Interview: Will Kimbrough on His New Solo Album, 'For the Life of Me,' Collaborating With Jimmy Buffett, and Being Appreciated by Paul McCartney (2024)

Once upon a lifetime ago, when I was a record store employee, we got a promo copy of a new album by a band called Will and the Bushmen. They were signed to SBK Records, a Capitol Records subsidiary which was brand new and flooding us with promos for their releases, but being partial to dudes named Will, I gave it a listen, and I immediately fell in love with the single, “Blow Me Up.” As such, the band remained on my radar for the duration, and when they broke up, I continued to follow the career of their frontman, Will Kimbrough.

Kimbrough’s career has taken some fascinating turns over the years, and as he’s continued to release records on his own, he’s also worked as a sideman and a songwriter for hire, most famously collaborating with the late Jimmy Buffett for his last several albums. Indeed, he co-wrote the big single from Buffett’s posthumously-released Equal Strain on All Parts, “Bubbles Up.” With the recent release of Kimbrough’s own new album, For the Life of Me, I was able ask him about the whole of his career, including his origin story, how he came to meet and work with Buffett, and much, much more.

I'm excited that you have a new studio album. It's been awhile since the last one.

Yeah, not since 2020.

I'm sure the pandemic didn't help things on that front.

Well, the main thing that happened was that I came out of the pandemic busier than ever!

There are worse fates.

Right! I mean, by June 2020, I was back on the road and doing the Songwriting for Soldiers work, and then by early 2021 I was just fulltime back out. So that post-traumatic growth work I do... You know, there's only more of that work to do. And I don't want to quit doing it, no matter what my artistic thing is. You know, I'll be 60 in a couple of weeks, and it's, like, "What are you gonna do with your life?" I'm gonna play shows, I'm gonna make records, but I like to do this work as well, for a whole different kind of reason.

Well, let's talk about that first. How did the Songwriting for Soldiers project come about?

I played on Mary Gauthier's album called Rifles and Rosary Beads, and that was songs that she wrote through Songwriting with Soldiers, which is Darden Smith's organization that he started. And it was fascinating, and it was a great record, and maybe on day two or three of the recording sessions she said, "Have you ever done this work?" I said, "No." She said, "You should do it!" So I said, "I'd love to!" So Darden called me, and it turned out so many friends were already doing it: Radney Foster, Darrell Scott, Beth Nielsen Chapman, all these people that I've known forever. So I just started doing it.

And then when they started doing this post-traumatic growth work, they needed people that could travel and then write a song that night with a group, just listening to people and talking and have a song written by the end of the night, and then get up and do a follow-up, and then go back home. So they needed somebody who was used to being on the road. So here I am. [Laughs.] And that program has grown by, like, a thousand percent. Even in 2020, it grew something like 300 percent. So we're doing 170 of those post-traumatic workshops this year between 12 writers. And I'll probably do 20 of 'em.

That's amazing. And gratifying work, I'd imagine.

Yeah, it's extremely gratifying. It's a challenge, it's interesting, it's fun, you meet people who have an experience that you don't have... Because it's not all military, either. It's first responders of all kinds. And that's mainly what they concentrate on. So you get to do some listening, and you have to write a song. There's no "we didn't get one tonight." It's more like "you will find a song...and at the end of the night, there will be three-and-a-half or four minutes of a song, whatever it is." So anyway, when my own touring came back, and then Emmylou [Harris] started touring again and she called me and asked me to get back into it... So, yeah, I'm just doing all kinds of things. And they're the kinds of things that you don't really... [Hesitates.] I guess I could say, "I'm taking a sabbatical so I can do my record." But at the same time, it's not that simple. Emmylou can draw from about a hundred songs that we've played with her over the years, and she can't just get somebody to do that, like, tomorrow. [Laughs.] And I love her! I get to sing with Emmylou.

That's pretty awesome in and of itself.

