we took a good hard look at things in our past that we hadn’t made peace with and ventured into the vastness of the future. We kept dream journals and wrote from a place of consciousness."

From an interview with Brandi Carlile published in Acoustic Guitar, May 2010. Read the full article here.

Derek Sivers on promoting music online, 2009

A lot of musicians these days think that networking online is going to break their music, yet real-world gigs and interactions with people haven’t become obsolete. In some ways maybe they’ve become more important.

SIVERS I’d say more important. The more valuable thing is always going to be the more scarce thing. So when everybody’s lives are led online, then having a great live performance is going to help you stand out from the pack so much more than being one of the one million musicians with a great Web presence a click away.

I think about that stuff a lot: What is the road less traveled? What is the thing that most people are doing, and therefore what is the thing that few people are doing? Whatever few people are doing is where the greater value lies. If a whole new generation of musicians is spending much more time clicking around MySpace to add new friends than they are practicing their scales and arpeggios, then if you are one of the few who puts in an hour or two a night to practice your scales and arpeggios and chord voicings or whatever, it’s going to make you that much more of a standout.

From "CD or No CD," an interview with CD Baby founder Derek Sivers published in Acoustic Guitar, January 2010. Read the full article here. More about Sivers and his current projects here.

John Fogerty on songwriting, 2009

In past interviews you’ve described many nights in the ’60s working on your songs until 4 am. Yet the songs themselves don’t sound labored over at all.

FOGERTY It’s an interesting dichotomy. The best songs are effortless—“Midnight Special” or “Cotton Fields” or “Down in the Valley” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was quite remarkable in its time. It was completely out of the normal rock ’n’ roll box. The way I think back on that was, the Beatles had been very heavily influenced by Buddy Holly, particularly songs like “Peggy Sue” and “Everyday.” Buddy would go through these circles of fourths or fifths and follow the chord to the next progression. The instrumental chops weren’t necessarily earth shattering, so he’d do it with mental power, you might say.

Well, America kind of forgot all that and went on with its own vision of rock ’n’ roll, whereas the Beatles kept cooking with that in their development. It came out in things like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which had strange ways of changing key and going to the bridge, that kind of thing. But it still ends up sounding effortless.

The thing is, when you’re writing a song, let’s say you’ve got a good verse going and your next move is the bridge or the second verse or whatever. That’s when you have to want it to be a good song—not a throwaway song or in-a-hurry song. So that’s when the labor begins. That’s when you don’t settle for the first thing that occurred to you. You stick with it until it really fits. Sometimes that comes to you in an instant, and other times it doesn’t occur to you. And then one day you’re riding along in the car and you step out into the parking lot in the mall, or maybe you’re brushing your teeth . . . and suddenly that thing you’ve been thinking about for a long time just goes through your brain at a different angle, and you go—of course! And then it’s clear as a bell.

From my John Fogerty feature in Acoustic Guitar's January 2010 issue. Read the full story here.

Jill Sobule on fan financing, 2009

“I feel good personally, because I never really made a cent on a record ever before. You know, people can use this model whether they have 100 fans or 100,000 fans. You don’t have to have a gold- or platinum-selling album to be successful, because you don’t have to worry about the record company selling so much. The first record I sell, that first $10 I sell at a show or online, it’s mine.”

From an Acoustic Guitar magazine story on Jill Sobule's record California Years, which she funded entirely with direct contributions from her fans via Jill's Next Record site. Read the full article here.

Stephen Fearing on commercial songwriting, 2003

"The most interesting sorts of commercial music are the ones that find an emotion and put it out there. It might not be that subtly done; it might be kind of crude. But when a commercial writer finds an emotion and is able to articulate it in such a way that it’s really clear, then everybody gets it and everybody wants to hear it. I think in the singer-songwriter genre, sometimes the intellect takes over a little too much and everybody gets a little too clever. I’m trying to find music that is simple but not simplistic. There’s a skill, but it’s in the background—it’s not the first thing you hear. The first thing you hear is the emotion. That’s what really interests me right now."

From The Complete Singer-Songwriter. The quote comes from an interview with Fearing originally published in Acoustic Guitar July 2003. More on Fearing here.

Here's a really nice video of Fearing with Colin Linden on slide...

Elvis Costello on writing songs for posterity, 2009

JPR Do you aspire for your songs to have a life beyond your performance of them?

COSTELLO Not in every case, because sometimes songs are very particular to your own experience, and it’s hard to imagine even somebody else understanding them. That doesn’t make it wrong to write them, because you hope to place within them something that people recognize. But somebody who has the ambition to make songs universal uses language which is universal, and I don’t. There’s a very, very thin line between universal and cliché, as well, so you try to avoid that.

I write for other people sometimes. But my first thought is not, “Will this song go down into history?” anymore than I care a damn what posterity says about me. I have no concern for my reputation when I’m gone from this place. I mean if they’ll sing my songs and think fondly of me that I did anything good in this world, that’s fine, but I’m not writing to be remembered. I’m writing because I want to write, and I play because that’s what I do. If people get pleasure from it or anything from it at all, then I suppose I must have done something correctly in following my instincts or curiosity or even, as much to say, talents. But I’m not thinking about people kind of gabbing around and giving a brass plaque. That would be a wrong thing to do when you are writing.

From a cover story for Acoustic Guitar, August 2009. Read the full article, plus bonus interview material that didn't appear in the print edition, here.

Bruce Cockburn on his solo guitar style, 2009

"You can make the guitar work really well if all you do is strum chords. It's a good effect, but what I do instead is try to find things for the guitar that complement what's being sung or that help support it. Sometimes it's playing the melody along with myself; at other times it's more of a moving background part. It gives the song a color that it wouldn't otherwise have. If you're playing with a band, the tendency is to let the keyboard or the horns or the lead guitar do stuff like that. But because I write these songs to play them in any context, solo or with any combination of instruments, I tend to hog all the space, play all the parts, and then anybody who plays with me has to fit around that or join me in playing those parts."

From my feature lesson with Bruce Cockburn in the July 2009 issue of Acoustic Guitar. The entire article, including guitar tab examples and several video clips from the interview, is available here. I met up with Cockburn at the offices of Universal Music in NYC in February.

Tommy Emmanuel advice on performing, 2008

"You have to find the courage to walk up onstage and laugh at yourself, to be able to say, 'Guess what, I'm shaking in my boots, but I really want to play for you, and I'm going to do my best.' Keep it that honest. Keep it that casual, that personal, and it'll really help. You've got to believe in your heart that the audience is not the judge and jury. The audience wants you to do well; they're waiting for you to do well. They're not waiting to cut you up."

From "Play Out Now!" my feature in the May 2009 issue of Acoustic Guitar. Available online here.

