Q&A

This page includes selected press interviews and Q&As with Gary Marks about his songwriting, his RSD 2026 album Crossroads, his archival catalogue, his three 1970s folk-jazz albums featuring John Scofield, Art Lande and Paul McCandless, his eight unreleased undistributed albums from the 1980s through 2021, and his parallel work as a novelist.

From It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, Editor Klemen Breznikar. March, 2026.

This Record Store Day exclusive finally bridges the gap between his 1970s cult classics and the present day. The lead single, ‘I Guess It Never Stops,’ serves as a haunting centerpiece. It carries the same DNA as his early work with jazz giants like John Scofield, but with a weathered perspective. Marks watches the rainforests fall and the boardrooms carve up the map with a heartbreak that feels earned. “The daily news cycle is something I don’t pay much attention to,” he admits. “It’s an issue of sanity.” Instead, he focuses on the long-term cycle where truth and fiction are easier to pull apart.

By choosing studio time over the grind of the road, Marks preserved a specific kind of freedom. “I just knew I would not have fun… becoming an employee of a record company,” he notes. ‘Crossroads’ gathers fourteen tracks, including nine previously unheard gems, proving his internal drive never flickered. Whether he is tracking live in a circle or cutting two-inch tape by hand, the goal remains the same. As Marks puts it, “We would stay inside the song, and nothing else existed in that moment.”

Taking it back to the beginning, your 1974 debut ‘Gathering’ featured John Scofield’s first time in a studio. You were surrounded by guys like Paul McCandless and Mark Isham before they became giants in modern jazz. Looking back at those early sessions, what was the magic in the room like? Did you all know you were capturing something that would become a cult classic among vinyl heads?

Gary Marks: No, we didn’t know what we were doing on so many levels!

I considered those players on ‘Gathering’ my first real band. I met Michael Cochrane, already a great jazz pianist at the age of 21, while hearing him play in a practice room at the New England Conservatory. I was wandering around various practice room hallways all over Boston trying to find someone who I thought could play my very odd, very complicated songs without just riffing over the changes.

I had my guitar with me, just in case…. So I knocked on his practice room door, sat down on the floor, and played him a song that I thought would win him over.
Halfway through the song he started trying to figure out the chords I was playing. After he agreed to be in my band and make a record, I asked him who the best guitar player in Boston was. He said John Scofield. So I went to John’s apartment, and we bonded over the music pretty quickly. I asked John who the best vibraphonist was in Boston. He said David Samuels. David was super cool. He wrote the chord charts to the songs in great technical detail and passed them around to the rest of the guys.

Those three players became the core of the ‘Gathering’ band that recorded at Ultra-Sonic studios in New York a few months later. We rehearsed for a few months in Michael’s living room in Boston, played a few gigs, then drove to New York. I had been gifted free recording time by the recording engineer who had heard me play solo at the Mercer Arts Center. He goes by the name of Michael Tapes now. But really, everything was just happening without a preconceived idea about where this would all lead.

We gathered in a big circle in the tracking room and played all the songs live in one take. It was kind of a miracle, really. But again, we didn’t know there was any other way to do it. In the end, we were very excited about how well the album turned out. But because we were in our early twenties, none of us knew anything about the future, except that we would probably stay friends, and hopefully keep getting better as musicians.

Art Lande and his band Rubisa Patrol (ECM), including Mark Isham, was “my band” on my second record, ‘Upon Oanda’s Wing’.

Paul McCandless joined Art’s band, and John and David, on my third record, ‘Thoughts of Why’.

Paul McCandless also played on an album I wrote and recorded in the mid-80s, which was never released — one of many unreleased albums, until now! He played an amazing solo on one of those songs — ‘The Elemental Line’ — which will be on my new album, ‘Crossroads,’ coming out in April.

And, of course, we had no idea if any of those unreleased albums would ever lead to anything either, or be heard by the general public.

Like ‘Gathering,’ we just made music with no expectations. We would stay inside the song, and nothing else existed in that moment. Maybe that’s how you get “magic in the room.”

The new single ‘I Guess It Never Stops’ hits hard right now. You sing about Eden being stripped and carried off in trains, a theme you have warned listeners about since the 70s. Sitting here in 2026 watching the rainforests still getting hacked down, do you feel a sense of tragic vindication, or is it pure heartbreak that the boardrooms are still dividing up the spoils?

Pure heartbreak. Not surprised though.

