Of course, I’m not the only one.
What do you remember most from those first nominations, all those years ago?
I got the word from my management that we’d [been nominated for] that Grammy.
Credit: Norman Seeff
At the time, I can’t say the Grammys meant anything in particular to me.
Of course, I’ve changed my thinking since then.
I’m very excited to be nominated.
But at the time, I didn’t really give it much of a thought.
That time was sort of a musical transition period.
Really didn’t think much of it.
Over time, it is one of those things that you appreciate.
I guess I was just self-centered and full of myself and judgmental about things.
[Laughs] But it is great to have this album be recognized in that way.
There’s a lot of hope and optimism.
It kinda feels like the world could use a little bit of those classic American standards right now.
They’ve been with us all for such a long time.
Most of them are from my parents' generation.
They were songs that I learned on the guitar.
So in a sense, they taught me music, too.
They taught me those classic changes, and they meant a lot to me.
I had a lot of these songs as guitar arrangements for many years.
I love that because I think some people tend to think of standards as big orchestras and big arrangements.
I love how you sort of strip it down and make it really guitar-driven.
Oh, it was a great project and definitely stretched my guitar technique.
It advanced my playing, I think.
Mostly now when we think of songs, we think of a particular recording.
For that reason, the songs have to stand on their own legs.
Your new EP features your take on “Over the Rainbow.”
Is that another song you have memories of from growing up?
One of the original three broadcasts used to.
That’s just a great message.
I feel like we could all use a little bit of that right now.
I know it, especially going into this unbelievable second round of COVID.
How have you been spending the last couple months?
How has your quarantine been?
We had a big tour planned with Jackson Browne [and] a tour of Canada with Bonnie Raitt.
But the great thing was that my kids came home and we got to spend some great time together.
It’s been mostly family stuff.
I have two twin boys that were graduating high school, which was a sort of non-event as well.
That occupied us a lot.
That’s been a big part of the fall.
What was it that made you want to revisit some of those moments in your past?
You know, it was an offer that came in from Audible, the people who releasedBreak Shot.
It was a project done for them.
Really, it was the offer coming in and accepting it that sort of led the way.
I always have the feeling that basically since 1970 or so, my life has been an open book.
I’ve been a sort of public commodity and have been a public person.
It’s funny, when you’re successful at something there’s a tendency to keep doing it.
But up until that point was sort of a discrete, particular, defined period of time.
It was interesting to tell that story.
It also really helped me organize that period of time in my head, too.
You talked about how some of the songs onAmerican Standardcame from your family’s record collection.
What are some of your earliest memories of music?
That’s a lot of it.
We weren’t a church-going family.
There weren’t a lot of hymns.
There was a lot of church connected with that.
There was a period of time when hymns were a big part of my musical education.
Initially, we got Christmas carols, of course.
I remember those early on.
Then, the family record collection.
It was an interesting collection of music.
There was some light classics in there.
There was some kind of accessible jazz, a lot of folk music.
Then, there came a point when my older brother started bringing home the music he liked.
That was like the next stage.
Then I met a guy in the summertime.
My mom was a Yankee and we lived in North Carolina because my dad was from down there.
He was a doctor.
He had a job at the University of North Carolina.
But every summer, nothing would keep my mom from migrating upstream to the Atlantic Seacoast.
That was the next big part of my musical education.
Kootch, as we called him, he was the next person to light that fuse in my brain.
He and I basically learned guitar together.
He really is responsible for a huge piece of that.
He had such wide-ranging taste, and he really opened a whole new set of doors for me.
Your question was, what is my earliest memory?
Now, I’ve given you all of it.
I don’t know if I have enough discipline to do that.