Bob Weir on singing Jerry Garcia's songs, 2008

From my interview with Weir in the August issue of Acoustic Guitar, available here. (Photo by Anne Hamersky) He was so extraordinarily generous with his time and his insights into the guitar and songwriting. I was lucky enough to meet Jerry for a long interview with David Grisman in 1993, and it was so gratifying for me to have a chance to learn more about Weir's point of view. Here is his closing thought on singing Jerry's songs with RatDog these days...

"I love singing and playing them mostly because they're great songs. I also feel something of a duty to keep them alive and growing. I was there when they were born, watched them grow, and had a hand in their development. I think I know where they live. Every time we play one, it grows, evolves a bit—shows us a new facet. Needless to say, that can be pretty rewarding.

"The music we played was of an intimacy that perhaps can only occur in a long, heavily improvisational relationship. We learned to intuit where each was headed, and then tried to be there with some kind of meaningful counterpoint. That required a lot of careful listening and feeling. After Jerry checked out, he didn't exactly leave: when I'm playing, I can still feel him—" Nah, nah, don't go there… yeah, there, go there." I can still hear the harmonics of what he's up to and react as I always would. I can still feel his sense of character development as the song tells its story. Maybe I should be telling someone this in a quiet room while lying on a couch, but it's real for me."

RIP Utah Phillips

Just received the sad word that this great folksinger, storyteller, and rabble rouser left us over the weekend. Back in 1997, I had a memorable conversation with Phillips and Ani DiFranco about music and politics--the full story is included in my book Rock Troubadours. Phillips had just received a lifetime achievement award from Folk Alliance, and I loved this little fable he told onstage when accepting the honor. Later he retold it to me on the phone, as follows...

"The only problem with being made top folkie is the young ones--they come looking for you.

"I walked through the swinging doors of my local music store, my 1935 Gibson slung low on my hip. And there he was in the street, waiting for me: the kid. He plugged his Ovation guitar into his effects box, leveled it at me, and sprayed me with a burst of highly autobiographical, metaphorical verbiage. I flinched. Slowly I raised my 1935 Gibson and plugged him with the first two verses of 'Red River Valley.' He fell to the ground, stunned by the simplicity of an authorless folk song. I looked at him, lying there in a widening pool of angst. I slowly lowered my 1935 Gibson guitar and muttered under my breath, 'OK, who’s next?' as I turned and stalked into the postmodern deconstructionist night."

Utah, you will be missed.

KT Tunstall on discovering the loop pedal and writing "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," 2007

From my interview with KT Tunstall, just published in Acoustic Guitar (read it here). This is the second in a run of three cover stories I've just done for the magazine (last month was Keller Williams, next up Bob Weir).

"It was after the first record was made. A few months before [the record was due out in the UK in 2004], I was going on a solo tour of coffee shops in Scotland. I'd just made this album and it sounded like a band, and I couldn’t face just going out with a guitar and being that girl in the coffee shop who sings about being dumped. I wanted to do something different. I'd seen this brilliant guy called Son of Dave, who beatboxes or uses a shaker or harmonica and then sings crazy old blues music. It was just brilliant what he did using this loop pedal. And then I saw Jim White, the American singer-songwriter, using it--sometimes with his voice and sometimes with his guitar but never together. My friend helped me work out how to put both of them through the same pedal, just by mixing them in a remote desk.

"I wrote 'Black Horse' while I was trying to learn how to use the pedal. Tom Waits was an early inspiration for me, and I used to listen to a lot of James Brown. I was really envious that these songs were over a constant groove, and singer-songwriter stuff was always reliant on constant chord movement. I really wanted to write a song over a groove that didn't change, and the pedal was obviously perfect for that."

Keller Williams on songwriting, 2008

"I’ve always tried to put myself in the place of an audience member, mainly because I was an audience member for so long. I can totally relate to the songwriters who’ve had pain and are going through hard times, and I can totally relate to how that comes out in their music. But as an audience member, I didn’t want to hear about people’s problems. When I went out I wanted to be entertained, I wanted to be taken away from my problems. So I always try to stay on the lighter side of things.

"I’ve been extremely lucky in my life and my career. A lot of good things have happened to me and have made me extremely happy. So I haven’t really 'lived the blues.' I’ve definitely lived in a bunch of cars and rest areas and truck stops and campgrounds and cheap hotels, but I’ve enjoyed that. What I planned on doing was playing music no matter what the cost. I guess the lightheartedness of my lyrics is just a representation of me and my life."

From a cover story in Acoustic Guitar, June 2008. I met up with Keller in Nashville this winter for the interview. Read the story, and see my video footage of him playing excerpts from songs, at the AG site.

John Sebastian on meeting Lightnin' Hopkins and John Hurt, 2007

The May issue of Acoustic Guitar includes my interview with John Sebastian of Lovin' Spoonful fame, who recently released a nice duo set with David Grisman. The story is posted online. Here Sebastian talks about growing up in the thick of the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early '60s...

"Within maybe two years of this first contact between David [Grisman] and me, at 18, there were two really important things. One was my father did a television show that included Lightnin’ Hopkins. It also included Joan Baez, who was unheard of at the time. I sat under a camera and watched Lightnin’ Hopkins as far away as I’m sitting to you right now, and that knocked my block off. My dad said, 'I saw you leave home that day'--he told me that 20 years later. Lightnin’ needed someone to carry his guitar around and talk to the club owners and just be a New York guy for a Texas guy, so that’s what I did for a year or so.

"John Hurt was also coming to the Gaslight Café about once every six or eight weeks, and I became his occasional guitar carrier and harmonica accompanist. What I really wanted to know about was the guitar. The harmonica had been with me since I was five, and I was getting fluent on the little diatonic. But the guitar was a whole other mountain, and John Hurt was at the top of the mountain. So eventually I began to make friends, and he was a very receptive teacher. He was very different than Lightnin’, whose background had been street singing--you don’t teach somebody a song that’s going to come at you across the street from where you’re trying to make your living. John played guitar at parties and on back porches; his world was more of an agricultural world that had recreation on the weekends. Lightnin’s world was recreation. I learned a lot from both men--it wasn’t all about the fretboard."

Issa (formerly Jane Siberry) on "self-determined pricing" for music downloads, 2007

"The response from people is so positive that it confirms that it's the right way to go, and I'll sink or swim by it. People say, 'I can't believe you trust us,' or 'Thank you for not making us feel like the minute you take off the brakes we’re going to shoplift everything.'"

From my profile of Issa, formerly Jane Siberry, that aired today on NPR's All Things Considered. Listen to the whole piece at the NPR site. She stopped selling physical CDs and introduced pay-as-you-wish pricing on her website back in 2005.

