Top 22 J. D. Souther Quotes

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.

I have a wonderful piano that I really love: a handmade Yamaha grand. Sometimes I’m sitting there, and it sounds so good that I find some little melody or a phrase that leads me into a song, but probably more often than not, I actually grab a notebook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the ’80s, I got tired of the rat race. It was a terrible time for music. I wasn’t part of that whole MTV craze. I did ‘Go Ahead and Rain,’ which was Madeleine Stowe’s first bit, but felt no connection to it. I went many years where I didn’t have to work.

Think back to the early rock n’ roll records, and the average record length in the ’50s – and well into the ’60s – was two and a half minutes. It’s very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.

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.

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.

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.

I’m always writing something. There’s always some structure sitting around someplace. There’s always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It’s never not buzzing around me all the time. I’m always doing it.

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!

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.

I was never much of a club guy. Even when I was in New York in the early eighties, I never was once in Studio 54. It was too noisy. My version of those years mostly took place at my house.

A song of mine called ‘I’ll Take Care of You’ was on that ‘Wide Open Spaces’ Dixie Chicks album.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of ‘Prisoner In Disguise’ when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

There’s no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.

Mike Campbell and Don Henley and I wrote ‘The Heart of the Matter,’ which was a huge hit for Don.

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.

I’m not a great band member; I’m more of a band leader.

I didn’t even respect singers until I heard Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.