J. D. Souther Quotes
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Dixie Chicks surprised me with a beautiful three-part harmony version of 'I'll Take Care of You.' And Don Henley's performance of 'The Heart of the Matter' still just slays me every time I hear it.
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The more I go on in this career of making albums, writing songs and playing music, the more I think of each album as a movie. I really wanted to make a film, but making a film is much more expensive than making a record.
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I never even held a guitar until I was 23 and living in California, but then loved it. I'm really not an accomplished instrumentalist. Maybe that has something to do with why I write and sing.
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My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.
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A song of mine called 'I'll Take Care of You' was on that 'Wide Open Spaces' Dixie Chicks album.
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If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.
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There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.
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My secret heroes were Joe Morello, Ray Charles - who is, in my opinion, the most dominant figure in musical history in the 21st century - and Frank Sinatra. Those are my heroes. And as a writer, when Bob Dylan came along, it was a miracle because he gave us all permission to say anything!
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I didn't even respect singers until I heard Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.
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I think I've been influenced by everything I've ever heard. The first thing I ever heard was my grandma, who was an opera singer. The first song I ever learned was the 'Nessun Dorma' from Puccini's 'Turandot.' My father was a big band singer, so I used to hear him walking around the house singing standards all the time.
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I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.
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I love Massachusetts for a number of reasons. I once loved a magical girl who lived in a magnificently converted barn, a half-hour or so from Boston. I love your winters. I love the snow.
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Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote 'The Heart of the Matter,' which was a huge hit for Don.
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When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to live in the Hollywood Hills, behind Grauman's Theater, and I'd always hit the matinees.
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Stand-up comedians say that anyone in the audience can be funny, but people paid to see us because we're just a little bit funnier. In the same way, I think anybody can play music - in fact, I think everyone has music in them, but some of us can do it a little better.
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I save everything. I have these carefully organized file boxes. Somewhere in there is a section of the 'New York Times' where I wrote 'The Border Guard' in the margin.
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I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.
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I'm not a great band member; I'm more of a band leader.
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I never fully understand all the drama and machinations within the Eagles.
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I had a jazz trio, a rock n' roll band, and I played drums in junior high, high school, college, big bands, and I played timpani in the symphony. I am a drummer. It's the one instrument I actually play pretty well. It's just hard to carry on your back.
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I don't think I ever thought of growing up to be anything other than a musician. There really wasn't a plan B. Well, a kind of a distant plan B was to be a Formula One driver, but there really wasn't an entry point.
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I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write.
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I had given myself a sort of early retirement when I left the scene in 1985. All of the people in my family worked until they dropped, including my father. I decided to take a little time to enjoy life. I traveled, built my dream house, rescued a few dogs. My return to music, and acting, was deliberate, part of my musical arc.
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I'm a huge Robert Altman fan and don't take issue with his filmmaking, as eccentric as it is. But I just think 'Nashville' was a world he didn't know.