First of all, I’ve been having a wonderful run of luck with cover albums, songs I didn’t write. I had five pop cover albums and two Christmas albums, and they were all very successful.
The melody seems to have gone to the country. The country music seems to still have melody and interesting lyrics. But pop music, you’ve got to really listen hard to somebody who’s doing a good melody and a good lyric.
Fame is always a shock to the system; there’s no school to go to, there are no books to read, and when it hits you, it’s a surprise. You could be working for 10, 20 years and when it finally hits you, you get knocked down.
I stay glued to my piano and my work. I don’t look up. I write, I produce, I do the next project, I do my job. I don’t look up, and I try to be kind. I try to be kind to people. That’s what I do.
I keep reading about people who want to be famous – it’s not that they want to be great songwriters or great actors, they want to be celebrities. That is scary because you can be famous doing some really stupid things.
