One of the hardest things in the world is to perform on record and get someone to enjoy and feel what you're doing. It's unlike, like TV you can, you can fake it with the face and the crying and the bits. Recording is completely different.

I think that the song, the song "Stand By Me" is one of those songs that... and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about? It's something that, songwriters just write songs. It's like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It's not, it's not about how many of these painting I'll sell it's just how they feel at the moment. And that's how I wrote "Stand By Me".

I don't care what studio I'm in, I don't care what producers is producing it and I don't care what song it is because they taught me those things I feel so protected wherever I go as far as music.

I would imagine after the first recording session with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and Atlantic Records I began to realize that this is going to be like this for the rest of my life and I knew that what, what they were doing was going to be successful because with each session that we would do, it would get better and better and better, the songs would become better, the, ah, the feeling of success was there and we were all in the middle of that as well.

People abroad always tend to take what the best of what we have and come back through the back door always, say, and hit us with it. And then we wake up one day and say, I think I've heard that. Yeah, it was done by whoever, you know. So, ah, that's been one of our weaknesses we don't tend to hold on as they do there.

It never dawned on me at any particular time of my life that people are paid tremendous money to sing.

When I got involved with The Five Crowns who later became The Drifters, and we got this hit record, I still was looking at this as kind of a fun thing.