Snuffy Walden on composing for film and TV, 2007

"What I'm trying to get is an emotional resonance that keeps the viewer inside the story. As soon as somebody's more aware of what I'm doing than they are of the story, then I've kind of defeated the producer’s purpose. I want to do something different and special that stands alone, but at the same time if I sabotage the story by expressing myself as an artist, I'm not doing the job that's being asked of me. So it's a fine line, and one that I don't always succeed at, but I try."

From a profile in Acoustic Guitar magazine, February 2008. Read the story here. Snuffy Walden broke into composing for TV 20 years ago on thirtysomething. He currently does the music for Friday Night Lights and In Plain Sight.

Jerry Douglas on stage vs. studio playing, 2002

"The studio is a different place to play music than the stage. You’re not getting feedback from the audience. Every note you play is under a microscope, but the cool thing about it is, you get more chances if you need them. It goes both ways: I know a lot of recording musicians who say, 'Oh, I can’t play in a band in a live situation--I am just not good at it.' And with a lot of road musicians, you get them in the studio and you start hearing things that you didn’t hear live—maybe some rough edges, a lot of noise, things that you just can’t do in the studio.

"It depends on what kind of music you are playing, I guess, but if you are trying to be smooth and you’re trying to fit into a track, you want to really listen to other people and try to play as cleanly as possible. Try to put the best thing on tape that you can with a low noise ratio. And that’s really hard for a lot of people who come in and don’t know how to sit in front of a microphone, who’ve never played in a band situation sitting down or with headphones on. If you want a consistent sound on your instrument or on your vocal, you can’t be jumping around like you’ve got an SM58 in your hand onstage."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Paul Reisler on songwriting, 2007

“In the kind of lives we live, with lots of stuff going on and lots of noise, it’s increasingly difficult to pick out the piccolo from the wind section. What we’re really doing is that kind of selective listening. I always like to say that composing music is merely remembering it before someone else does.”

From an article in Acoustic Guitar, October 2007, offering tips for songwriters. Read the full article here.

Find out more about songwriter and workshop teacher Paul Reisler at his site.

Martin Sexton on making up songs in the studio, 2007

"Most of my songs are just made-up stuff. This whole record, Seeds, is just scratch vocal stuff. I made it up when we were tracking the record, and then I tightened it up to give it a cohesive feel. I didn’t really write these songs, like with a pen and a pad. I wrote them like the John Lennon school of just making them up as I went along....

"Generally I’d have the choruses--I’d have the hook--but the verses wouldn’t be there. I’d say two-thirds of [the writing] was, I’m in front of the microphone recording, and what comes out is what you hear. About one-third was the other side of the brain. Like 'Happy,' there was a funny line in [the scratch vocal]: 'Happy like loving you all night long / Happy like doing you on my dong / Happy like hearing my favorite song on the radio.' Just making it up I came up with those. OK, I like most of it, but I probably shouldn’t say 'doing you on my dong.' So I put something else there. That made it easy--I could fill in the blanks."

From a interview published (minus the dong anecdote) in the October 2007 issue of Acoustic Guitar. That issue also features my guitar-and-voice arrangement of "Nowhere Man," played with a partial capo, and my article on songwriting strategies based on an interview with Paul Reisler (more on that in a later post).

James Taylor on touring, 1991

"It's interesting, you know; if the tour lasts for two months, the rehearsals and the first three weeks of it will be the most rewarding time. Then there comes a point where you are feeling as though you're repeating it. It's such a large show--if it's for an average of 10,000 people a night, and carrying sound and lights and stuff that all need cues, and it's being given in an arena context, then you tend not to change it every night. You tend to want to set it into the form that that tour is going to be, and give them the best that you can every night rather than take a chance on it. If you're playing small clubs you can feel a little bit better about changing it up, but those big places tend to freeze the show. So after about three weeks of having it out, it starts to feel a bit like turning the crank."

From the book Rock Troubadours: Conversations on the Art and Craft of Songwriting.

Wallace Stegner on truth vs. fiction

"You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true."

From an interview with Stegner by Richard Etulain, quoted in the afterword to Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety. I don't normally quote fiction writers in this blog, but his words are equally valid for songwriters. As discussed in my book The Complete Singer-Songwriter, the line between reality and fiction is often blurry in great songs--what matters is the deeper emotional truth.

Jewel on performing, 2001

"My dad was really good at it. He was always the one who would tell stories and make up songs on the spot about audience members. We’d do the four hour-long sets, and we would walk around between sets and talk to everyone. I was really shy and stiff onstage, real self-conscious. And then I went through other phases where I’d been onstage so long, at age 14 or 15, that it would get way too comfortable--you’re too relaxed and you don’t have any respect for it. You’re not entertaining; you’re just like in your living room.

"I think when I started playing my own music, I came into my own, because I get lost in the emotion of the song--I don’t have to think about it at all. I just learned to have a rapport with the audience and talk and tell stories and joke around, and I began to enjoy that as much as singing."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Duncan Sheik on putting Steven Sater's words to music, 2001

"Usually when I write, I write music first and then words later, whenever they come to me. So it was a little bit of an adjustment, but once I got into the process it became very natural. In fact I really enjoyed it, because it becomes this kind of fascinating puzzle, how you can make a line of text work as a musical phrase, and how you can take the structure of the given text and make that work as a musical structure in terms of the whole song. It became its own little adventure each time.”

From an interview for Acoustic Guitar. At the time, Sheik had recently released Phantom Moon, on which he put Steven Sater's poetry to music. They've continued to collaborate since, notably on the current Broadway musical Spring Awakening.

Chris Whitley on songwriting, 2005

“I’m quite a limited musician, so I feel like I have to trust my impulse.... What I’ve been looking for is a way to break down my own rationale, my own way of judging what I do. I don’t want to make something that’s not worth buying, but I want it to feel like a human’s lifted their head right off or something, or opening their self."

From an interview for NPR's All Things Considered (listen to the story here), in the summer before Whitley died of lung cancer. At the time Whitley was mastering the CD Reiter In, released last year by Red Parlor.

Whitley has been very much on my mind lately. Rounder is releasing Dislocation Blues, his CD with Australian guitarist Jeff Lang (look for my review in an upcoming issue of Acoustic Guitar). And I've been performing "Big Sky Country" live. Though I've loved Whitley's music ever since Living with the Law, I never attempted to perform it before. Took me a while to find my own take that didn't feel like a watered-down version of his playing and singing. But now it feels so great to play that song, and the words have taken on a whole new meaning.

"Meet your maker in the big sky country...be kissing time good-bye."

David Wilcox on getting lost on guitar, 2006

"I’ve noticed that when I would go and hear people play, it always sounded better if I didn’t look. I almost wanted to have a little velvet curtain in front of the fretboard, because I’d hear somebody play something so cool, and I’d look up and say, 'Oh, I can see where he’s getting the nine off the open string.' And it would ruin it for me, because if I knew how to play it, it wasn’t mystical anymore. It would sort of dissect it and kill it. So I have always chosen to keep it alive, even if I have to hide the knowledge of it from myself. It’s so much more fun for me to hear and feel a progression than to know what it is."