Right! So it's, like, what am I supposed to do, go, "I'm gonna do a two-week tour, so just you handle it on your own"? [Laughs.] It's just not like that. So at this point, it's a regular ongoing thing: "Where am I going this week?" The tour never ends. I guess for me it's like the indie version of the Endless Tour, like Willie Nelson or Bob Dylan or whatever. So I'm doing it. And it's great.

When the time did come to start working on For the Life of Me, did you have some songs that you'd already started to work on pre-pandemic or did you start completely fresh?

There's a couple of songs that go back in time. What always happens to me, especially in the last few years, is that I write something and it feels like, "Oh, I could build a record around that." Or I write two or three songs, and it feels like, "Oh, this is me in a direction that I like." And then some songs that already exist will almost always raise their hand and say, "What about me? This sounds like my family of songs!" And so that happened this time as well. I started to put the record out in 2021, but things just got... [Hesitates.] I didn't have a record label or a manager to do that for me. Also, I needed to finish it. It was recorded, so I put out three singles in 2021: "When This Is All Over," "I Don't Want to Start a War," and "The Other Side." And I was leading up to the release of this record, but then life just got... It was just too much. Too many 20-days-in-a-row weeks. I have a family, a parent still living... You know, life is going on. So it finally came together now! [Laughs.]

And, of course, the process of putting together an album nowadays has changed so much since you first started, to say the least.

Yeah, you know, one thing that happens... Like, this always happens, where I end up with eight or nine songs I've recorded in a proper recording studio, and then two or three songs that I recorded in my little home studio here, and we'll finish everything up here. Because my home studio is fine, I'd just rather not try to cram everybody in there to do the tracking! But I have done that. Anyway, it was fun. It just took a long time. But I guess every artist has a story like that, if they make more than two or three records. There's the record that takes a couple of years just to get it going. In my case, it's literally just things I've signed on to do: my stuff, Emmylou's stuff, production, studio work, Songwriting with Soldiers, and its appendage, the Warrior Path, the post-traumatic growth program. But I'm happy with all those things. So I guess I'm just stubbornly not willing to give up on any of 'em. And I still have the energy to do it, and that won't be forever.

As you said, the tracks emerged slowly but surely, but would you say you have a personal favorite gateway drug into the album that you'd recommend?

You know, I think it could be that it's the title track, because that was one I did at home, and that was one that really talks about the time period, this time period that includes COVID and the age of Donald Trump and trying to maintain some sort of... [Pauses.] I've always thought that if you could empathize, it would help make things a little bit better. And I can't make other people do it, so I try to do it. Also, we're sort of a cold war with ourselves in America. It's like a cold civil war. There aren't battles happening on the battlefield, but occasionally there are little battles, and then there's this underlying...not agreeing to disagree, but... I mean, I know what side I agree with, but at the same time, I don't want to live in disagreement with some side. But obviously there's big reasons for disagreement and big things to worry about in the world.

I'm also really glad I did "Clotida's on Fire," because that's a history that made the headlines in the last few years, because that slave ship was found. Before the ship was found, it was more of a legend where I'm from, so it gave that community something to say, "Yeah, we've been saying this for 150 years. This is real. There's the boat. This happened here, and we're still here." So it's a sad historical story with an inspiring, tough community that's still there, hanging in there, and still being really treated with injustice, I think.

And I'm glad I did "Southern Wind," because that took me back to the sort of mysterious lyric thing that I've loved from early R.E.M. and all that stuff, where you don't know exactly what somebody's talking about, but you kind of get it. You get the feeling. And maybe living in Nashville all these years and working with people like Todd Snider and Rodney Crowell, and being around people like John Prine, you start to really try to tell a story with lyrics and make it understandable. And now with this working with veterans and first responders of trauma, you have to use their words and speak in a very specific language. Although each individual is different and each group is different. But it's nice to be able to get back to that impressionistic lyric on that. So that's a really long-winded answer to your question about a gateway track. [Laughs.]

Which is fine. And I'd just add that, as a stage-setter for the whole album, I do enjoy "Walking in the Valley of the Shadow."

