Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.

I think we've always been better live.

We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.

Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.

I loved Mal Evans holding one note down on You Won't See Me from Rubber Soul.

Fortunately, as we all know, it's impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I'm playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there's Howie. Tom's in the middle and we're playing all this stuff I love. It's great.

If you call attention to yourself at the expense of the song, that's the cardinal sin.

Besides, I'm fairly incompetent. I can't play that fast.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

I loved working with Bob Dylan.

Sometimes you work with somebody you've never heard of because you just feel like working.

Working with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson takes you up another level.

I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes.

I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.

Bob Dylan's not a hype and a haircut: he's the real thing.

I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.

I quit college and neglected to tell my dad.

I think I drift toward sad love songs.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.

I've always written songs since I was a kid - always.

In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.

What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It's never about you stepping out and showing you can play something fancy.

Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.

I started recording because I was always complaining about the records that I was getting of my songs. At least if I did them and messed them up, I wouldn't have anyone else to blame.

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.

All my songs were solo voices. Just me singing. In fact, that was the gimmick - no gimmick. Just singing straight with not too much background.

It's part of the calling to at least do a few songs in the show that give people some hope. There's so much hurt in this world and... music is such a great healing balm and a great way to forget your troubles.

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

When I heard his first songs, Dylan was answering certain questions that I had all my life been asking myself.

The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs - I really wanted to make a record like that.

Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.

This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish.

All my songs are where I am.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

We would turn everything into songs in those days.

Sometimes, but the year I lived in France I started to write songs.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

I had deeper, more reflective songs on the first album.

I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.

The process depends on the situation, and I don't think there are any two songs that have gone exactly the same way... well, actually, that's not true.

I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.