From a feature Q&A in Acoustic Guitar, April 2007. For more on singer-songwriter David Wilcox, see his site.

Arlo Guthrie on running his own label, 2003

"I remember years ago when I was working with Warners, our agreement was that I could buy my stuff at cost and sell it on the road, those kind of places. Well, their cost was twice as much as what I actually had to pay to manufacture it myself. I said, ‘Well, how is that?’ And they said, ‘Well, we have big buildings filled with secretaries and limousines and lunches and stuff like that.’ Well I didn't have any of that, so the cost of me doing it--it didn't make sense to go with a large label, especially nowadays with the Internet and people can buy and trade and listen to stuff whenever they want worldwide."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Pete Seeger on "We Shall Overcome," 2006

Seeger tells the story of how he, along with Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Zilphia Horton, copyrighted their version of "We Shall Overcome" to prevent it from becoming an "insipid pop song":

"It was my late manager, Harold Leventhal—a very wonderful guy, a close friend—who said, 'Pete, you know if you don’t copyright this, some character out in Hollywood will copyright it, and next thing you know they’ll have a version where it says, "Come on, baby, you and me will overcome tonight." If we want to keep it from being mistreated, you’ve got to copyright it.'

"I said, 'I didn’t write the song. I just arranged the guitar arrangement.' 'That’s good enough,' he said. So Frank, Guy, and also Zilphia Horton, our names are on the copyright. Four white people. At that time we didn’t know the name of Lucille Simmons, who had sung it [when Horton learned it from striking tobacco workers].

We put down that all royalties go the We Shall Overcome Fund. Bernice Reagon, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is the chairman of that fund, and she and others get together every year down in Tennessee and give out several thousand dollars for black music in the South. [Royalties] come in from all over the world. You know it’s sung in every part of India in the local language.

From an Acoustic Guitar interview published in the February issue, with a transcription of Seeger's 12-string guitar rendition of "We Shall Overcome." See photos taken during the interview here.

Pete Seeger's brief history of the guitar, 2006

“Did you ever stop to think of it? The guitar came out of Asia, Spain brought it to Mexico, USA fought a war with Mexico and got Texas and California, and it also got the guitar—and the guitar got us. It was Africans in the South that worked out this African way of playing it, and Merle Travis picked it up—they call it Travis picking, but Merle said, ‘Oh, this is the way black people play the guitar. I just picked it up from them.’ In other words, your thumb gets the basic beat, and your fingers get the offbeat. It’s all around the world now.”

Outtake from a feature published in Acoustic Guitar, February 2007. Included with the interview, conducted last summer at Seeger's home in Beacon, New York, are several photos by JPR, including the one above. More photos are posted here.

Bruce Cockburn on electronica, 2003

"I got interested in electronica because I realized at one point that a lot of what's being done in that scene involves a kind of drone continuum with short-term events happening over the top, and that's pretty much how I've always played the guitar or approached the guitar. I thought I should listen to some of that, and I've discovered a wealth of stuff I like in that world. So then I tried to take that and put it back on the guitar again."

From a Bruce Cockburn profile on NPR's All Things Considered. Listen to the full piece at the NPR site.

Ben Harper on his first guitar, 2001

"I was nine at the oldest when I got my first guitar. I wanted to play, and I kept reaching for my mom’s guitars, which were quite nice--Gibsons and Martins and such. I was like, 'I want a guitar like yours, Mom.' She was like, 'No. I will get you your first guitar.' So she gave me a bottom-feeder nylon-string--very basic, plywood, orange top, brown sides--and I played it and I played it.

"My brothers and I were heavily into BMX, and we were making double-sided ramps that we would jump off one side and land on the other. Out in front of the house, we were getting everything but the kitchen sink to jump over--there was everything from Big Wheels to phonographs that didn't work anymore. I came home from school one day, and there was my guitar in the pile of stuff they were jumping! I just nutted up, 'Nooo!' I grabbed it. It had been good and scuffed, but it was still working. I was like, 'Oh my God!' I was furious.

"I stuck with the nylon-string until I was really seriously into learning an instrument. I was up into my teens when I started saying this is something I might really want to do--a good seven or eight years later. I think that guitar is still kicking around my mom's garage. This family never throws out an instrument."

From an Acoustic Guitar interview.

Joni Mitchell on composing in alternate tunings, 1996

"If you’re only working off what you know, then you can’t grow. It’s only through error that discovery is made, and in order to discover you have to set up some sort of situation with a random element, a strange attractor, using contemporary physics terms. The more I can surprise myself, the more I’ll stay in this business, and the twiddling of the notes is one way to keep the pilgrimage going. You’re constantly pulling the rug out from under yourself, so you don’t get a chance to settle into any kind of formula."

From the book Rock Troubadours.

Janis Ian on writing "At Seventeen," 1997

“I was literally at the kitchen table at my mom’s, and I just started playing that [melody]. I had been listening to a lot of Joao Gilberto, and I’ve always loved Brazilian music--I don’t know why. I was reading an article at the same time, and the article opened up with something like, ‘I learned the truth at 18.’ It was about a girl who had gone through prom week and had learned how valueless it was. And it just started. It took a long time to write--it was a three-month song."

From an Acoustic Guitar interview. More about Janis Ian, whose latest album is Folk Is the New Black, at her site.

John Knowles on choosing a guitar teacher, 2006

"If you’ve bought a guitar and are looking for ways to learn, you think you don’t know anything, but you know why you bought the guitar, you know whose music you admire, you have a dream about what you might be able to do someday. That’s really valuable stuff. So when you go to look for a teacher, see if they’re in fact on the path you’d like to be on. The reason is, the guitar is one word but it is many paths. If you get on the wrong path, the teacher will lead you down it--they know how to do that. The trick is to find out if that person understands your passion, which at the moment is maybe a little fuzzy, but it’s there. Don’t underestimate the value of that."

Outtake from a feature in Guitar Teacher magazine. Find out more about Nashville guitarist John Knowles, longtime collaborator with Chet Atkins, at his site.

Yoko Ono on Lennon and McCartney's songwriting partnership, 2004

“Most people think that John and Paul really wrote the words and the music together. In the beginning probably they did... But by the time I came into the picture [in 1966], John finished most of the songs and went to Paul’s place and said, ‘Well, this is what I wanted. What do you think?’ And vice versa: Paul had songs finished too, and I don’t think there was much to add. I think that Paul respected John and John respected Paul's space.”

