I was writing with different people in Nashville - whoever I could. Eddie Hinton came on the scene about 1963, and about four years later we wrote a ton of songs together. I drifted around, but Eddie and I had some cuts through the '60s and '70s. I went on the road with Kris Kristofferson in 1970.
But Eddie does not make all the decisions. Eddie can listen to reason; Eddie can be swayed or talked in or out of certain things. Eddie allows other people to lead in this band and to have certain roles that are very fundamental to the decision-making process.
When I first got to Nashville, somebody said that [Kris Kristofferson and I] were the only two people who could describe Dolly Parton without using their hands.
Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
We were playing a small club in San Diego and the power had gone out in the building. Eddie had a lighter and kept us lit backstage. We became very good friends and spent a lot of time together including hearing Eddie sing in some of the bands he was in at the time.
Everything that Eddie has said about me is the total opposite of what really happened. Eddie says I wanted to be a solo artist. No, Eddie wanted to be a solo artist.
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun.
If there was a new Chris Eubank coming through, it wouldn't happen, because Eddie would jump in front of them and make it about the Eddie Hearn show. Where's the Naseem Hamed of today? He doesn't allow them to flourish.
Malcolm and Eddie Show,' a lot of other people came and went, but Malcolm and Eddie were steady on the case.
Hemingway was very sparse in his writing. Kris Kristofferson is like that. He can take four words and say it all.
He really just wanted to go about his business. I would put Eddie Murray in the same category as Andre Dawson. He would like to kid around with the press and (be surly), but he was a total professional. I see why he is a Hall of Famer. I am just glad I had the pleasure of playing for Eddie (Murray) for one year.
These days I don't look to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I've got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea. I'm sure that I'm still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well......I can't play like Eddie Van Halen. I wish I could. I sat down to try some of those ideas and can't do it. I don't know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more.
I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
Everything was a lot more challenging for me because of who my brother was. If I were in the film, someone would had said that I got the part because Eddie's in the film. If I wrote a script, folks would say that I didn't really write that: that Eddie did and I threw my name on it.
When I wrote for myself before as an artist, I probably wrote about 15, 20 songs a year. I thought that was a lot. Then, when I first started writing for the people, I wrote, like, 65 songs in a year for two years in a row.
I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.
I was born in St. Louis and lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, before my family moved to Nigeria, where they're from. We lived there for three or four years and came back to the States when I was about ten. I realised that I'd gone from place to place not fitting in. The thing that helped me fit in when moving around and not having a ton of friends was that I could make art. That was the through-line.