My dad was president of the Finlandia Foundation for a number of years and there was a period of time when he tried to get me in. I'm glad I finally got in.

With the bass it's another thing. I don't need to use alternate thumb-picking as much. Even though Jack says he loves it. My thought is that it might irritate him somewhat.

I was writing a lot of true love songs-true love almost gone wrong but saved at the last moment...Many of the best songs get written in a state of abject misery. I prefer to write fewer songs and have less cataclysmic events in my life...Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good.

I started with the chorus of that song, kind of like a fun bouncy thing to play, and then one of the lines popped up: 'I got things to do today, people to see, things to say.' I wrote about a dozen verses for it, but no song needs to be that long unless you're Bob Dylan. So when we recorded it I started to tear it down to some of the lines I thought were the funniest.

We do a wealth of stuff (live), drawing from over the years.

If you make the same mistake 3 times, that becomes ‘your arrangement’

I'm not sure I ever pleased Ian [Buchanan] with my progress, but he continued to tolerate me. I had to work at everything that I did. Well, it wasn't work; it was fun actually.