That's probably my favorite, because it just evokes something I love, which is the Band and [Bob] Dylan from that late '60s era. I grew up hearing that music come out of my older sister's bedroom. I don't know if you've experienced this, but the music you heard when you were... Well, for me, there's three periods of that: the stuff you hear when you're about six years old, and then the stuff you hear when you're, like, eight to ten, and then the stuff you hear in adolescence. So many people who are my age just always love stuff from, like, '70 to '73. Just the sound of it. Because that's the first music that you went and bought yourself. You went and bought the greatest-hits album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or you bought the Rolling Stones double album with all the hits on it (Hot Rocks 1964-1971), or the Beatles' double albums, the red and the blue ones. You know, the stuff that you could get for, like, ten bucks when you were a kid, and then you had some records to listen to. Four sides. Or All Things Must Pass, or Bowie, or Blood on the Tracks, or the first three Springsteen records. And I'm not trying to emulate that, but I can't help it.

So sometimes you land on something, and that one did feel like I could write a song with all that biblical imagery like a Robbie Robertson song - or Rick Danko or Dylan - and still feel like you're writing about right now. But then when you play it for whatever audience, they just hear it as this groovy, wordy song, and...it's great to have songs like that, for all kinds of reasons. I hate to be so practical about it, but at the same time, it's, like, when you've created something that you can then use to connect with people, that's a good thing. And then you can say what you want to say, and they're sort of sitting there listening because the music puts them at ease. And that's not always what music is about, I know. In the '90s... I've been to many noisy concerts by Sonic Youth and people like that, where I appreciated that the music was more the message. The medium was more the message than the lyrics...because you couldn't hear the lyrics. [Laughs.] You just heard noise and somebody talking over the top of it, and it was a sensory experience.

Even though I've been a fan of yours since Will and the Bushmen, I don't actually know your full secret origin. How did you actually find your way into music in the first place? Was it something you discovered on your own, or did you come from a musical family?

I loved music. We had a piano, and I was free to go noodle around on it. My dad had a guitar that he never played that we had torn up as kids. It just had, like, two strings on it. But about 1974 or 1975, when I was about 10 or 11, I discovered - and I mentioned it earlier - the music coming out of my sister's bedroom. And then I discovered that our FM stereo album rock station in Mobile, Alabama was playing the first three Springsteen records, the first Elvis Costello record, the first Joe Jackson record, the first three or four Tom Petty records... But also the stuff you would expect to hear on FM at that time: Zappa, Cream, the Allman Brothers, King Crimson. You know, album rock. Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, all that stuff. And as a result, because we had a medium-sized city with a good radio stations, those acts came through town. So I got to see Springsteen on my 12th birthday. I got a $20 guitar and a $4.50 ticket, I think it was, to see him in a thousand-seat theater on the Born to Run tour. I formed a band the next day...and six months later, we played a show where we got paid.

Not that that was the only reason to play, but it was literally that we had skating rinks in Mobile where they hired bands to play. And, really, all you had to do was get a ride down there. Because I was 12. [Laughs.] I had to get a ride, or ride my bike over there, and talk to the manager and say, "We have a band, and we want to play." And they didn't say, "Where's your demo tape?" They said, "Let me look at the calendar" and "we'll pay you $150." So I was hooked. I mean, I had two places to play starting at age 12. And we could set up the whole band with the Marshall stacks and giant drum sets and Hammond organs... Whatever friends we had that had gear, they could be in the band. So we had two drummers at one point - because, you know, that was a thing - and we thought that was cool. So I was in. And I wrote some songs when I was around that age, but at that age, I wanted to learn the songs that I loved, all the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Zeppelin songs. So I laid off songwriting, and I learned 200 classic rock kind of songs.

