[Captions are auti-generated] Hey, I'm William Shatner,
and this is The First Time.
First time I wrote a song
would have been with Ben Folds on an
album called Has Been
My Favorite shows on TV.
12 minutes of advertising.
I think you find that kind of time.
We started writing songs and I
thought, hey, wait a minute, I can
write a lyric about this.
I'd written poetry and
screenplays and books
and stuff like that. But finding
the precise word,
what a lot of people don't
understand is you can
paint with words if you have the
vocabulary.
I was just reading about how Vermeer
painted and repainted
the use of light.
So his subtlety with paint
is the subtlety you can use with
words if you have
what do you call that thing again,
the the pink thing?
Well, if you have that in words,
what is that word?
It'll come to us.
I had heard or realized
that tambourine was really
a cry for drugs, Mr.
Temperament. Where are you?
So when I chose that song
to perform, I was
doing an album about
lyrics and literary
material, so I chose
Mr. Tambourine Man as a cry
for help.
I'm not sleepy
and there is no place I'm
going to and chose the literary
material that accompanied that
segued into it.
Cyrano de Bergerac, the
literary material ends.
I may climb to no great heights, but
I will climb alone.
So it was a guy who was doing this
alone and without the help of drugs.
That was my connection to
who? Mr. Tambourine Man, which
without the connection, you don't
know what I'm doing, which is what
most people realize.
What's he doing?
Well, that's what I was doing.
What's a country?
You see, the definitions
are somewhat
obtuse, for example,
on this album.
Bill, there is a country song
called So Far from the Moon.
My marriage had been canceled.
So I should Brad
Paisley companies me
and sing the song Will I
Do My Thing? But it became a country
song because Brad Paisley did
it so far from.
It is 5:00 a.m.
in a honey, and it
became a song,
and I don't know whether we thought
of it as a country song, because
one of the problems of this
album, Bill,
is that Rob, the poet
and I would work a song or the
lyrics over and we send it to
today and would lay a rhythmic
bet and then I would do it.
But what was the character
of the song?
In some cases, not
all. But in some cases the song
became what the
artist we asked to accompany me
was.
Years and years ago,
my kids were in love with the Jonas
Brothers. I'm a sucker for.
They were on tour, so figure out
how long ago that was and
they wanted to go see the Jonas
Brothers. So because
I had a little Paul got tickets,
said, do you want to meet them is
where we got the meet.
So we got to meet the Jonas
Brothers. And I met Joe Jonas
did not realizing that
many, many years later.
Joe Jonas would hear some
of the songs that the three of us
had written.
And want to be a part of it.
I don't
care.
And brought it from his label
to Republik, which brought it to
Universal.
What was the first the
you know, in the old days
before they started projecting
backgrounds and stuff like that
or whole sets, so
you'd be you now are frequently
in the middle of nothing.
You're in front of a green screen,
which may be 360 degrees up
down those with a projecting all
over. So you're in the middle of
nowhere. And yet when you see the
first image you're in that, you
know, you're in the Andes or
in the Roman Empire, the movie sets
can be marvelously wonderful,
complex and taken
months to make this set was
different from any other set I've
been on. And I vaguely
remember walking onto
it. And the leading actor
and I look on, I think,
my God, this is going to be my home
for at least this year.
Wow.
It was all in wonder.
I met Leonard on the set of
Star Trek when the cast was going
to start filming.
I do remember vividly
him saying when there was a fight
between us, a staged fight between
the characters. He said, you
know, Spock wouldn't do that
because first of many times
I would say that, well,
what would he do? Well, I don't
know. He might pinch and
he pinched me on the shoulder.
And I, as a reaction
fell to the ground, everybody
laughed and we that became the
pinched.
I went on stage in front of fifteen
thousand people not knowing
what I was going to say, having no
written material whatsoever at a
Star Trek convention in the 70s.
That was a frightening experience
and took many experiences
like it to become accustomed to.
That was, I think, the first
or the second, because they had a
first that I thought, hey, I'm a
serious actor. I don't do that kind
of thing. And then I heard there
were fifteen thousand people
waiting. I thought, OK, that's the
kind of thing I do.