So I look at this collection of songs you are about to release and it looks to me like trick or treat at the rainbow coalition. Boggling variety. Or the flip side might be, why are you so exclusive? I don't see any reggae or klezmer. How did you pick this wild batch of songs? ~ MT

There are two sides to the method for me, Merle.  One is, you hang around this business long enough, you meet people, clever people who can do things you can’t do.  I’ve met lots of songwriters over the years, and I’ve noticed how hard it is for some of these people to even get noticed or garner applause for their humor or their heartache. They have a talent for yanking my feelings out of me and putting them on paper with such accuracy that I can’t not sing them.  Ever since the Wheel got hooked up with the Cody band, the mantra has been “take your friends with you”.  I think that’s an honorable way to walk through this world.  And so on this album I have material written by old friends:  LeRoy Preston, Blackie Farrell, Bill Kirchen, Brenda Burns.  I can write, and I used to write a lot, but two things happened that influenced that:  First, everything that I wrote between 1965 and 1970 was lost when a roving band of West Virginia hillbillies set my ’63 Mercury Monterey on fire.  My lyrics, my artwork, my clothes, 90% of everything I owned was in the trunk and went up in flames.  The steering wheel melted.  The seats were nothing but springs.  I took it as a sign that there might be better songs outside the trunk.  Second, a friend in the business listened to one of my tunes and said, “Too many words”.  Maybe he was being a sanctimonious jerk, maybe he was just expressing an opinion that I inflated to the size of an insult. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to show enthusiasm that day, or maybe he was trying to save me from myself. I’ll never know.  It didn’t stop me from writing, but it did stop me from sharing my songs with anyone.  So I have relied on other writers over the years to explore the depths of living and then allow me to interpret their lyrics and their melodies.  That’s what I've always been, an interpreter of song.

Anastasio's Flotsam and Jetsam

Another side of taking friends along is taking people whom I wish were friends, or who seem to be kindred spirits.  I didn’t really look at genres until later in the game on this album.  The thing I wanted to accomplish was a return to singing what I consider great songs, after not having sung for a very long time.  People kept asking me if I was having fun.  There were times when the recording was fun, with Tony Garnier laughing his head off at everything or Paul Anastasio moving into the fiddle booth like an eccentric pack rat, with fruits and tuners and his laptop and a ukelele and his toothbrush lying on the floor.  I was energized and focused on what was going down and what people needed.  I wouldn’t say that the entire recording experience was fun.  The first day was good because it was my birthday and I had cake and daffodils in the vocal booth (along with the mainstay bottled water, throat spray and Hot Tamales candy).  I felt loved!  And the enormous amount of talent and love and encouragement in the studio were humbling.  I was honored to be there, and almost embarrassed that the whole thing was essentially about me.  But later in the process I flew to Austin to do some vocal overdubs, and that experience was difficult.  

"Happy Boothday" to Me

Part of my problem is that I am ten years old.  If I hear a song I want to sing I take a run at it.  Like a wide-eyed kid I rush into things and I don’t know that there are tunes that are unsuited for my voice, or that someone my age shouldn’t sing because it might embarrass the young folks.  I’m impulsive and I try them.  I want to be ten, without the responsibility of making difficult decisions.  I want to just get my hands on the thing and start molding.  And on this project I tried 14 songs:  that's a lot of clay for someone who was coming off of a ten-, eleven-year sabbatical.  When I first heard the songs I thought lots of things:  “I can sing that,” or “That’s a killer melody,” or “That’s an emotional volcano,” or “That’s funny as hell!” or “That could make a dead man cry,” or “That’s as dry as a dustbowl martini.”  And my cool-o-meter was pegging based on what I used to be able to sing before I left music for a decade.  Guitar tracks were really not much of a problem for me, even though I hadn’t played in ages.  When I got right down to laying down vocal tracks, though, there was a lot of catching up to be done, a lot of remembering how to get from “a” to “b”, a bit of wrestling the old licks out of the footlocker and dusting them off to help me tell the stories.  It was good to break through the vocal paralysis in Austin, but it was a demeaning exercise.  It was work.  It was frustrating, infuriating, unrewarding work on a lot of levels.  And when I returned to California I honestly didn’t care if the project never saw the light of day.  I was ready to bag it. 

Talent and Career Management

The only thing we could do was to keep on moving forward.  We already had quite a lot invested in the project and it would have been unreasonable to quit.  So that’s what we did:  we kept moving forward.  As a ten-year-old, I will drop a hot rock.  As a sixty-year-old, I know I need to juggle it until it can be handled.  This is what my Golden Years look like:  juggling, handling, managing.  I've come full circle, all the way back to The Ed Sullivan Show and the spinning plates on rods:  cocktail dress optional, but don't hold your breath.