Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.
Musically, I would never run dry. Any time I sit down to an instrument, I could write a song.
Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.
In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.
I hang my laundry on the line when I write.
The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.
Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.
I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.
Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.