Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and something else takes over, something comes through my fingers. The muse, God, luck: you can give it a name if you want, but I’ve no idea what it is. I just know straight away where the melody’s going to go. Sometimes a song only takes as long to write as it does to listen to. ‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’ was like that – I sat down, read the lyric and played it, pretty much the same as you hear on the record. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. If I don’t like what I’ve done after about forty minutes, I give up and move on to
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