And then I met this musician from Atlanta who moved to Mobile for a day job. He worked for NCR, National Cash Register, so he got sent to Mobile. He was, like, 22, and I was 16, but he put up an ad on the bulletin board at the music store with a push pin that said, "Wanted: Musician to Form Original Band." And I thought, "Well, I've written some songs..." So I called him up, and I went over and I played him some of my songs, and he said, "You know, in Atlanta, the bands play their own songs, and I know people that got record deals." So I was, like, "Okay, cool!"So we started this new wave band - it was 1980 - and we wrote songs, and we recorded some songs, but we never put 'em out.

But we ended up playing the Southern college circuit, and then we opened for R.E.M. on January 9, 1983, which would've been the last date of their Chronic Town tour, and about a week before they went and recorded Murmur. And I remember my friend booked them for the University of South Alabama, and it was the most money they had ever made. They made $1500. And that was my moment. You know, you read those rock and roll books about how, like, when Johnny Rotten saw Neil Young, and then he saw the Ramones at the Roundhouse, and Joe Strummer was there, and Pete Shelley was there, and all the people who saw the Sex Pistols in Manchester Free Trade Hall... I've read all those books. [Laughs.] Well, this was my moment like that.

Because those guys, they looked like me, they dressed like me, they weren't any better at their instruments than me, but they had this massive charisma as a group of four people, and they obviously went to the top.But I think an important part of it was that it gave me permission to be Southern. Because before that, if you were in a new wave band in the South, you would probably end up affecting sort of a British accent...or a New York accent! Because those were the touchstones, right? England and CBGBs. So then I became very dissatisfied with my new wave band, because we weren't putting out records. And I met a couple of like-minded friends, and we formed the Bushmen.

That was the end of '84, and then in '85 we put out this cassette-only EP, and we started getting played on the radio. And then we put out a 45 in '85, and then... It took us awhile to get the Blow Me Up record out because we started to get interest from the labels by that point, so we moved to Nashville. We should've put out a record before '89. The songs we wrote during that period, some of them made it onto that Blow Me Up record or they just disappeared into the dustbin of unknown history. So that's my only regret: that we didn't make that second record before we made our major-label record. Because it'd just be fun to have those songs out there. But we toured all over, and we worked really hard, and we got signed to a major label, and it was a lot of fun, because we lived in Nashville, so someplace that we had access to in our van was New York. So we drove up to New York every month and played for Island, Atlantic, Columbia, RCA, MCA, IRS, whatever. And finally we got signed by this label that was part of EMI and Capitol Records, and then we lived that story.

So, yeah, what got me into it was a great radio station. When you have a terrestrial radio station in a city, then they can play the records by artists who are on tour, and the artists get sent to those towns where they're getting airplay. That's why I saw Springsteen. He played two nights there on the Born to Run tour because that radio station was helping break Born to Run. So he played two nights at $4.50 a ticket. If they sold out both nights, they grossed $9,000 for two nights. For the E Street band! But, you know, it was 1976. I saw some crazy shows. I saw John Prine, I saw Kiss, I saw Aerosmith... I saw Elliott Murphy open for ELO! But the big moments were the Springsteen show and the day I got a guitar, and then opening for R.E.M. when I was 19 and seeing, "Oh, they just pulled up in a van and wore their street clothes onstage, and Peter Buck's amp doesn't work, so he had to borrow mine." It made them human. Also, they weren't trying to pretend like they were from Brixton or the Bronx. It was a different thing, and they really broke that ground for me and made it okay to go, "Hey, we're from Alabama." Of course, then people were, like, "Oh, do you know R.E.M.?" "Yeah, we opened for 'em, man..."

To ask the obligatory Buffett question, how did you first find your way into his camp as a collaborator?

