A Quote by Al Kooper
The place that I worked I used to joke about it. There was a, every morning at 10:30 I'd come into work and I'd go into this cubicle that had a little upright piano and fake white cork bricks on the wall, and a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside. Every day from 10 to 6, we'd go in there and pretend that we were 13 year old girls and write these songs. That was the gig.
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I write in the mornings. I get up every morning at about six in the morning and write until nine, hop in the shower and go to work. Nighttime I usually reserve for re-reading what I've done that morning. I would be lying if I said I stuck to that schedule every single day.
I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.
I don't go to an office, so I write at home. I like to write in the morning, if possible; that's when my mind is freshest. I might write for a couple of hours, and then I head out to have lunch and read the paper. Then I write for a little bit longer if I can, then probably go to the library or make some phone calls. Every day is a little bit different. I'm not highly routinized, so I spend a lot of time wandering around New York City with my laptop in my bag, wondering where I'm going to end up next. It's a fairly idyllic life for someone who likes writing.
I create my own schedule, so you start out each day and you say, "Okay, from 10 to 11 I'm going to write," and on the dot at 10, I went downstairs, got dressed like I was going to work, and at 11 I stopped. I don't know why, what kind of wizardry about that worked, but having the structure for a month, I was dishing out songs.
During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something].
I used to leave my house at 6:30 in the morning, and I would visit 10 shops every Saturday, starting at the furthest shop I'd decided to go to that day, ending up in Oxford Street 12 hours later.
I'm into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, "Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there's someone outside with a gun that's saying, 'Don't come out until you write something.'"
One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life.
I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.
It takes a long time to write 10 good songs. Sometimes you have to write 30 to get 10 good ones.
What we've witnessed in the past 25 or 30 years is just incredible. We've birthed 30,000 or 40,000 restaurants. I used to go to Europe every year to get experience [and ideas]. I don't go to Europe anymore. I go to Oregon, I go to Washington, I go to Louisiana, I go to Little Rock, I go to Austin, I travel New York City. I don't go to Europe anymore.
I take a lot of enjoyment out of imagining myself as... I dunno... a wall. I keep adding bricks to my wall or little house.
I have to go with Data's makeup, because that was basically every day, 10 months out of the year, for seven years. There were only a couple of days that I had to endure for Dr. Soong.
For a moment there I convinced myself I had my back against a wall, and suddenly the only wall I find my back against is that of a 10 by 10 writing shack in Glendale, where the summer days average between 90 and 100 and each song can be quantified in the sweat it took to write it. There is no ac in hell, and sometimes you've got to get down to get up. The train is gaining speed I should think.
I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone.
The only thing we took out was the Constitution of the State of Mississippi and the interpretation of the Constitution. We had 63,000 people registered on the Freedom Registration form. And we tried from every level to go into the regular Democratic Party medium. We tried from the precinct level. The 16th of June when they were holding precinct meetings all across the state, I was there and there was eight of us there to attend the meeting, and they had the door locked at 10 o'clock in the morning. This is what's happening in the State of Mississippi.
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