When you see how good corporations and politicians are at hiding the truth, and hiding their motivations, and you see the choices the voting public makes when they believe what they are told, then voting for Nixon — and now Nixon 2.0 — the rest becomes inevitable.

Strip-mining and chopping down the forests where Eden may have once existed is all just a reflection of who we’ve become.

But you know, everything changes. The pendulum will soon swing back in the opposite direction. Then we’ll see….

By the way, I can remember recording the song you’re alluding to — ‘I Guess It Never Stops’ — like it was yesterday. I remember conversations I had with the players. And I remember things like cutting two-inch tape at the end of that song so I could splice in a trippy “Eden Animal” synth part I came up with. One wrong move by the engineer cutting the tape and that entire song would have been gone.

Fortunately, the world can forgive more than one wrong move. The question is, how many chances will we get?

Let us talk about the gap years. You have those eight undistributed albums living on your website. Whittling down decades of hidden gems to fit onto Crossroads alongside nine unheard tracks must have been agonizing. What was the ultimate deciding factor for a song making the cut for this specific Record Store Day release?

Out of the ninety-eight songs I’ve recorded and published, twenty-four fit the lyrical theme of Crossroads. We are at a crossroads in America and in human history. What will democracy turn into? What will humans become? Out of those twenty-four songs, fans and friends and family gave me their input. Jac and Barbara at Lantern Heights did as well. It was amazing that we could squeeze fourteen songs on the album, and fortunate, because I wouldn’t have wanted to leave any of those songs behind. The other ten will hopefully be heard some day as well.

You have always tackled the concept of power and cultural fracture head-on. In the new single, you call out “fathers playing God.” Back in the day, rebelling against authority looked like one thing, but the power dynamics in 2026 are warped beyond recognition. How do you find fresh ways to write about democracy and conscience without getting bogged down by the 24-hour news cycle?

The daily news cycle is something I don’t pay much attention to. It’s an issue of sanity. Because all the news outlets have their own form of nightmares and fairy tales to sell us. It’s the decade-long news cycle I look at, because then it’s easier to tell truth from fiction. I write from that longer-term perspective. But I also don’t think the power dynamics have changed that much. Because, yes, the Supreme Court has expanded the power of the presidency beyond recognition. But what this president is doing legally, with no one able to stop him, Nixon simply did illegally and in secret.

So, it’s really just a different set of rules with the same outcome.

It’s wild to think about Upon Oanda’s ‘Wing and Thoughts of Why’ getting reissued seven times across Europe and Japan, becoming white whales for record collectors. Now Lantern Heights is putting out ‘Crossroads’ as an official UK and Europe RSD exclusive.

Yes, ‘Gathering’ was reissued three times, and the other two albums were reissued twice each.

But the exciting thing about ‘Crossroads’ — aside from the overall socio-political theme — is knowing the nine songs no one has ever heard before made it onto the album. They were written and recorded between 1985 and 2020, many years after those first three records.

I also feel really honored that Crossroads was chosen as an RSD exclusive. It’s a lot of fun to see my name alongside some of the other RSD selections this year, like Springsteen and Joni Mitchell and The Rolling Stones. A big thanks also to Jac and Barbara at Lantern Heights for believing in the project.

Freedom is the absolute backbone of your music. You broke away from the commercial game to protect your artistic autonomy, and you write about personal liberation on almost every record. After five decades of exploring the concept, what does true freedom look like to Gary Marks right now?

To me, freedom encompasses all areas of the human experience.

Freedom to form our own opinions and beliefs about God, gods, or no god.

Freedom to vote for those we think will best preserve that freedom.

Freedom from having to form any conclusions at all.

Freedom from the incessant dark thoughts of our own minds — finding the ability to break free of those kinds of thoughts, and feel truly alive in the moment.

Freedom to find our own way in life without having others define what that has to look like.

Basically, I’m describing America in its highest form, love in its highest form, and a level of decency and compassion for those who are different from us, so they can be free too.

My personal belief is, if we are not free in all those ways, we are not yet free.

I’m certainly holding myself to that standard as well, and working on it.

Your 1974 debut, ‘Gathering,’ holds an incredible reputation as the missing link between Tim Buckley and those classic early Impulse sessions. Carla Bley’s JCOA label handled the distribution, but the actual recording process at Ultra-Sonic Studios in New York remains the most fascinating part of the story. You had players like John Scofield and David Samuels making their recording debuts. The studio lore states your band laid down all nine tracks live in first takes with zero overdubs. When you look back at that energy, how did you capture lightning in a bottle on your first time steering a major studio session?

