![]() And the reason I was lonely was because I wasn't honest. That made me feel safe, because I didn't want to be more advanced or more talented than I was at that time.įor me, when I was homeless and having panic attacks, I was very lonely. He wasn't thinking about radio-he wasn't thinking about anything except the music. Ben was the first producer who wanted to do justice to the songs. I wanted to be honest, and so I just looked at because I thought it was a really honest record, and it was a singer-songwriter's record. There was such heat in the bidding war, that I did meet with a lot of big name producers and they did want to edit my songs and polish them. In fact, members of the Stray Gators, the backing band who appeared on Young’s record, also performed on Pieces of You. I do feel really proud looking back that I never betrayed either of those promises to myself.įor the album, you chose producer Ben Keith based on his work on Neil Young's 1974 Harvest record. And those two things really guided my whole career. The other was that I wanted to be an artist more than I wanted to be famous. I could never let my pursuit of music eclipse my pursuit of being a good person. I made myself one promise that my first job was to actually figure out how to be a happy person, and my second job was to be a musician. I didn't want to put pressure on this happiness that I had. I ended up turning it down, because that was an advance I would owe back. I remember being like: “I can't believe I finally figured out how to be happy.” And when the record labels started coming, I was offered a million-dollar signing bonus. It was such a liberating, freeing moment. And I did end up developing an amazing little following. I was living in my car because I didn't have sex with the boss who fired me and I couldn't pay my rent. I think the biggest misconception is that I was living in my car for my dream in music. But you were also developing a fan base locally, which later led Atlantic Records to sign you. At one point, you were living in your car. The backstory behind Pieces of You has been well documented: hailing from Alaska, you were an up-and-coming musician in San Diego trying to make ends meet. ( laughs) It became a really fun challenge for my archivist and I to put together stuff that I knew would be unknown to them. So when it came time to release this reissue, finding music and tracks that my fanbase hadn't actually already gotten a hold of was very difficult. You have to cultivate a fan base that's going to want you to be more than just famous and really support your art and growth.Įarly on during, got very avid about bootlegging, and they would circulate and share bootlegs of live shows. That means you have to have a 60-year outlook. My goal was always ambitious: it was to be one of the best singer-songwriters of all time. When you look back at something like this, it has to be so many factors coming together to make it work. ![]() Did sifting through that material trigger memories? There is a lot of archival tracks on the new reissue. ![]()
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