In the mid-'90s, I was in Todd Snider's band, and Todd was on Margaritaville Records, which was obviously owned by Jimmy Buffett. So I met him in passing a few times - we opened some shows, we got to shake his hand and stuff, and go to a party and drink beer while he was in the room - and then one night we played Tipitina's in New Orleans, and Buffett and Jerry Jeff [Walker] both showed up. So there was a big hubbub in the dressing room, which at Tipitina's is the size of a nice bathroom. [Laughs.] So there were, like, 300 people in this "bathroom," trying to party with Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff and Todd. It was just a waste of time. But I was standing right next to Jimmy Buffett - we pressed up against a wall by the crush of the crowd, both looking for the exit - and I looked at him and said, "I gotta say 'hi,' Jimmy. I grew up in Mobile, so I figure I should say 'hi.'" And he said, "Oh, you're another escapee!" And I said, "I guess so, yeah!"

And then he somehow, for some reason, remembered me, and asked about me. His niece Melanie was taking care of his parents - she was fresh out of college and had free time, and he said, "Why don't you live in our house and take care of my mom and dad?" His dad had dementia, his mom was older. So she took care of them, and he would come visit. Well, one night in 2003, he said, "Melanie, whatever happened to that guy from Mobile who played with Todd?" And she said, "That's Will Kimbrough." He said, "Yeah, what happened to that guy?" She said, "Well, he's in Nashville. He's playing." And he goes, "Huh, I wonder what he's up to." So she called me that night and said, "Here's an address in the Hamptons, in Sag Harbor. FedEx some stuff to him, because you're on my uncle's mind." And so I sent him my first two solo records and maybe a CD-R or a cassette of four-track recordings of new songs and just said, "Melanie told me I should reach out."

And so about three months later I got a call from somebody at his office that said, "Jimmy would like to record a couple of these songs." And I said, "Okay!" And about three months after that, I got another call that said, "Jimmy wants you to come play on the record." So he just decided to sort of take me under his wing. And I played on seven records, which were the last seven records of his career, as far as studio records. And I think we put together 20 songs over the last 20 years. So we got connected because he apparently had a very interesting kind of long memory, and he remembered me and reached out to me. And after that first record we did together in 2003 or 2004... Of course, I wanted to do more work with him, so I reached out to him. I tried to be tasteful about it. I tried to space out my messages and not bother him, you know? To not get put in his spam folder. [Laughs.] And it worked out.

So we became friends, and...mainly it was about music. We would bond over music that we loved, whether it was all the stuff that came out of Muscle Shoals and musicians who played there - Spooner Oldham and people like that - or world music, particularly West African guitar-based music. But we had a lot of fun. And the last couple of records we did together... We did two albums while he was getting treatment for cancer, and one was in 2020, so that one was compromised by COVID. But I figured out that he really just wanted me to write what I thought was the right thing to do and not anything to do with me trying to be him. So I would send him my ideas just raw, and...it was a fun thing to realize that, that somebody's not trying to get you to give him ideas that are like his, but something that can add to what he already does. So it was a really fun collaboration.

Maybe you can answer the question that I've always wondered: was he a Crowded House fan, or did someone else introduce him to "Weather With You"?

No, he was a fan. He was a big music fan, and we would talk about all kinds of music. But, yeah, he loved Crowded House, and he loved Neil Finn's songs. So you know those records. He really picked... I mean, we did a Mary Gauthier song before I knew Mary. "The Wheel Inside the Wheel," I think is what it's called. Which is a really mystical song about New Orleans and Mardi Gras. And we did Guy Clark songs, we did "Elvis Presley Blues," by Gillian Welch... He was listening to a lot of music. And Mac McAnally would bring in songs and pitch him songs sometimes, and they might be more like Nashville songs, because Mac knows everybody here. Mac is a real centerpiece of this town, and he's a real wonder of the world, I think. He's starting to be discovered more. Now that Jimmy's gone, Mac's out there touring full time. He's great.

Dare I ask if you've gotten any sort of Buffett bump yourself?