Naivety, most of all. There was no one from a record company telling us to change things, or telling us what “would work out there.” I was free of all that.

But technically, we also didn’t even know what overdubs were! Ultra-Sonic was a 16-track studio, state of the art. But all we knew was — we were being recorded.

First I played two songs with just John. Then we all gathered in the main room. We each had headphones on, and could really hear each other for the first time, since our rehearsals were pretty loud and chaotic. We felt like we knew the songs emotionally, and knew what we wanted them to sound like. Tim Buckley was, in fact, one of my inspirations for the free-form arranging and the instrumentation — especially having vibraphone be so prominent on many of the tracks…. Dylan and Joni Mitchell were my inspiration for the lyrics. In other words, they were going to have to be special or the song wasn’t going to make it onto the record.

So we all gathered in a big circle. I was sitting in a chair with my 12-string Martin, and my voice mic on a boom stand. The engineer worked on the sound for a few hours, then he said he was ready…. and we played the songs. Then we sat at the soundboard and listened and said, “Wow, this sounds great.” Then we all drove back to Boston….. And that’s how you capture lightning in a bottle, I guess.

A massive philosophical shift occurred between Upon Oanda’s ‘Wing’ in 1976 and your 1978 release ‘Thoughts of Why’. You posed the ultimate human question in the title track, asking the listener why we are here. To avoid leaving the record incomplete, you dove into Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization to find a concrete answer. That historical deep dive birthed the closing track, ‘The Grace to Be.’ Synthesizing centuries of human history into a single folk-rock arrangement is a massive undertaking. How did that intensive research phase change your approach to building a song?

I knew once I wrote the lyrics to ‘Thoughts of Why,’ if I didn’t come up with an answer to why, that song was basically meaningless. The search for an answer came from Will Durant, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, the Tao of Physics…. In fact, that time, that search was my entire education beyond high school, since I dropped out of college in my freshman year.

But ‘The Grace to Be’ didn’t come from an outline of what I learned. I actually found the answer from writing the song. That’s what formed my approach to writing songs and novels after that.

The “building blocks” don’t exist beforehand. Musically, everything comes from improvising — playing something interesting enough and surprising enough to make me record it.

Lyrically, or even when I start a novel, I start with a sentence. If the sentence naturally leads to a next thought, I write that down. Then sometimes the thoughts form a story. Then sometimes the story gets too long to be a song and I write a novel instead.

But it all comes from the free-flow state that I learned while improvising on the piano. Art Lande was my teacher for a number of years. I learned to trust the sound, trust the movement, and keep trusting. Control should only come after you understand what it is you’re creating.

I still write that way. I guess we could include that way of creating when talking about what freedom is. For me, writing in the flow, moment to moment, without pre-formed ideas, is the ultimate freedom.

From Mundane Magazine, March 2026:

With songs spanning nearly fifty years, the cult jazz-rock songwriter returns not with a comeback, but with a body of work that feels uncannily in dialogue with the present.

There is something quietly radical about an artist who keeps writing even when nobody is watching.

For decades, Gary Marks did exactly that. While the machinery of the music industry kept moving—tour cycles, visibility games, formula, pressure—Marks stepped away from the system without stepping away from the work. He continued writing songs about power, freedom, conscience, and the fragile state of the world, building an archive that now feels startlingly timely.

That archive becomes Crossroads, out April 18 via Lantern Heights Records, a new LP gathering work written between 1976 and 2021 into a single thematic body. Selected as an official Record Store Day UK/Europe release, the album is less a traditional return than a revelation: a chance to hear how one songwriter has spent decades tracing patterns most of us only recognize once they become unavoidable.

Its lead single, “I Guess It Never Stops,” carries the kind of devastating calm that makes its critique hit even harder. Environmental collapse, greed, power, social distortion—Marks doesn’t write about these things as abstract anxieties, but as recurring cycles of human behavior. That sensibility runs throughout Crossroads, an album shaped not by trend or topicality, but by a long view.

And that may be what makes it feel so current now. Marks was not trying to predict the future. He was writing about structures—political, psychological, moral—that keep repeating. In that sense, Crossroads is not nostalgic, even when it pulls from songs written in the 1970s. It is startlingly present.

