Jam Cruise is actually a comfortable place for me. My jamming skills and my improvisational skills have improved immensely as I've gone more solo, because I've had this opportunity.
Swimming upstream in the music business is a hard thing to do.
If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome!
There's always a personal satisfaction in writing a song by yourself. You get the inspiration, and see it through, and you're done. It's focused and very personal.
I realized if I'm not really making an album, I don't have to be concerned about things like stylistic consistency, pacing, a coherent mood. All that stuff goes out the window.
Having a mustache and never smiling became a permanent component of my persona through the quaintly self-important decade of the seventies.