From a 25th anniversary tribute to John Lennon, published in Acoustic Guitar. Read the full story here.

Paul Simon on high-string guitar, 1993

"My guitar parts are usually a combination of guitars: a six-string and a high-string [a guitar with the bottom four strings tuned an octave higher than standard]. The high-string adds just a shimmer on top....

"From Simon and Garfunkel through probably every record I've made, I'm playing high-string. On the Rhythm of the Saints tour, most of the guitar work I did was on the high-string. I've got three guitarists in the band who are incredible, so what am I going to play, you know? I've got to basically put an acoustic, shimmery top on top of Ray Phiri's picking, or Vincent Nguini's fingerstyle picking, and the high-string has the percussive sound of a six-string but it has all the overtones of a 12-string, except there's no midrange--you're only on the upper strings. I use it all the time."

From the book Rock Troubadours.

Peter Mulvey on the road, 2006

I had a great time a few months back hitching a ride for a day with rock troubadour Pete Mulvey while he was on tour in upstate New York. The resulting piece, a slice of life on the road, aired last night on NPR's All Things Considered. You can hear the piece at the NPR site. (Don't ask me what the headline "Indie Music Is Retail," as seen on the NPR site, is supposed to mean--those words definitely did not come from me.)

The song heard in the opening, called "Abilene (The Eisenhower Waltz)," can also be heard in full on the Web broadcast All Songs Considered.

More on Peter Mulvey, one of the great voices of the singer-songwriter scene, at his site.

Ani DiFranco on performing, 1997

"Kids come up to me, and they want advice about what’s the magic formula to get the national tours and the distribution. You can see they want, want, want all these things. And I think, Maybe you should just try to get a gig. Maybe you should just get a gig, and maybe you should do that every weekend for ten years, and then see if you’re not on a haphazard national tour that grew organically and if you don’t have some recordings that you made along the way that are distributed through the people you encountered along the way."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

For info on DiFranco's new CD Reprieve, click here.

In other DiFranco news, her against-all-odds project of rescuing a dilapidated church in Buffalo, and turning it into an arts center, is finally wrapping up a decade later; the Church, as it's now called, hosted its first events earlier this year. You can listen to my 2004 report on the in-progress renovation at the NPR site.

Joe Pass on jazz improvisation, 1994

You have a form, but you have accumulated a great deal of ideas or themes and melodies that you have heard, and you can put them in. They're like having a pocketful of music, or a mindful. If you have a good night, they come; if you have a bad night, they don't come. But you have this form that you work with.

I think the only person who's totally creative is a guy who has never played before. He goes boomp [makes a playing motion], and that's creative, because what does he know? Once he's learned the C chord, he's finished creating.

From a roundtable interview with Joe Pass, Pepe Romero, Paco Peña, and Leo Kottke, for Acoustic Guitar magazine

Greg Brown on the songwriting well, 2000

It’s such a subconscious thing. It’s like this little song part of you fills up over time. It’s like a well, and then you just put your dipper in and dip it out. When you’re a songwriter, at least a songwriter like me, you have to work hard on your craft--if you hear something, you want to be able to figure out how to do it. But the songs themselves, I don’t know where they come from or where they’re going or why they picked me. They really are presents, and your job is to receive them and pass them on.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

As I write I'm spinning Greg Brown's new CD The Evening Call (release date August 8). Brown's vocals sound very emotionally charged, in a deep gospel vein, at times bringing to mind Van Morrison...

Paul Simon on his early days in England, 1993

I first went over in 1963, briefly, but I lived in England for most of '64 and '65. The English folk scene was a big influence on my playing. Davey Graham was one of the guys who influenced everybody--he influenced Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, who were probably the leading blues folk players. And Martin Carthy was probably the best player, the most musical of the players. That arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" is sort of how I remembered how he did it. Everybody did "Scarborough Fair," and everybody did "She Moved through the Fair"--those were two really big songs.

From the book Rock Troubadours.

Check out clips and a few full tracks from Surprise, Paul Simon's new collaboration with Brian Eno, at paulsimon.com.

Richie Havens on the DIY music business, 2002

You can actually sell or give or share your music with the whole world. You don’t have to have the middleman. Availability has always been the trick gate that record companies have stood in front of. For most musicians, it’s like, “You can only get through this gate through me.” So then it means, “You have to jump through this hoop first, and then I’ll let you go in.” You don’t really have to go through that anymore. You can make your own Web site and get your music out there. And a lot of people are doing it, and much to their surprise, doing it well. It comes down to this: if the music is good and it has something to say and it has something to offer a listener, then that listener has the wonderful ability to make that choice. He wants it, he gets it.

I can tell you for a fact that in the 1960s, for every hit song or every hit group that made an album, I probably would much rather have the demo they gave the company than the album the company made. It’s still the same. Make your own music. Get the atmosphere around that song that you want. And the people will hear it and will feel it.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

More on Richie Havens.

Cathy Fink on beginning guitar, 2000

If you really want to learn stuff, get together with someone who just learned what you want to learn. They are not so far advanced that it's below them to show you, and usually they are so excited that they just learned something that they love the idea that somebody else wants to find out what it is....

It really works, and we see it happening at the [summer music] camps all the time. Sometimes we’ll specifically pair up one of our beginners with one of our intermediate players, so they can learn a little bit from each other. The intermediate players learns something just from the process of slowing down what they just learned how to play, and then the beginner has somebody just a little bit ahead of them to give them some encouragement.

From the Beginning Guitarist's Handbook.

For more on Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer's CDs and instructional books/videos, for kids and adults, see their home page.

Jewel on the "myth of perfection," 2001

I don’t think it’s my job to perpetuate a myth of perfection as an artist. I really liked reading Charles Bukowski and Anaïs Nin and authors who would let me see their process, let me see how they developed. Because as a young kid, I thought, “OK, this is something I can do. You don’t just start out writing The Grapes of Wrath.” And so I’ve never wanted to look more perfect than I am in the public eye, because why would you want to alienate people from thinking they can do what you do? I think a lot of artists enjoy that gap--they like perpetuating the myth that they are sort of a special chosen race of artistically perfect, fit people. But it’s not true--there are a lot of songs I’ve written that aren’t very good, and all you can do is put out what’s honest and keep going and developing with time and just focus on development more than anything.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Ani DiFranco on American apathy, 2003

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about American apathy, you know just about our inertia, our consumerism as opposed to citizenship, how we can hardly be bothered to vote, most of us, let alone really be politically active or active in our communities. And the more that I do that myself, try and be a participant in democracy, try and help create it in my country, I realize it brings my life so much joy. It makes me all kinds of friends, it gives my life so much meaning, and sometimes I wish...I almost think that people don’t know that. You know it looks like a lot of work to get involved in your community. You have to start going to meetings or donate your time, and people are, I think, not as involved as they could be just because they don’t know that actually it’s a way of improving your own life.