Well, I co-wrote "Bubbles Up," and when Jimmy passed, it was a pretty good bump to have all of Paul McCartney's social media to say, "'Bubbles Up' is a great song." It was on Twitter, it was on Instagram, it was on Facebook, it was out in the press... So that's a pretty good bump. [Laughs.] To have Paul McCartney like a song that you helped write and helped record. So that's a big one. And I'm certainly getting more of those gigs where it's, like, a Parrothead reunion gathering and they want to ask me if I can come play. So I guess you'd call that a bump in a sense. They want to hear the stories, and they want to hear the songs. And another one would be just that realization before he was gone that he trusted me totally.

That last batch of songs we wrote, he said, "I've gotta go get treatment. Can you start these songs, and I'll tell you what I think?" And so we wrote five songs that way. He needed someone he could trust to get things started, because he knew that he wanted to make a record, and he had these ideas for songs, so he was sending me ideas. It wasn't, like, my ideas. I was waiting for him to say, "This is what I want to write about." But I'd send him complete songs and say, "If you like it, we can work on it. If you want to change it, we can change it." But I would send him complete songs from beginning to end and say, "This is a mockup of how it could be." And some of them ended up being pretty close to that. So I got a personal bump from that, understanding that he really trusted me to run with his ideas.

But the McCartney thing was great. I don't know if I'll ever meet him or if anybody'll ever introduce me and say, "This is the guy who wrote the song you talked about!" and whether he'd remember or not. But it doesn't matter. Just seeing that and knowing that it reached him... I mean, as a lifetime music fan and songwriter and band member and musician, having McCartney like your song is...

It doesn't get much better.

Yeah. I mean, I'd rather Jimmy Buffett be alive and still writing some more songs, because it was just so much fun to be around him and just be around how his kind of energy and imagination worked, and how he processed the world through a song or a story.

I'll start wrapping up, but do you remember the first person you met where you had to fight to keep from going full fanboy?

Yeah. You know, I don't think I did a very good job. [Laughs.] But I think it was Alex Chilton. And he, of course, was not someone who suffered fools. Or hardly anybody at all, really. In the right or wrong mood, he would just be dismissive to anybody. And we ended up becoming...friendly acquaintances. I won't say friends. But the first time I met him, we opened for him, and he was playing one of the first shows when he had Feudalist Tarts out. So he'd just come back out, and if you were in the know about Big Star or knew somebody that knew the story of Alex Chilton, it was just rumored that he'd just been washing dishes at Tipitina's or something, living on the street...and then all of a sudden he's there! So I brought my copy of Radio City to have him sign it, and it was on Big Beat Records in England, which...he wasn't getting any royalties from any of that stuff.

Oh, sh*t...

Yeah, it was basically a bootleg copy. He said, "I'm not signing that. It's a bootleg." And he walked off. But we had a great time playing with him, and he was a lot friendlier after that, because we played with him a lot, and I opened for him a lot solo. So I had some good exchanges with him. But the first time I met him, I was so nervous. And the first few times I'd go up to him very timidly. But I learned from that, so when I met Nick Lowe the first time...

I was in a Starbucks in Hollywood, and I went up to put some milk in my coffee, and there was Nick Lowe, dressed as Nick Lowe. Y'know, he's got a black jacket on and a white shirt, and his hair's this high, and he's got Ray Bans on and...he looked great. And I'm just, like, wearing some sweatpants or something, taking a walk while on tour, but he's dressed up like Nick Lowe. But I knew at that point not to just say, "Nick Lowe, I love your music," because who knows what he was going to be like? I knew that a friend of mine had run sound for him, and I knew that he loves Emmylou...and I wasn't working with Emmylou at this time yet, but I asked him... I dropped the name of the soundperson, the engineer. I said, "Do you know Doug?" And he said, "Oh! Do you know Emmylou?" I said, "Yeah, I do!" And I knew her, I just hadn't played with her yet. So then I got to have a two-minute conversation with him. Because I learned to drop the right name. Or just to stay out of the way. Sometime you see people in a room and you're, like, "I don't even want to meet them. I've got the records, I enjoy that." Like, I'm terrified of meeting Van Morrison.

I think it was Nick Heyward who told me that he spent a fair amount of time actively avoiding David Bowie. He just feared having to come up with the right thing to say.

