American Songwriter | Archive for Q&As

Q&As

Hamell On Trial on Bob Dylan, “Maggie’s Farm” Cover(0)

February 7, 2012

How did you first get into Bob Dylan? I was young and heavily into the British Invasion, but the babysitter had a boyfriend who was a folkie; he had Eric Anderson, Dave Van Ronk, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and of course Dylan. I kinda dug it all. The first album, where he was [...]

Hamell On Trial on Bob Dylan, “Maggie’s Farm” Cover

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson On <em>Thick As A Brick 2</em>, The Grammys And More

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson On Thick As A Brick 2, The Grammys And More

On April 3, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson will release Thick As A Brick 2, the followup to 1972′s beloved prog opus Thick As A Brick (an album comprised of two long, interconnected songs). In this extensive interview, rock’s most famous flautist talks to American Songwriter about the sequel’s genesis, its parallels to the original, his [...]

A Q&A with The Fray’s Isaac Slade

For their third album, Scars & Stories, “How To Save A Life” hitmakers The Fray turned to super-producer Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) to give them a boost in the studio. We talked to Fray frontman Isaac Slade about his formative days studying songwriting at the University of Colorado, the inspiration behind the band’s [...]

Matthew Caws From Nada Surf On Bob Dylan

How did you first get into Bob Dylan? My aunt Peg in North Carolina had a Martin nylon-string guitar and would sing “Blowing in the Wind” to me sometimes. She was a really fine fingerpicker and I remember being mesmerized by how her right hand moved. So my first exposure to Bob Dylan was also [...]