“I only write with purpose.”
At the same time, I put elements of my roots on this record that I never have before.
It’s a nice reintroduction of myself to me and to my audience.
Credit: Wicked Cool/Big Machine/UMe
Playing these songs for the first time in 20 years was quite a revelation.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this stuff is not like anything else.
It’s really something different.
It’s some sort of strange hybrid that I developed through the years.
I realized, “Wow, I kind of created my own genre here.”
I went back to that thing which I thought was most uniquely me.
There’s very little room for improvisation, and I found that discipline fascinating.
It gave me even more of an appreciation for Southside Johnny.
Bruce had that riff, and that’s basically how I collaborate.
Looking back, I wish me and Bruce had done more together, honestly.
It was just a song here, a song there, whatever we needed at the time.
In the early days, both me and Bruce kind of did the same job.
We didn’t exactly have that co-dependency that makes for great songwriting teams.
I talked to Bruce about this.
I was like, “You’re not going to go out every year, right?
Whenever you don’t go out, I’ll go out from now on.”
It’s really been that way even with Bruce’s stuff.
So, we work for ourselves.
We want to satisfy our own artistic ambitions, and then you hope the world likes it.