[Laughs.] Right! Oh, but here's one, and it's someone I met through Jimmy Buffett, of all people, but...we were writing songs down in the Caribbean one year, which was a great time, and we were having fun, and we went out to lunch one day after writing all morning and making demos, and up walks Roger Waters from Pink Floyd! Which is a strange thing to see him walk up to you. It's like a hologram. [Laughs.] Because I'd never seen them play before. I'd just seen him on album covers and videos and television. And he walked up, and he and Jimmy were neighbors in the Hamptons, apparently.

So he sat down and had lunch with us, and he was just as nice as could be, and he was interested in all of us because we were with Jimmy. So he asked each of us, "Who are you and what are you doing here?" I said, "I'm Will, I'm a songwriter." And he said, "Oh, a songwriter? Me, too!" I said, "Well, I know!" [Laughs.] And one of the guys at the table, you could just see him about to burst like a balloon, because he was such a fan, and it was such a big deal to have him there. Iw as tamping it all down. I was, like, "Do not ask him if he's going to play with David Gilmour..." And this guy just did it all. Because Live 8 had just happened.

But he was really gracious. The guy was, like, "I saw you on Live 8! It was great! Are you guys going to tour again with you and David Gilmour?" He said, "We're not. We're not going to do it. We don't hate each other, we just don't like to work together, and we don't have to. We don't need to. We don't need the money." And he said, "Every year we meet with these business managers..." I guess at this point the four central members were still alive. But every year they'd meet at some fancy, oak-paneled club in England, and these business managers of Pink Floyd would hand over these folded slips of paper that would have an enormous amount of money written on it that each one could make if they'd do one show in Japan or one show in South America or something like that. And they always would just put the slips down and say, "We're not gonna do it." And then David Gilmour would say, "But my version of Pink Floyd will be touring!" And then Roger Waters would say, "And I'm going to tour as well." So they just didn't need it. And he said, "And I'm not gonna tell you how much we turned down, because it would hurt your feelings." [Laughs.]

And then he showed up that night for dinner! He asked where we were having dinner, and he came, and there was only one seat at the table, and it was right next to me. So then I had to say to myself, "What am I gonna say to him?" So I just said, "How's it going? Do you own a place down here, or do you rent? Or do you have a boat?" And he told me a little bit, and then he asked me, and I'll never forget this, "Do you like Neil Young?" And I said, "Yeah, I love Neil Young!" He said, "Do you know him?" I said, No. But surely you do." And he said, "Well..." And he told me the story of playing one of those Bridge School concerts, and it was right after Roger had left Pink Floyd, and he'd never played a solo show, and his roadie had died, so he didn't even know where his instruments were, because they were in a storage container in London somewhere! So he had to get all his stuff shipped, and he played, and he was so nervous about it, but the crowd loved him.

But he also said, "Do you know Neil's album Rust Never Sleeps?" And I said, "Well, yeah, it's one of my favorites." And he goes, "It's probably my favorite album of all time." Which I thought was interesting. And then he said, "All I wanted to do was talk to Neil and ask him some questions about those songs." And Neil wouldn't see anybody that night. He'd come out and play and host, and then he'd go back in his dressing room. He was mad about something. And he said, "I sat outside Neil Young's dressing room in a folding chair and waited, but the roadie wouldn't let me in! And I said, 'Can I please see Neil?' and he said, 'Nobody's seeing Neil tonight!" He said, "But I'm Roger!" The roadie said, "I don't care if you're Jesus Christ!" So he sat out there all night and waited, but he never saw him.

That's an amazing visual.

Yeah, and that perspective of, Roger Waters can't get an audience with another rock star at a concert they're both playing. [Laughs.]

I think if I was sat down next to Roger Waters, I'd just ask him Syd Barrett questions.

Right! I thought of 'em all. Have you see the latest Syd documentary?

I haven't yet. I very much want to.

