"My grandmother started teaching me songs when I was two. She was very proud that she had taught me eight or nine songs and I could sing them. We lived down in Van Nuys and in those days the whole valley was just orchards and the streets were dirt then. I'd sit up in this old walnut tree and she'd get the neighbors to come around. That was my first experience with an audience—three years old, sitting in a walnut tree singing to our neighbors. I sang songs like Bell Bottom Trousers and Danny Boy, and other Irish and English folk songs. They applauded. That was my first experience getting feedback for doing something other than making trouble. I was a very mischievous kid, I was bounced around from one situation to another, and music was always a very centering thing for me."

"So this fellow came along and married my mother and adopted me—gave me his name—and he asked me, 'What do you want?' So I told him, 'I want a piano and a baby sister.' So, he gave me a piano right there, and he and my mother had three daughters, so I got three sisters. Over the years, he has continued to be very supportive of me."

"I diddled around on the piano for a long time and sang in choirs, and in school I was always in the glee club singing Oklahoma and all these shows that I just loved singing. When I was ten, they started giving me some piano lessons and I rebelled against having to sit down and practice. I have always had this authority problem. And still, when somebody tells me to do something, I'd rather not. (laughs) So I didn't."

"I had an innate ability to listen to a song on the radio and be able to go to the piano and just play it. So I was playing Dave Brubeck jazz progressions and Taste of Honey, while my teacher—a very stuffy and British, classical teacher—wanted me tolearn these stupid little exercises. He'd say, 'Well try doing...this' and I'd sit down and play Take Five or Taste of Honey or whatever. And so he gave up on me and I gave up on lessons at about the same time. So, I pretty much taught myself."

"One of my father's clients was Randy Brooks who was a big trumpet player in the United States at that time. He had a number one record as a trumpet player, which is hard to do, called Tenderly. He gave me a trumpet and I started taking lessons from him, which was really an honor, to have this guy giving me lessons. Randy had a stroke soon afterwards and still played a little bit, but not much. For years I played that trumpet in a band and in the school band."

"But I never fell in love with the trumpet like I did with the guitar. I picked up the guitar when I was about sixteen. I started getting interested in writing songs, but I didn't sit down and seriously write a song that I wrote down and put down on tape until I was twentyfour or twentyfive. I started writing pretty seriously about the time I was going through my first divorce. I guess pain causes a certain amount of creativity. Anyway, I didn't cut off my ear, but...I thought about it." (laughs)