Outtake from a feature on NPR's All Things Considered about on Ani DiFranco's quest to save a historic church in Buffalo. Listen to the story at the NPR site.

Indigo Girls' Amy Ray on exploring guitar tunings, 1997

I just turned to tunings as an alternative, you know, to have fun with it. “Center Stage” [from Indigo Girls] was in open D. I remember hearing the B-52s, that guy Ricky [Wilson]--he died. He played every song they had in a different tuning. He never played anything in standard tuning, and I just remember thinking about that--it was really inspiring. The guitar became an endless spectrum at that point. I’m not a really good guitar player, so to change tunings opens up new worlds for me.

From the book Rock Troubadours.

You can read more thoughts from Amy Ray (including news about the Indigo Girls' deal with Hollywood Records and their collaboration with Mitchell Froom) at her personal Web site.

Patty Larkin on stealing from your favorite songwriters, 2002

It’s a known fact: Amateurs borrow, but masters steal. When someone asks me where my inspiration comes from, I tell them it comes from what I hear and love, from other artists. In the past I have admired certain songwriters so much (Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones, to name two) that I had to ban them from my stereo. Everything I was working on would sound like warmed-over versions of their songs. My process is still influenced by what I hear and like, but now it’s more like osmosis than conscious imitation. My mind pinpoints what is unique or special and files it away somewhere.... I am trying to create the feeling that someone else’s songs give me when I listen to them.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

More on Patty Larkin.

Erin McKeown on balancing business and art, 2002

A mistake I made when I was just starting out was to try to do everything myself. While I am certainly a better businesswoman for understanding how the industry works, I neglected my creative life in the process. You have to have help—so find some good help and trust them. You can’t ever completely check out of the business side of your career (which I have also done at times to devastating effect), but you can definitely find a way to supervise without devoting all your time to it. It is a certain skill in itself to recognize someone who can help you, but if you never try it . . . you’ll just be sitting in Kinko’s a lot.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

More on Erin McKeown.

Ferron on setting songwriting goals, 2005

You know, if I get up today and want to write a hit song today, I’m probably going to be pretty depressed by the time I go to bed. If I get up today and think, I’m going to put two words together in a way that I’ve never seen side by side before and it’ll mean something, chances are I might get something. If that’s why you’re doing it, the possibility for reward is high.

Outtake from a Ferron profile in the February 2006 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.

More on Ferron.

David Grisman on improvisation, 1993

I always think that really the only difference between improvisation and composition is a time factor.... There's a certain amount of what you "improvise" that's part of your shtick--it's the reason you can recognize Charlie Parker, because he is playing the same stuff every time, in a way....

But it's the creative process, and what I'm trying to say is that even though we can say it's improvisation, what we played today isn't totally different from what we played yesterday. I don't think anybody just improvises something that they've never heard before, unless they're somebody like [pianist] Cecil Taylor--I wouldn't really imagine that he knows what he's playing half the time, in other words that he could write it down.

From an interview with David Grisman and Jerry Garcia in the book Rock Troubadours

Peter Mulvey on making it as an indie musician, 2003

I just do the thing you can’t replace with anything else: I play music live, for real, in rooms, with people. That’s what I do with most of my time. I think the reason that [indie music] is thriving is because the more mainstream music scene is getting further and further away from that. So you can move a lot of records by having a video with like a chase with spaceships and stuff, but ultimately, it’s just unsatisfying. It’s like you are whipping up this giant soufflé but it isn’t made of anything, and what we do is just food. That’s it.

From a story on the indie music business for NPR's All Things Considered

More about Peter Mulvey

Suzanne Vega on her first gigs, 1992

I think I used to feel angry at the audience for looking at me, because I was very shy and not very comfortable with myself. And I’ve learned that you can’t do that; if someone is looking at you, if they’ve paid money to see you, then you’d better put on a show and not sit there and be morose.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Billy Bragg on politics and pop, 2005

I think a sense of humor is crucial in any kind of songwriting.... And if you’re writing political songs and playing them on [the BBC hit parade] Top of the Pops—I did “Between the Wars” on Top of the Pops—it’s utterly ridiculous because there you are with Duran Duran and the other bands of the day all dressed up in their finery, and you’re singing this song about the miners’ strike. If you didn’t have a sense of humor and see the ridiculous side of that, I think you’d come across as very very earnest, which I’m not particularly. But by the same token, going to play on Top of the Pops allowed me to get my ideas in everybody’s living room.

Outtake from a feature in the May 2006 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.

Listen to my review of the box set Billy Bragg, Volume 1, on NPR's All Things Considered.

Ben Harper on being the opening act, 1999

That’s been exciting--to be able to bring acoustic-based music to large audiences that aren’t necessarily there to see you. I’ll never forget opening up for P.J. Harvey-—she invited us to tour with her. I’d sit down with an acoustic Weissenborn in front of 12-year-old girls with black eyeliner packed in the front row, looking up at me going, “What in the hell is he playing?” But by the third or fourth song, the heads would start to nod, and then it would be on, you know.

From the book Rock Troubadours

For info on Harper's new double CD, Both Sides of the Gun, click here.

Chris Smither on meeting Bonnie Raitt, 2003

When I was first starting to play [in the '60s], Bonnie Raitt was Dick Waterman's girlfriend, and I didn't even know she played the guitar. She certainly wasn't playing professionally or playing at any venues.

She and Dick moved from Cambridge down to Philadelphia at one point, and I remember staying at their house one time when I was playing in Philadelphia. Bonnie and I were sitting around, and she said, "Well, what are you up to lately?" And that was the first time I ever played her "Love You Like a Man." She said, "You know, you should do some of those songs on slide." I said, "Well, I don’t really play slide." And she said, "Oh, it’s easy." She picked up this guitar and started to play, and it was absolutely mind-boggling. I had no idea that she played at all, anything!

From an Acoustic Guitar profile

Jewel on mixing media, 2001

I really like writing and drawing, and I get bored doing one thing too long. It’s sort of like if you are a farmer and you plant the same crop every year, it depletes the soil, but if you rotate crops it puts nutrients back in the soil, so when you go back to the same crop, it makes it stronger. For me, writing is like that. If I switch from songwriting to poetry, my songwriting gets better in my absence. Whereas if I do it all the time, it just burns me out. I don’t get any new information that makes my songwriting better. Sometimes just doing visual art, concentrating on pure shapes for the sake of shapes, makes my melody writing better. It makes my phrasing stronger.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

James Taylor on the marketing of music, 1991

My musical style developed really in a vacuum. It developed in North Carolina with a lot of time on my hands--empty, open time--and I think that’s true of a lot of musicians who develop their own thing. It takes a lot of time to practice, and it takes a certain amount of alienation to want to do that instead of wanting to do social things. It means that you in some way are cut off. It’s always a funny and, I think, jarring thing when you bring these things to market, when it starts to be something that happens in a public context. It’s a very iffy transition for a lot of players.... The marketing side is taken very seriously and gets a lot of attention and a lot of interest. It’s validated, and it eats your music--it eats it up.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Dave Matthews on the allure of acoustic guitar, 1999

I think in the first place it was a percussive thing. Also it’s lighter and there are less things you need with it, so when I was younger and just traveling around, doing a lot of walking, it was always easier to have an acoustic. So I sort of grew attached to how portable it was. And when you’re 16 and you can play “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, [sings] “It’s not time to make a change . . .” all of a sudden you’re making out.

