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1. I think I’m great. I mean, I might as well come out and say it. Like most people, I have an ego and I’m in show business, so you have to have kind of a healthy, conflagrated ego to a degree. On the other hand, I’m consumed, like a lot of people, with self-doubt and loathing and guilt.
2. I don’t think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
3. When you make a record, you listen to it literally hundreds of times. When it’s done and you can’t do anything else, I never listen to my records.
4. When a parent dies, the whole house of cards comes down.
5. I had a hip replacement a couple of years ago. I have a song about that. And why wouldn’t you? It strikes me that that was a huge event. It’s kind of funny and horrible and interesting, so why wouldn’t one write about that?
6. My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I’m not too tuned in to country music. I don’t know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!
7. When my mother died, and when my father died, it’s big. Our parents are giants; they’re titans of our lives, so of course it’s going to be a big deal.
8. If I had five minutes to live, I don’t think I’d be bothered singing a song. I’d be dead, so it won’t really matter. I’d have a glass of wine and a cigarette.
9. I’m always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
10. When you start your career, you have to figure out a way to separate yourself from the pack. So I went for a kind of preppy, psycho-killer look: I had short hair, grey flannel pants, and a button-down shirt. I think it worked, because nobody else was looking that way at that time.
11. When you start performing, you realize that you have to separate yourself from the pack. So I would never wear bell-bottoms, which everybody else was wearing. I had short hair — and to see a 21-year-old guy walk onstage without longish hair was, in itself, weird. Every entertainer needs a shtick.
12. The big things in the average person’s life are the romances that they have — and then the destruction and loss of them. Parents, siblings, children, the death of parents, family tension… these are monumental things. They struck me as being interesting to write about. I didn’t have a very exotic life, but all this stuff happened to me.
13. I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late ’60s at Carnegie Mellon.
14. As it turns out, three of my four kids are professional singers. And they’re really interesting, good singers.
15. Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it’s blue, and there’s palm trees; it’s a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.
16. I wasn’t in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.
17. I was a smoker for years. Occasionally I slip and have a cigarette. Remarkably, my voice has held up. I’m grateful, obviously. But I don’t gargle with honey and ground-up bird eggs. I have no secrets.
18. I’ve been writing about growing old for some time, really from the beginning of my career. It’s something I’m apparently hung up about and now that I am old, hopefully I speak about it with some authority.
19. I think I’m the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.
20. It’s nice when people say, ‘God, I’ve been listening to you since 1963 or 1985, or whatever.’ I appreciate anybody who goes out and buys music these days.