Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking "Uptown Girl!" I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called "Ragdoll," which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.

I took a fresh pack of Luckies, a mint called Sen-Sen, my old man's Trojans.

The piano sounds like a carnival and the microphone smells like a beer. And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say, man, what are you doing here?

Call me a joker, call me a fool, right at this moment I'm totally cool.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

I started just concentrating on songwriting when I was abut 20; I'd been in rock bands six or seven years, kinda got that out of my system, I said, "ok, you ain't gonna be a rock star, you don't look like a rock star, it probably ain't gonna happen. So what you should do is write songs and maybe other people will do your songs."