I don't care if my lettuce has DDT on it, just as long as it's crisp.

I can only be me. I do what I do, I'm not a jazz player. ... I don't play jazz standards, at least not in any recognizable way. It's not my turf but I have plenty of respect for that style of playing.

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

We were on a tour, and there were some chord formations that were tough for me to play when I was a kid...it had become apparent that there was some stuff I wanted to do that [would require me] to learn how to do that. So I wrote the song and used some of these chord formations so I would have to play them. I thought it would be a great teaching vehicle for a while, and it was, but it ended up as a performance song.

The blessing of this music is that it is fun to do and it keeps evolving.

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.

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.