(upbeat music)
- Tell me about the first song you ever wrote,
and when it was and how old you were and what it was about.
David how 'about you, do you remember your first one?
- I do, I do.
My dad was a cinematographer, who made films.
And so I thought originally, well I've got an in there.
I'll get to be an actor, mainly because of girls.
That was sort of my main motivation in life at that point.
- Makes all the good songs.
- But then when I went down to the coffee house
and I sang and I realized I loved singin'.
And so the first song I wrote, I was following,
there was a folk duo called Bud and Travis
and Travis Edmonson one of the two guys.
They had split up and he was playing at
the coffee house in Hollywood
and I was sort of sitting there hawkin' his changes.
You know, I would go there at night and sneak in
and watch how he played the guitar.
Figure out how he was doin' what he was doin'
'cause he was pretty good at it.
And I wrote a song for him and he recorded it right away
and it was a terrible song.
- Your first song got cut?
- [Rebecca] That's pretty cool.
- Seriously.
- [Rebecca] Yeah.
- Got cut immediately and it was all good.
Which is even worse 'cause it's down on a record.
I don't think I wrote a song
that I would have played for any of you
until I was in the Birds.
I wrote one called Everybody's Been Burned.
That was the first decent song I wrote.
But before that there were several absolute crap songs.
There's no question, after that all genius.
- Oh, of course.
- Were you, I mean, as a writer, I mean,
I know I'm certainly this way, really hard on yourself
and hard on your songs?
Like harder than you would be on other peoples, yeah.
- Yeah, I mean, when your ego's involved.
- Sure.
- [David] You want to be good.
- Yeah.
- And the bands that I was in, not now.
I'm in a cooperative band now
but I was in very competitive bands.
So we were always trying to top each other
and we were frantically trying.
- Yeah.
- To, you know, make the songs be
as good as we possibly could.
- Did that make the songs better
than in your cooperative situation?
- I think cooperative works better than, you know.
I think collaborative works better than competitive.
Competitive winds up at war.
Collaborative winds up at a symphony orchestra.
When I was a little kid I saw a symphony orchestra
and it stuck in me that the power of the whole thing was
all those elbows moving at the same.
I got the picture that it was big
because all those people were cooperating
to make a one thing, that really stuck in me.
(upbeat music)
- David, tell me about getting involved
with Little Pink House.
How you first got involved
and how the song sort of came to you.
- It's a very odd circumstance.
I actually wrote the song before they made the movie
and here's how it happened.
There's a woman in, I think it's Connecticut.
She had a house, it was her house.
It was her biggest deal in her life.
She was a nurse, very plain, ordinary little woman.
She loved this house dearly, she painted it pink.
There is a thing called eminent domain
where towns can take stuff for supposedly the common good.
It's misused every time that they use it.
It's always somebody getting paid under the table
to take public land and give it to somebody wrongly.
Every time, that's how it gets used.
That's what happened here.
They took her house away from her to make
a shopping center or something and they never even used it.
She fought it all the way to
the supreme court passionately and lost
and they bulldozed the house.
A friend of mine wrote a book about it.
Jeff Benedict, and I loved the book.
It was a very emotional book, she's a very brave woman.
And he called me up one day and said listen,
we want to make a movie about it.
Would you consider writin' a song?
And I said boy, I'd love to write a song about that.
So I went to my son, James Raymond
who is one of my main writing partners.
Brilliant musician, and we sat down and we wrote that song.
And it works, I wish they'd used it inside the film
instead of it over the credits at the end.
I think it would have been even stronger
but for me it was a great experience.
This group really felt like creating something,
you know, correctly, I went,
I felt good about the whole thing,
entire process, I loved it.
(upbeat music)
- Everyone, 'cause I'm sure you guys
always get this question, like what's the process like?
'Cause I think people who don't write songs
are fascinated with how they get written.
- What comes first, the words or the music?
- I think that too, like I could ask you
how you made a movie all day.
'Cause it seems like magic to me
but you know, it literally, like does every song
not come from the most bizarre place, like it's just.
- Yeah.
- Here's the best note anybody
ever gave me about writing lyrics.
Mitchell, damn her for being so good.
She was my only for about a year
and I produced her first record.
And I love her and I still love her.
- You mentioned that a few times before cameras came on.
- I mention it a couple times.
Well, I can't help it,
I think she's a brilliant singer, song writer.
She told me a great thing, she said write that down.
I said write what down?
She said what you just said.
I said what did I just say?
She said something good, you do that all the time.
You compose something with some words
and it's really good and you don't remember it.
If you don't write it down, it didn't happen, click.
If you don't write it down it didn't happen.
Thank you, Joni, 'cause then I started writin' it down.
If I get four words in a row I like, I write 'em down.
'Cause later, you go back and you go oh,
well, wait a minute, then it could go, and you,
and you got a spark.
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