I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.
I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.
Our tunes aren't just sing-along tunes: they're very complex. After a few days of that, you gotta take a break.
I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.
I started out as a pianist and singer in gay and piano bars - they were the only places I could get a job singing show tunes.
Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.
When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.
Blue grass was the outgrowth of Irish music. As a matter of fact a lot the tunes, a lot of the melodies and the jigs... have different names but are actually the same tunes.
Every time there's a cut in the action, we joke and dance around, there's show tunes and fart noises.
I have tons of tunes, maybe 30 tunes that I still think are great, and only because some jerk at a record company didn't think it was great, it's not out there.
Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
I did a lot of musical theater when I was younger, and I really hope to get back there someday. I miss singing a lot. I listen to Broadway show tunes in my car and sing along to them.
When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!
It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.
I like old tunes when I'm driving. They're fun and uplifting. Billy Ocean, that kind of thing.