My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. ↗
I picked all the tunes before I went to Memphis, and the band was all set. Willie Mitchell is an arranger like I am, and he let me do what I had to do. ↗
Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth! ↗
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed. ↗