It's good! You should see it. It answers a lot of the questions. Yeah, I thought about that, because I wanted to tell him that Will and the Bushmen used to play "Corporal Clegg." Which was a Roger Waters song on one of those early albums. Anyway, so I fanboyed Alex Chilton, and I learned from it to not do that with Nick Lowe and Roger Waters! And now if I meet Paul McCartney, I can say, "Hey, I'm the guy who co-wrote 'Bubbles Up'!"

So you'll be on safe ground.

I hope so! And we have the same hairdo: the Beatle wig. [Laughs.] So I'm happy with my new record. It's an ongoing thing now - it's like the Never-Ending Tour, the Never-Ending Recording Session, the Never-Ending Songwriting Session, it's just a way of life now. And when I started with the Bushmen, as you pointed out, putting together a record was such a daunting task. You had to either come up with thousands of dollars, which was a lot more then than now. Everybody had to put their life savings in to book, like, two days at some big studio and buy tape, which was awesome, and have vinyl pressed. No CDs existed. They don't really exist much now! I wish they did more. I like 'em. But it's really a dream come true for me to keep making records. We just finished Shemekia Copeland's record, and I helped her write, like, eight of the songs, and this is my fourth record in a row to write with her, so we've written twenty-something songs for her over the last seven or eight years. So that's gratifying to me, too.

I look at it a bit like Neil Young: when people yell requests at him, he says, "They're all the same song!" So he doesn't have to play their request. [Laughs.] But to me, it's all the same act, which is the act of the love and affection you have for music and language and for stories and for what's left of the human race and humanity, to still want to put it all together in a song and then record it so you can then go perform it. I was talking to my daughter about Sierra Ferrell last night, and she goes, "Well, I've seen her several times, and she's got one of those voices that's really hard to contain on a recording. When you see her live, it's so much more." And it makes you think about, what would it have been like to see Billie Holiday? What would it have been like to hear Charlie Parker? Now you can capture a live frequency range, but you still can't capture the energy that somebody can put out. But I do think that if you're a good songwriter, then at least you can put the song down. And that's one thing I've learned to do: to write and be a producer and be a musician. And then you can take it out and perform it with the energy you've got at that time.

None of us know when we make a recording whether it's going to mean anything to anybody five years from now, but that's not what you're thinking about when you do it. I mean, I know people have told me, "I knew when I recorded this that it was gonna be something I'd be playing for the rest of my life!" And I'm always a little bit, like, "Yeah, right. You're telling me this now, 30 years after you wrote it." [Laughs.] And I just read the Bernie Taupin book - because I read all those books - and I really liked the early part of it, because those are really the only songs of his that I like. I don't really like the '80s and '90s, and 2000s stuff that much. But he had this whole thing about how they made a record with Leon Russell and how sorry he felt for Leon Russell. And it really made me mad that he put that in his book. You know, he was saying that Leon's success had only been at a certain period of time, and he hadn't had any success in the '80s, and he was paling. And I was, like, "Well, he was old. He was ailing. It could be any of us!"

I'm sure Leon was just fine with the work he did and the people he worked with.

Yeah, don't speak for Leon. Leon's got his own book, too! But it just made me... I felt like somebody at the publisher should've said, "Are you sure you wanna say this? Because didn't Elton basically imitate Leon Russell at the beginning of his career and open for him? Shouldn't this be more of a 'I can't believe we got to work with this giant?'" And he kind of said that, but then he basically said, "But I feel sorry for him, because he's not as rich as me." [Laughs.] And I was, like, "God, man, get your sh*t together!"

Anyway! It's fun to make records, and it's fun to go play, and then in between, I never get bored, because if I play a string of dates on my own, then the next thing I get to do is either go meet some utter strangers and have them pour their hearts out to me and help them make a song out of it, or I get to sing "Wheels" or "If I Needed You" or "Old Five and Dimers" with Emmylou. So I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I'm just trying to stay healthy and keep going and get on the airplane or get in the car and get to the next place...and then get back here and make another record!