Jim Messina Quotations

We're doing exactly what the Republicans don't want: getting more people involved in our democracy. Giving more Americans a voice in their future.

We need each and every one of you to commit to vote for Barack Obama today!

One of our canvassers was walking down a driveway last night when he came upon two bears, between a year or two weighing 150 to 180 pounds,

My experience with Buffalo Springfield was that they did not rehearse.

I didn't want my event to take away from his charity, ... We bought something like $3,000 worth of tickets for his event and I offered to play a few songs with him if he wanted.

From Kenny's perspective, when he came into Loggins and Messina, he had been expecting a solo career, but it turned out to be a duo,

Kenny and I, and I'm very glad we did this, decided that if we were going to work together we weren't going to complicate it by letting management push us into putting out a new record,

It is a lot cheaper to spend eight hours in a rehearsal hall than in a recording studio.

I was concerned with him losing attendance, because of the conflict of me doing my show, ... So I told him I would lend my name to the benefit, so we could advertise it as 'Kenny Loggins with Jim Messina Sitting In.'

I think it was just the right moment, ... Kenny was open to it and wanted to embrace old friendships. The door was open.

I think that was very good for both of us, ... I think Kenny got to see how people reacted to us, and also he could hear, as could I, a sound that we hadn't heard in 30 years.

We recorded several of Kenny's songs in the living room of my home.

We could now make intelligent, grown-up decisions to keep us from falling into the same trap, ... We're interacting more as friends and companions. We share the same bus, sometimes the same dressing room, and have brought our kids out to share the silliness.

When Kenny first came to me, I think he was thinking of making a nice little folk record, but in my opinion, folk music had come to an end and I felt he needed to go to the next step, the next generation.

What was supposed to be two hours a night turned into four hours. The audience was so excited, so inspired and mesmerized. I thought: 'This is what it's all about. This is the true essence of what performance is supposed to be.' That's why I decided to do this tour,

We've put the word out for a lot of our friends in Hawaii, but we're not going to spoil the surprise,

You get all the girls, ... Maybe I can get all the attention.

At that time, I was signed to Columbia Records as an Independent Producer. I spent many weeks forming, auditioning, rehearsing and recording demos for Kenny, who was finally signed to Columbia Records.

The studying led me to the fact that I really am a songwriter and music is what I love to do, ... I also understood the patterns in my life and discovered that I wasn't so unique. I was very much like many other people who had a choice to get well and leave a narcissistic world or continue to struggle with it.

This election isn't about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. It's about you. The other guys write $10 million checks and make $10,000 bets. But we've bet this campaign on you.

It's been great from the start, but I'm realizing that the music has just gotten tighter the more we play together,

It was an opportunity to spend some time together, have some fun to create some music and an opportunity for Kenny and me to sit down and do some things we wanted to do, ... The time was right and here we are.

That set it for me that it was possible to capture an audience,

I realized how quickly you could eat up a lot of time and money if you weren't prepared.

I realized being together was a bigger thing than any of us alone. So that clinched it for me. That made me want to explore it further.

Because Kenny mainly wrote folk songs, I was giving him some of my songs to see if we could get more of an edge, get more rock with it, and also rearranging some of his tunes to have different flavors other than folk stuff, ... So I had gotten a little more involved than I would have preferred to have, and also I realized that I couldn't just send him out to the world, that I should be there (too).

I asked Kenny to sit in. Richie Furay, Rusty Young and Paul Cotton (from Poco) were there, too.