Got a vaccine shot in the arm, for shingles. Hurts a lot in my shoulder like my brothers’ hiding around the corner when I was ten, ready with a surprise smack hard in the quad of my leg. A regular game between four males but when you’re the smallest you need better strategies for risks. Is it why I went into songwriting? When I got a deal with the German label Glitterhouse, in the 90s, (thanks Don Christensen) I totally misunderstood the situation. They signed me because of City of Wood, my third record. A solo-ish guitar and voice recording. They arranged a tour of 6 countries. It was amazing. A driver, and two other artists on the bill, hotels every night. But after I realized most of them didn’t speak English with fluency, I concluded they wouldn’t understand the nuance of what I sung about lyrically. I brought a drummer along with me so we could make bouncier sounding music and be more “entertaining”. I didn’t understand that they didn’t give a shit about that. The texture of acoustic guitar bluesy singing was good enough. I used to think the Beatles were such smart interesting artists and that that was why they were successful because they were so adventurous. But that wasn’t why, that was just an aspect of what they did in their situation that just happened to also be amazing. Success itself was largely about fashion, it always is. I remember an interview where they asked Greg and Jim what made us successful and they answered their songwriting. Probably good that journalists didn’t ask my opinion. I noticed nobody cared about their songwriting or anything else the way everyone did after Try was on high rotation at Much Music. Seemed success was about being on TV, was about whether you could afford to be the product frequently advertised. What better answer as to why you sing a song in your head when you don’t like that song? Is it because it was written so well… or was the advertising targeted to someone like you and it worked?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"