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Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly - they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.
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Very often it's really inconvenient - who you fall in love with. You can't really control it.
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I've also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament - it was about 1982 - they called it Peace Sunday.
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So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let's face it.
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I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.
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I'm sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.
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I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.
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I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight.
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I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.
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The biggest influence? I've had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
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That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.
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I never was a very good singer.
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English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.
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No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
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We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.
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I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.
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I get some heat for what English people call 'overproduction.' I don't think my older stuff was overproduced, but I do think that sound has dated.
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People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire.
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I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.
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So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.
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I'm gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender. Where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender. And believe in whatever may lie in those things that money can buy, though true love could have been a contender
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As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.
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Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, I'd like to study piano.
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If someone said, 'You can go live in this little town in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks and all you've got to do is sing for us,' I would do that. That's more exciting to me than the prospect of going on some national tour, where you're going to play arenas or sheds every night, because of the crushing repetition of that kind of line.