There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.
— John Prine
I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n' roll lifestyle.
I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you're not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you.
When I'm making my own record, it's real work for me.
I never fit in with straight country. I never really fit in with rock n' roll. I've always been somewhere in between all this stuff.
You get to thinking that because you've written 50 or 100 songs, you think maybe you know how to do it. But when they're not coming along, you're just as in the dark as you ever were. When they're coming along, there's nothing to it. Sometimes it's so easy, it's like you're a court stenographer.
Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.
I wrote most of 'Hello in There' in a relay box, which looks like a mail box, only bigger. Sometimes, it was so cold and windy on my mail route that I'd go inside the relay box and eat a sandwich, just to get away from the wind. I remember working on 'Hello in There' inside the relay box.
If you listen to people talk, when people actually talk, they talk in melodies. If they get angry, their voice rises, and it's more of a staccato thing. When they ask for something, they're real sweet. It's all music.
I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.
I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.
I always feel like every song is the last song.
Kris Kristofferson and Steve Goodman were the two most unselfish people I ever met.
Soon as I could play one guitar chord and laid my ear upon that wood, I was gone. My soul was sold. Music was everything from then on.
'The Ways of a Woman in Love' is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl's house and wishing he was the one in her arms.
My first Grammy nomination? I was 24 - I was nominated for best new artist of the year.
I think of the Bible as an unauthorized biography.
I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.
The Songwriters Hall of fame, that's the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.
I can't really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that's man-made. I'm a writer, too; that's how I look at the Bible. Like, 'I could've written a better version than that,' you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.
If some part of the review is true, those are the ones that sting.
I don't concern myself with where I fit in. I just keep my head down and keep doing whatever it is I'm going.
Even when I was coming up in the singer-songwriter ranks during the early '70s, I thought that people who were stylists and stuff shoulda still been up on the pedestal. I mean, it's fine to recognize people who write songs, but it kinda got out of hand, you know?
I think the best duets are those where there's a dialogue back and forth, and then the two singers go into a thing together.
When I was a mailman, writing songs was my escape from the regular world, and now writing songs is my job. And I've always been one to avoid my job.
I can blame a lot of things for not writing songs, but cancer isn't one of them.
In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.
I try to write about things that actually happened so that I know it's real before I put it down on paper.
As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.
I was a mailman walking in the snow six days a week, 12-hour days. Every two weeks, I'd get a check for $228.
My music has been called so many different things over the years. I figure as long as it's selling, call it what you want.
People thought we were crazy for starting a record company. They really thought I was shooting myself in the foot.
I'd rather get a hot dog or a doughnut than write a song.
It doesn't hit you until you pull up to the hospital, and you see 'cancer' in big letters, and you're the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.
I was kind of shy as a lad, and a lot of things that made me laugh, I found, did not make other people laugh.
I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people's songs.
There's only two things. There's life, and there's death.
I don't like to see Christmas trees torn down.
I think it shows when you have to work too hard on a song.
All the girls over there in Ireland are well versed in American country music. Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline are like king and queen over there.
In the Army, I was very good at avoiding my job!
I'm not good at remembering things, in general.
Writing songs used to be my hobby; it used to be my getaway.
I didn't hear anybody talking about the plight of a soldier coming back home and what he'd gone through. That was why I wrote about that stuff. If somebody else had done it, I probably wouldn't have touched the subject.
I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.
I could never teach a class on songwriting. I'd tell them to goof off and find a good hideout.
You know that first love that leaves you? You never forget that, especially if you're a songwriter. I must have gotten nine songs out of that girl.
The only time I ever think about getting old is when I look in the mirror. I feel pretty good about it, actually.
To tell you the truth, the nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame totally surprised me. I had no idea that was coming. I know a lot of people like to say it's enough just to be nominated. But I've been nominated for so many things, I'd like to get this one. I think it's a long shot, considering I never had a No. 1 rock n' roll record.
After a couple bouts with cancer and everything, black cats are nothin', you know?
