“Sometimes you work with somebody you’ve never heard of because you just feel like working.”

Fortunately, as we all know, it’s impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.

I think we’ve always been better live.

I think I drift toward sad love songs.

I’m playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there’s Howie. Tom’s in the middle and we’re playing all this stuff I love. It’s great.

If you call attention to yourself at the expense of the song, that’s the cardinal sin.

We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it’s probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it’s hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.

Working with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson takes you up another level.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that’s great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don’t want to get in the way of the song.

I loved working with Bob Dylan.

There is nothing to do except to be just who you are. You have the right to feel beautiful and enjoy it.

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you’re an owner. Faith is at its best when it’s that way too. It’s best lived when it’s owned.

Love is like air we can’t see it but feel it.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

We don’t feel constrained by what we did in the past.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

It’s not simply what we feel, but what we feed, that determines what we do and how we live.

At least I’m not playing other people for a change. It’s a very odd place to be… I feel I’m an actress who sings a bit.