From the book Rock Troubadours

Songflowerman on teaching music to young kids, 2005

They’re missing the personal aspect of music. Everything’s like a cartoon--they watch so much cartoons. And there’s hardly anybody out there who’s just doing a live show, somebody who’s actually a person and will talk to them and listen to them. I think that’s what’s missing. I think that’s why I wanted to be a music teacher.

From a profile of the music teacher Songflowerman (a.k.a. comedian and opera singer Tom Anzalone), on NPR's All Things Considered

Pete Seeger on learning from Woody Guthrie, 2001

I learned the genius of simplicity. He didn't try and get fancy, he didn't try to show how clever he was. He had done a lot of thinking, and he read voraciously. I remember the time he got hold of Rabelais and got through it all in one or two days, and in the following weeks you could see him trying some of the same stylistic tricks of piling on adjective after adjective. However, he once said, "I must steer clear of Walt Whitman's swimmy waters." I think he decided that if he was going to write songs, he wanted the lines to rhyme, and he liked things to be in meter.

From a Pete Seeger interview in Acoustic Guitar.

For a thrilling, chilling read, check out this transcript of Pete Seeger's interrogation by members of the congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, August 18, 1955.

Ani DiFranco on "the new alternative," 1997

The pop music realm has a huge disrespect for our elders. It’s all about worshipping youth. Youth has a lot of energy, and there’s a lot of important shit that goes down in youth culture, but I don’t think that means you ignore your elders or where you come from. People may constantly want to be inventing the new alternative, which so quickly gets co-opted and turned into just a cookie-cutter formula, with just a slightly more distorted guitar or something, whereas they might be ignoring the fact that they could take the same old tools--an acoustic guitar--and be working in an old, crusty medium like folk music, and do something totally new.

From the book Rock Troubadours

Carol McComb on beginning guitar, 2000

Nobody is born with a guitar in the hand and the golden voice. Even after people have become fairly accomplished musicians, they still have bad days, and they are still capable of missing even the simplest chord.

From the Beginning Guitarist's Handbook

More on teacher, author, songwriter, and performer Carol McComb

Kelly Joe Phelps on songwriting, 2001

It’s a good thing to not pretend that you understand everything. You can write a song or sing a song about something and actually leave it saying, “I don’t know what this is about.” You’re singing about your confusion about it, the fact that it’s a mystery to you. That’s a good thing because that’s a true thing. You don’t understand everything. When you sing about relationships, I don’t know how you can tie it up in the end because so much of it is not understandable.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

More about Kelly Joe Phelps

Why I picked KJP as one of Acoustic Guitar's top artists of the '90s

Joe Henry on John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, 2004

His writing had more to do with his own self discovery than with expressing a very smart idea. There’s a real primitive thing about his lyric writing that makes it more emotional for me, and it ages better as a result. It’s not like clever wordplay; it’s more like biting into an idea and spitting it out. It doesn’t have the same kind of crafted elegance maybe, but it has a lot more pure blood running through it.

From a John Lennon 25th anniversary story in Acoustic Guitar magazine

More about Joe Henry

Beth Orton on mixing acoustic and electronic music, 1999

To me it seems really natural, but maybe that’s part of my upbringing, part of living in today’s society, where you’ve got your organic aligned with the technology that’s around everywhere. It seems that people are doing that in their daily lives all the time: trying to bring together an organic feel and the technology.... But that’s really pretentious!

Chris Whitley on blues and beyond, 2004

I never felt like I could go back and lean on something that’s been done before me. It doesn’t sustain me for very long. I lean back and play some Delta bluesy kind of thing, and I really bore myself after one song. It feels like it’s too clear what you’re supposed to do. And to me, that’s not what blues is about at all.

Leo Kottke on performing, 2002

There’s something about walking onstage that makes you think you’ve got to be good, you’d better not be a disappointment, and you’d better not make a mistake. All of that is horseshit. None of it applies. The opposite is true: you will be a disappointment; you will make mistakes; you will have nights that are just empty at best. And be happy with them.

There’s something automatically there when you walk on, by contract. It’s what “in concert” means. I think it starts before anybody is in the building. It’s something about people knowing that they’re going to meet as strangers or otherwise in a room and share this musical experience. You walk out and the motor’s running, and what you do is just follow that. That’s what’s doing the work. It’s really delusional to think you are what’s happening, because you’re not. You are kind of the excuse, maybe the focal point, or more accurately maybe the trigger. What’s really going on is just that curve, and if you pay attention to that, boy, it’s the most fun on earth.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Read Leo Kottke's notes on sadness, meeting Bill Clinton, and more

Dan Bern on finding a creative refuge, 2001

I’m painting and drawing a lot, writing stories. I don’t know, it all seems to feed each other and balance each other. Music and songs and touring and records--I love it; I can’t imagine a better job in the world, but at the same time, it’s a job and sometimes it feels like one when you are driving 500 miles a day and stopping at the radio station and going to the record store and doing the gig. So it’s nice to have these other things that nobody knows much about. I really don’t have to think about what anybody thinks about it. It’s refreshing. It’s like when I was 15 writing songs--it feels like that.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

More about Dan Bern

Joni Mitchell on recording Blue, 1996

I was opened up. As a matter of fact, we had to close the doors and lock them while I recorded that, because I was in a state of mind that in this culture would be called a nervous breakdown. In pockets of the Orient it would be considered a shamanic conversion. It begins with a sense of isolation and of not knowing anything, which is accompanied by a tremendous panic. Then clairvoyant qualities begin to come in, and you and the world become transparent, so if you’re approached by a person, all their secrets are not closeted. Like a Gypsy, you get too much of a read on who a person is. It makes you see a lot of ugliness in people that you’d rather not know about, and you lie to yourself and say something nice about them to cover it up. It gets very confusing. In that state of mind I was defenseless as a result, stripped down to a position of absolutely no capability of the normal pretension that people have to survive.

