Often when great musical artists die who have impacted my life, I feel gratitude that we live in an age where we have their music so beautifully recorded & preserved, so that Elvis or Coltrane or Steve Goodman or Laura Nyro or John Lennon are always alive for me. But when someone dies way [...]

Photo © Elliott Landy/www.LandyVision.com It was May 8, 1991, and I’d returned to my Hollywood office after lunch to find a pink phone message tacked to the board with an unlikely haiku: “Mr. Dylan appreciates your magazine. He will be in touch.” At first I suspected it was a joke. I’d been trying to land [...]

Meeting with Dave Stewart at his Hollywood dream factory is a dizzying experience, not unlike what one imagines visiting Warhol’s factory was like in the day, minus the zombies and cocaine. There’s a whole lot of people in a unified space doing a whole lot of art all the time. To Dave, it’s more Wonka [...]

(Photo: Paul Zollo) HAVING BEEN A FAN of this remarkable band for several years, I expected something great from them. But this is beyond expectations. The Fuxedos’ self-titled debut is one of the most audaciously inventive albums of all time. Just the version of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” should earn them their own [...]

He told me years ago that he was more interested in what he discovered than what he invented. It seemed like a fine line to draw, so I asked him what the distinction is in his mind between discovery and invention. “You just have no idea that that’s a thought that you had,” he said. [...]

I think what a lot of people don’t understand about songwriters is that to do what we do – write songs we want the entire world to hear – it takes a true measure of courage. You’re in the business of putting your heart and soul out there in the world, where any number of [...]

“If I knew where the great songs came from,” Leonard Cohen told me, “I’d go there more often.” It’s the same answer I received, though worded differently, from many of the legendary songwriters I interviewed for my book Songwriters On Songwriting. The guiding idea of the book was to gather together the wisdom of many [...]

He’s written the words to many of America’s most cherished standards, starting with the classic “Stardust,” with music by Hoagy Carmichael, a song which he said he knew “in his gut” was important. Other standards to which he concocted the lyrics include “Deep Purple,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Stars Fell on Alabama,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Moonlight Serenade” and [...]

“The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me.”

Tom Waits couldn’t have become Tom Waits without Weill…