Musically, the album bridges worlds. Earlier work leans toward folk-jazz, with collaborators such as John Scofield, Mark Isham, and Paul McCandless shaping its sonic language. Later material expands into classic rock textures, while still holding onto the improvisational spirit and emotional clarity that define Marks’ writing. The result is a record with range, but also with a strong internal line: every song is navigating some version of the same question.

How do we move through the inner and outer struggles of life without giving ourselves over to destruction, denial, or control?

For Mundane Magazine, Gary Marks reflects on why these songs are surfacing now, what it means to create outside the industry, why the album format still matters, and how complexity can deepen emotional truth rather than obscure it.

Question: Crossroads feels less like a comeback and more like a revelation. Why bring these decades of work into the light now, after so long outside the traditional system?

Answer: Lantern Heights wanted to release an album of songs I’d written that resonated with today’s political and cultural climate. I had 24 songs that fit that general concept. We chose 14 of the 24 because that’s all we could fit onto two sides of vinyl. The others will just have to wait. But it should be interesting to see what the reaction is after it’s released.

Question: You’ve spent much of your career refusing the machinery of the music industry—no touring, no chasing visibility. Was that a conscious rebellion, or simply the only way you could remain truthful in your work?

Answer: I personally didn’t like touring, singing the same songs over and over, and being told where to go and what to sing. I felt I could write more authentically without touring, and without the music business consciously or unconsciously shaping what I wrote about—or worse, telling me what I should or shouldn’t write.

In the end, I wanted to be proud of the songs I wrote 30 years later, even if no one heard them. That would be more fulfilling than potentially being successful in the business, but writing from a formula. There certainly are artists that could do both—Springsteen, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, Sting, Michael Jackson. Some artists feed off the pressure, the audience, the record company deadlines, or contractual demands. Some eventually get so big they can write their own rules. I love so much of their music. It’s timeless. It’s unique to them. They are the brilliant exceptions compared to what usually happens. I just didn’t see myself being able to do that, or wanting to try.

Question: The album spans nearly 50 years of songwriting, yet the themes—power, environmental collapse, conscience—feel eerily current. Do you see your work as prophetic, or is it more a reflection of patterns that never really change?

Answer: I never tried to forecast the future. I was just writing about the present back then, in a general way. So yes, I was consciously writing more about political patterns, and psychological patterns inside of us, that never change, or are hard to change.

But I think there are also changes going on right now in America that I never thought would happen after the Nixon era. What we all know is, no would-be dictator is going to allow true freedom to exist inside his or her own country. So if we really want the American dream to be more than just spoken or written ideals, we need to choose democracy over dictators. That’s the obvious part.

But this Supreme Court has now given the presidency itself the power of a king. This was never meant to be. Whatever you think of the outcome of the Trump presidency, it’s really not the point. The point is, all future presidents are going to have virtually limitless power—power to commit crimes, accept bribes, override Congress, defy the courts. That includes the next Democrat who becomes president too.

So, by focusing on the broader issues, my writing is more timeless than talking about a particular politician or party. I guess that’s why Lantern Heights thought Crossroads would be unique at this point in time, even though some of the songs are decades old.

Question: “I Guess It Never Stops” carries a quiet but devastating critique of humanity’s trajectory. When you write about these cycles of destruction, do you feel more hopeful or more resigned?

Answer: I think if we acknowledge the problems out in the open, then it’s possible someday positive change can come. So in that way, I’m hopeful. I’ve always been an optimist, because it’s a great way to stay sane and have a happier life. So I don’t go around thinking about these things hour by hour. But I do want to write about them and increase awareness, if possible, about the larger issues that need to be talked about. Because I also don’t think it’s going to serve anyone to stake their claim, and plant their victory flag on the beach, while ignoring the tidal wave forming out there.

Question: There’s something almost radical today about believing in the album as a complete body of work. What does the album format allow you to say that a single—or a moment—never could?

Answer: That’s such a great question, and such a great reason to love vinyl records. Because the band or writer can create a large, unified work that stands on its own as a singular piece of art. Crossroads is able to bridge decades of songs with a socio-political arc.

Some of the songs from the 1970s are more folk-jazz stylistically, with John Scofield playing guitar. Some of the later work is classic rock with guitarist Stef Burns taking amazing solos. Jazz virtuoso Paul McCandless takes solos over rock songs. So in that way there is great diversity. But the lyrics hold everything together because they are all about the inner and outer struggles we have to navigate our way through, here and now.

