There’s a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.
After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That’s when you feel the passage of time is occurring.
If you can’t create physical life, you find a life force. If that’s in music, that’s in music. I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it. And I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit.
For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don’t. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the backstory.
There are two ways to wake up. You can wake up thinking about what you know, or you wake up thinking and saying ‘What can I learn?.’ That’s a very different approach.
The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don’t believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don’t get confused.
