How are you doing? You contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic. I’m fine. It was way back at the beginning, more than a year ago now, March 2020. I was well again really soon. It wasn’t that bad of a case, so I was on the mend within a couple weeks. What inspired the title, Downhill From Everywhere? Oceanographer Captain CharlesMoore, who said, “The ocean is downhill from everywhere.” He was pointing out that everything that humanity produces and everything that we do winds up in the ocean. Is it easier or more difficult to write songs now in your 70s? It’s harder to write something I like. But it’s always been hard, so I don’t know. I have it pretty easy, frankly. I’ve got a room full of instruments, a wonderful studio and great players to play with. The thing is, not just anything will do. I don’t crank out songs; I don’t make lots of records. I just do the stuff that matters to me, and I hold myself to a pretty high standard because I never want to repeat myself. Is there a message in this music? There are issues in each of these songs that inspired me to write the songs, or subjects, if not issues. But, yeah, I think that certainly there’s a message in most of them. In the past at times, “message” has been a word that has put me on guard. I know that people don’t want to be lectured or preached to, so I’m just always worried about the word message. Like the famous remark by SamuelGoldwyn, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, saying, “If you have a message, try Western Union.” What he meant was he wasn’t going to let anybody make any movies that had any kind of social message in them. “Human Touch” is very timely, maybe it’s because it speaks to the 15-month quarantine with no hugs. There’s always a need for connection. Everything about our lives is about that. I like that song a lot too. It was written as the end credits for a film. I was invited into the song by two other very fine songwriters named LeslieMendelson and SteveMcEwan. So you had to hear the song at the end of having seen a movie that was about a specific story and issue, but you can’t just restate the movie. You have to go deeper and touch on the thing that the movie has touched upon. That would be connection. As a matter of fact, the lines “Reaching out for some connection or maybe it’s just their own reflection” resonated with the universal thing. You want to be connected but with something that you feel akin to and someone who you feel akin to. What was the name of the movie? It was for a documentary film called 5B, the first ward in a hospital in the United States that was dedicated to treating patients with AIDS. It was in San Francisco. The film was really about the courageous doctors and nurses who treated these AIDS patients in the beginning when no one even knew how the disease was transmitted. It’s a very moving story. It didn’t get a super-wide release, but it’s a great film. The release of Downhill From Everywhere was delayed by the pandemic. Did that give you time to rethink things, and if so, what changes did you make? It was just that I just had the chance to hear what I had done. A lot of it was done. It was not finished, because it wasn’t mixed, but a lot of it was recorded when the pandemic hit. And so I found myself not listening to any of it for quite a while. Then reviewing it. That gives you a really great sense of perspective. It had a lot to do with the bass and the drums. Specifically, I went back in and I changed some drums; another song I changed the bass part. As a songwriter, I’m pretty happy when the song’s done, when the song has all its lyrics. Usually, I’m still writing the lyrics while the track is being done, so sometimes I really forget to make the record. The record is more or less a record of having made the song, but there are things that you hear in retrospect. That’s always been the case. You always go out on the road after the record’s out and the song continues to develop, and you hear things in it. As a matter of fact, I was playing yesterday with two of my bandmates—we’re doing a virtual performance for a group that’s doing a fundraiser. So there’s a song that I thought I’d try with them just playing with organ, acoustic guitar and electric guitar. The question was whether or not this very rhythmical song of mine could be played that way, whether I could hold down the part on the acoustic guitar. I found that if I changed one chord, it made it really easy to play this thing. If I had realized that when we were making the record, the song would have opened up in a completely different way. This is a song that was made 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, the request was to send a song: “We’re reviewing your new album, but send us an older song that we can play on our program.” So here it is 20 years later, and I realized, if you take that chord out and just don’t play that there, this whole thing flows completely different and opens up into a different kind of phrasing. It liberates the song. I’m kind of excited about that. We’re going to cut that that way. We’re also just getting ready for a year or two of touring by playing some of the songs and renovating in a way, revisiting the arrangements. But to say one more thing about these virtual recordings, it’s really been a blast to record them in a stripped-down way because it highlights the songwriting; you hear the words more intensely. And at the same time, we know these songs from playing them in lots of different venues and different configurations, so it’s really great to see what happens if you make it just one or two people. Do you remember the first time you heard a song of yours on the radio, what that feeling was like? Completely surreal. A friend of mine had picked me up at the airport. I had been off touring. I was playing acoustically, solo stuff. I had never played with a band until I made my first record. So I made this record and then I had to wait a while for it to come out, so I just went back to playing by myself. I came back to town, and she said, “Watch this.” And she turned on the radio and I was on it. Like magic. She flipped through the dial and there it was. That was wild. It’s always a little bit instructive. In that case, it was just positively surreal. But when I hear songs