As far as the album format in general, I remember listening to The Beatles and trying to decipher their messages and their album covers. Then Sgt. Pepper was released. Then The Who followed that with their rock opera, Tommy. And, of course, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde in its own way. These, and so many other albums back then, became classics not because of one song, but because they had some underlying sound and message that unified the whole. Online music changed this. And that’s fine too. But Crossroads tries to bring back this idea of a “thematic” album. Even the album cover tells the story. Hopefully, it will stand the test of time.

Question: You’ve collaborated with musicians like John Scofield and Mark Isham early in their careers. How did those creative exchanges shape the sonic language you developed?

Answer: I could never have thought up arrangements that equaled the level of brilliance they created by improvising ideas on the fly. So the most important sonic influence was trusting improvisation as part of the arranging of a song. Letting go of the idea of note-by-note control.

Of course, first, we had to come to an emotional agreement of what I was trying to say, lyrically and musically. But once we agreed on that, with players like Paul McCandless, Michael Cochrane, Art Lande, David Samuels, Scofield and Mark Isham, and later Stef Burns and Tony Saunders, my job was to evolve my sound with them, while keeping everything within the emotional framework of the story or message of the song.

Question: Eight full albums existed in parallel to the industry—unreleased, undistributed, almost hidden. What does it mean to create without an audience in mind?

Answer: I did have an audience in mind. I had my musical muses, and my family and friends, and musicians I respected, as well as some diehard fans. So I would write for myself in isolation. But then, if I played that song for them and it didn’t get the reaction I was hoping for, I’d throw it out, or make big changes. If it did get the reaction I was hoping for, I knew I’d written something worth recording.

Question: The title Crossroads suggests decision, tension, and possibility. Do you feel like this moment—both personally and culturally—is a point of no return?

Answer: It’s not a point of no return at all. It’s the exact opposite. A crossroads by definition is an intersection that requires choice. We either choose a way to move forward, or head in the wrong direction.

Do we act on environmental awareness and scientific facts, or just take what we need and let future generations deal with the fallout? Do we buy into the terrible things we say inside our own minds about other people until we are saying those things about ourselves? Or do we read the signs and fight back internally, and choose to create a more peaceful, happier reality? Each of these crossroads are intersections we come to often. Sometimes daily. The paths we choose define us.

Question: Your music often bridges jazz, rock, and something more philosophical. How do you approach complexity without losing emotional clarity?

Answer: That’s a cool question. I do think it’s important not to choose anything for purely intellectual reasons. It has to be a part of what you feel, and how you naturally hear music. I’ve never tried to be jazzy, or complex. But at one point I became very curious and excited by complicated chord formations and asymmetric meter.

I studied these things when I was learning piano from Michael Cochrane and then Art Lande. Each of them were amazing teachers because they taught me as a songwriter learning piano, not just as a pianist. So for instance, as part of my piano lessons, Art Lande would have me sit with a hand drum and play for 5 minutes in 5/4, then 7/4, and 11/4. Then I would improvise on piano, and suddenly these asymmetric meters would become part of what I heard, and how I played.

Or I would just press down on a bunch of random notes in a key and not try to name the chord. But if I liked the sound, I would learn it in all keys until it became part of my sound. If these kinds of rhythmic and harmonic complexities become a part of how you play, and how you hear, then words like jazz or rock become meaningless. It’s just your sound. And the emotional clarity isn’t lost, the complexity just gives you more ways to express what you feel.

Question: After five decades of writing, what still compels you to pick up the pen? Is it urgency, curiosity, or something closer to responsibility?

Answer: I don’t feel a responsibility to write. In fact, I think feeling a responsibility too often turns any kind of art into work, and formula. Writing, for me, has to come from improvisation, without deliberately starting out trying to capture anything. Once an idea captures my attention, I love following it and seeing where it leads. Sometimes it leads to a very pleasant dead end that I bow to and move on. Sometimes it becomes part of my next album.

What feels most striking about Gary Marks is not simply that he kept writing outside the spotlight. It is that he kept writing with the same seriousness of thought, the same musical curiosity, and the same refusal to flatten complexity into easy messaging. Crossroads is powerful because it does not feel like recovered material dusted off for relevance. It feels like proof that relevance was there all along.

In an era dominated by immediacy, singles, and attention economies, Marks returns with something slower and more demanding: a thematic album that asks to be heard as a whole, not skimmed for highlights. The politics are there, the environmental anxiety is there, the moral unease is there—but so is a deep faith in music as a structure for thinking and feeling at the same time.