From the book Rock Troubadours

Andy Summers of the Police on the guitar industry, 1994

Especially in America, the guitar has become such an industry, and I find it all a bit of a turnoff. When I started, there was nothing; now, there's every possible video, everything you can think of is available. It's what I call the tyranny of possibilities, and I think it must be very confusing to start out with.

Ben Harper on his first guitar, 1999

I was nine at the oldest when I got my first guitar. I wanted to play, and I kept reaching for my mom’s guitars, which were quite nice--Gibsons and Martins and such. I was like, "I want a guitar like yours, Mom." She was like, "No. I will get you your first guitar." So she gave me a bottom-feeder nylon-string--very basic, plywood, orange top, brown sides--and I played it and I played it.

My brothers and I were heavily into BMX, and we were making double-sided ramps that we would jump off one side and land on the other. Out in front of the house, we were getting everything but the kitchen sink to jump over--there was everything from Big Wheels to phonographs that didn't work anymore. I came home from school one day, and there was my guitar in the pile of stuff they were jumping! I just nutted up, “Nooo!” I grabbed it. It had been good and scuffed, but it was still working. I was like, "Oh my God!" I was furious.

Chris Smither on music downloading, 2003

My audience is expanding in two directions, and I think it probably has a lot to do with the access to the music on the Internet and people looking for things, not waiting to be told what they should listen to. When MP3s and Napster copies first came out, I was outraged--I felt like I was being burglarized. But I've come about 180 degrees now and realized that, at least at this level of music, it's helping me. It's helping me a great deal.

I can’t tell you how times I've had people come up to me and say, “Hey man, I downloaded three of your tunes off the Internet. Give me everything you've got.” And they buy all the records. The only people who download and don't buy are the kids, and they never had any money to buy with in the first place. So it doesn't matter. As soon as they have money, they are buying it. So what happens is the kids come to the shows now because they have heard it on the Internet. It's gratifying to see people in their late teens and 20s in my audience.

Outtake from a story on the indie music business for NPR's All Things Considered

David Bromberg on Mick Jagger, folksinger, 1990

My favorite folksinger today, the guy who's most in the blues/folk tradition, who does it best, is Mick Jagger. If you think about it, there's a direct line from Charlie Patton to Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger has recorded quite a few Robert Johnson tunes, two or three anyhow. They don't sound the way they did when Robert Johnson did them, but he did the same thing with them that Robert Johnson did: he took the song and adopted it and made it his own.

John Mayer on blues guitar, 2003

There was a certain time that I got to in my playing where I shut off my ears to superfluous blues playing. The thing about blues is that the minute it becomes self-indulgent, the minute you repeat yourself, the minute you are just doing it because you love doing it, everybody can hear it--and I don’t ever want to hit that point. There’s nothing I’d love more than to solo all night--it would be great. But it doesn’t hold people, and the last thing I want is to have people refuse that trust.

From an Acoustic Guitar magazine cover story

Jerry Garcia on improvisation, 1993

If you've got a recognizable style, that's really your limitations, you know what I mean? Basically, you play what you know how to play. And then within that, sometimes in moments of great clarity, you are able to see stuff that you don't know how to play, but it's close enough to what you do know how to play that you might try for it, and sometimes you might hit it. I tend to do that more often than is probably safe, because I frequently fuck up. Sometimes it works, and if you keep on trying at it, eventually your percentages do improve; but then it just becomes new stuff that you do know how to play.

From the book Rock Troubadours

Chrissie Hynde on learning to write songs, 1995

I can’t say I’m the most disciplined writer. It’s probably like anyone writes a song--where you might know two chords, but every time you pick up your guitar you hum this little melody because you can’t play anything else. And that’s how I started: I was just trying to learn how to play the guitar, but I couldn’t play any songs because I didn’t know how to play, so I’d kind of make up my own tunes. I never really played along with records, and I never played with other guys because they were guys and I was far too shy to pull out my guitar and play barre chords.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Bruce Cockburn on truth telling, 2003

One of the things a songwriter gets to do--I suppose it's true of any artist--is you get to take your inner feelings and fling them out at the world and say, “Here, buy this!” [laughs]. So there's a certain luxury about being a songwriter and being able to do that stuff. But it's really about sharing. On the one hand you can see it as self-indulgent to want to share things like rage or pain, but it's really in the sharing of those things that humanity improves, in a way. The laying out of truth, whatever the truth is, is a positive thing, and other people can benefit from it.

There was a guy in Sweden, for instance, who came up to me one time and told me the song of mine called "All the Diamonds in the World" had prevented him from committing suicide. The last thing I thought about when I was writing it was keeping anybody from committing suicide, including me. It was an expression of something I was feeling. But for this guy, it touched his life in some way that really changed the direction he was going in. That is a very humbling experience, and it's a good example of how the sharing works. I guess it's possible that you could influence somebody for the worse as well, and I feel a certain sense of responsibility to avoid doing that--but not at the expense of telling the truth.

Outtake from Bruce Cockburn profile on NPR's All Things Considered

Utah Phillips on building a career in music, 1997

What’s the work of a poet? To write poetry. What’s the work of an artist? To paint. What’s the work of a singer? To sing.

Fasten totally on the work. Give yourself completely to the work, till you can do it as well as it can be done, and then people will come looking for you. But forget the rest of it. That will happen if you’re completely fixed on the work. It's a superstition, I know; I believe it.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Kelly Joe Phelps on shoes, cars, and wheelbarrows, 2001

A friend of mine who is a great songwriter studied poetry in college, and one of her teachers said when you write, you should be able to pick up the page and shake it and have all this stuff fall off of it. Things, you know, shoes, cars, wheelbarrows, windows, cigarettes, ashtrays, whatever--things should be in there. When you put those kinds of things in, it makes a better picture; there’s more stuff to grab onto. The message itself might be abstract--you may not even understand in the end what the heck the song is about, but there is a lot of stuff you have taken away and put in your pocket. Whereas with other songs, you can follow it completely, one word after the other, but by the time you get done, it’s just a piece of stale bread.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Peter Mulvey on finding your voice, 1999

When I was 19, I just wanted to be Leo Kottke. But the thing is, I don’t have either the strength or the speed and never will. And also I’m not him. There’s that glaring flaw, that gaping hole in the plan, that I am not, in fact, Leo Kottke.

I think all you do as an artist is you hear things that you think are cool, and you go out and you try to do them and you fail. And that failure produces your own art--hallelujah.

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

Robyn Hitchcock on John Lennon, 2004

Lennon is now my favorite rock singer of all time. He could sing those planing Beach Boys druggy ballads like "Sun King," and then he could do really harsh stuff like "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey." He had that voice that would just connect with you. I suppose Bob Dylan’s does too--they’re both talented men with big noses who had a cruel streak but could also be very funny and very tender.

Outtake from John Lennon cover story in Acoustic Guitar magazine