of mine where I wasn’t expecting, maybe in a passing car or in a store somewhere, one time I heard one of my songs in a mattress store and I thought, Oh, that’s not good. You mentioned you’re getting ready to tour. Is your tour with James Taylor back on? It’s been on hold while we figure out how to go about it safely. So it’s been postponed a couple of times now. Initially, we were just moving the first legs around to the back and postponing it a few months. Then we decided to postpone the beginning for a whole year. Now it’s been postponed another few months. Right now, it’s scheduled to start at the end of July. The tour sold really well, and people have hung onto the tickets. Very few people needed to get their money back. We’re like a placeholder. I know that when we do this it will be safe, and people will be secure in going to a concert. But, also, I know that when we do it, it’s just going to be the most joyous thing… Well, it was already going to be the most joyous tour for me. I love James’ music. I love his band, and his songs have been in my head for most of my life. I got to do a couple gigs with him a few years ago. It was just an incredible experience. Something happens. You can look at it in the abstract: I want to be in a group, I want to be in a crowd. Really, when it comes down to it when you’re there to see the music, see the musician or hear the music of someone you love, it’s a joyous thing. That’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m looking forward to being back in that space with my band. What’s an amazing concert experience that you’ve had? One of the most amazing experiences I ever had in a concert was watching PeterGabriel at the Los Angeles Forum. And hearing him. He was the first to do that thing where you fall backwards into the crowd, and they would pass him around. He did that and it was like receiving communion or something. It was so incredibly elevating to see him being passed around from person to person. A lot of people have done it since. But it was joyous and there was a kind of solemn beauty in the act of the trust. It was something I’d never seen done. I don’t know if he’d done it before that, but it was something that was absolutely new. There was something about that. It created a bond between everybody in the audience. When we left that building, people didn’t even want to get in their cars. People were milling around in the parking lot and people were so high. I’ve been in a lot of great music experiences. I need to see live music and I go see people play live as much as possible. So Peter Gabriel was one, but there are also nights in little clubs where the intimacy and the musicianship is just so powerful and so immediate. There’s a club in Los Angeles that only holds about 100 people or so, and that’s one of my favorite places to go. It’s called the Largo. I really miss those shows. It doesn’t have to be like a big thing, a spectacular thing like in an arena. Very often it’s something really small and intimate. You have 50-plus years as a musician. How do you measure success? You measure it in terms of how much you’re able to continue to pursue your goals and how well you’re able to prioritize doing that. I measure my success in terms of my freedom to be creative, not by money. Money plays a role in that, of course, being secure. But it’s never been the object for me. You have multiple Grammy award nominations, you’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but was there something special in that the Library of Congress selected your album Late for the Sky for the National Recording Registry? It was a singular experience for me. It put things in a historical perspective. I remember hearing the term disposable music really early, like in the mid-’70s sometime. Rock ’n’ roll was disposable music. I thought, It is? I didn’t know that. I never thought of it. To me, rock ’n’ roll, especially the best of it, is indelible and will last forever. That’s what I aspired to do, to write a song that would still be relevant years later. I didn’t think about it that much, but I thought all the music that I listened to, so much of it was folk music that I was listening to 50 years after it had been recorded. The blues music from the ’20s and the ’30s, I grew up on Dixieland jazz, my father had a huge Dixieland collection, and also gypsy jazz, DjangoReinhardt. But LouisArmstrong, EllaFitzgerald, this stuff he was listening to with such devotion so many years later, it just never occurred to me that whatever became popular would be popular for the time it was on the charts and then disappear. The best of it stays with us. And then, of course, the flip side of that is that it’s dated. So, Late for the Sky, the recording is somewhat dated. Not only in the way it sounds, but in the way I sang in those days. I really came face-to-face with that. When I re-release stuff, or if I have to remaster it for the modern technology, the temptation is to try to do things to accentuate the bass or the top end, or to make it more competitive by today’s standards. Of course, if you do that you can’t really do it without really messing with the sonic composition of the song. It’s been tried. Almost every engineer I know can’t really resist trying to make it sound a little bit tougher and better. And if you do that, all you do is accentuate its faults, of which there are many. And I hear them. I hear them like, “Why am I holding that note that long, what’s wrong with me?” But pleasantly for me, I also hear all over again what was going on then, what I was doing in my life, and what mattered to me. These albums, that one and my first album, held up. Interestingly, they’re better than I remember them being. Although I think Late for the Sky was the first album I still liked when I released it. Because you finish them up and you wait for a while. There are things about releasing an album that take a little time. It’s not released even in the same year you make it sometimes. You make it and then it’s a half a year or a year before it comes out. So you’ve had time to hear everything that’s wrong with it. Usually for me, I hear that even before the thing’s out. So it was very nice to be recognized in that way and to have it put in that perspective. Next, The 26 Biggest Hit Songs of 1970