That may be the quiet radicalism of Crossroads. Not that it predicts the present, but that it reminds us how long the signs have been visible, how often we arrive at the same intersections, and how much art can still do when it refuses formula.

Gary Marks never stopped writing.
He simply waited for the right moment to let the work speak again.

Questions from Fans!

Do you consider yourself to be primarily a songwriter, a singer, a pianist, a guitarist, or a novelist?

“Songwriting and novel writing are the most important to me. I also love improvising on the piano. I try to improvise every day.”

How do you come up with some of the unique chord voicings you use in your songs?

“Discovering them isn’t a mental or a theoretical thing; it’s improvisational. I like to explore tactile and visual patterns. They can only be named in context, but if I really like a particlular pattern or voicing I’ll learn it in every key, and it becomes ‘a Gary chord.’ In fact, I name other people’s unique chord voicings after them — There are Joni chords, or Keith chords, (Joni Mitchell and Keith Jarrett). Open tunings on guitar present another opportunity to make up chords, or even an entire chordal systems. David Crosby in his song Guinevere, and Dave Matthews come to mind. All of these writers are great teachers for me.”

Why don’t you like to play live or tour anymore?

“I actually like playing live, for about 5-10 people at a time, when I can see faces, and when we can all hang out together afterwards. Clubs aren’t enjoyable for me because it’s really hard to control the sound and the technical environment. Concert halls are so big it too often becomes impersonal for me. And the travel involved is very hard -- being away from friends and family. I’d rather just stay home and write, then make the songs come to life in the recording studio.”

How do you reconcile your family life with your writing?

“It’s not exactly reconcilable. Maybe I’d write more songs if I were living alone. But writing is about recording the changes in your life, not changing your life so you can write.

I try to play piano and guitar most every day, then one day I go into this ‘other space’ for reasons unknown to me, and I might write a bunch of songs in 48 hours with no sleep – a whirlwind thing where it seems like nothing I play or sing can go wrong, I’m plugged in. Or, I’ll write a novel in ten days. When I’m in that creative whirlwind, Theresa tells the kids — don’t go under your father’s desk and start pulling his socks off today, he’s writing…. But I’ve had to learn and re-learn not to try to force things to happen. Creativity on that level seems to have its own cycles.”

Who has been your favorite musician to play with?

“I’ve been really fortunate to play with virtuoso players like John Scofield, Art Lande, Paul McCandless, Michael Cochrane, David Samuels, Mark Isham, Stef Burns, Tom Finch, Tony Saunders -- these guys are among the best in the world on their instruments, and also have brilliant creative minds. So any time I’ve played with any of them, I feel honored.”

How do you choose your band members?

“The most important thing is, they need to be better players than I am. Because, for me, the goal is to make each of my songs come alive, and sometimes that takes great skill on an instrument I don’t play. We need to tell the song’s story accurately and creatively. That kind of story-telling takes special players who don’t get hung up on technique. When the song neds to convey a unique harmonic or rhythmic idea, it’s never a problem. So for the sake of my songs, I find the best players I can who are also tuned in with me emotionally and creatively.

Do you have a favorite song of yours?

“If a song I’m about to record is not a favorite of mine, I throw it out. So, honestly, the songs I’ve recorded are my favorites.

Your “sound” keeps changing over the years -- from folk to jazz to rock. What makes you want to change your style?

“Well, I think most writers evolve and change naturally when they are not interfered with by the industry, and don’t get in their own way. In my case, I guess I have devolved from writing songs with complex harmonies and asymmetric meters in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, back to my harmonic and rhythmic roots – rock — where it’s all about emotion and feeling it, and sharing that feeling with the listener when you’re playing…. Jazz was an amazing learning experience. It helped me learn the art of music; it allowed me to understand the piano on a deep level. So many of the best players in the world are jazz players. They are able to create in the moment. I wanted to know what they did and how they were able to get there, and feel under my hands. But I never had a desire to play a book of jazz standards. Honestly, I’ve never had the desire to play other people’s music professionally. Fortunately, my teachers when I was in my twenties, Michael Cochrane and Art Lande, didn’t set that as a goal for me. They were very unique teachers. John Scofield talked me out of going to Berkeley School of Music, for instance. They all realized and appreciated that I was a songwriter first and foremost, and that I wasn’t going to want to fit into a stylistic format. So they encouraged me to find my own way, and look at styles of music as someone else’s definition of what I was writing, but not defining myself that way.”

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