J. J. Cale

“I'm a great believer in freedom of speech.”

“Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing - it's either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I've done on occasion.”

“I try and manufacture recordings to sound spontaneous. Then, some things are spontaneous.”

“Everybody lives in a city, cause there's not too many people in the small towns who can find work.”

“I tried to play anything people would hire me to play, because I was a musician.”

“I'm so old, I can remember before rock 'n' roll come along.”

“On the 'Escondido' album, I think it took us a month to make that album.”

“The music is the same if you go all the way back to the first albums I made or the middle or whatever. The thing that's different is the lyrics.”

“You don't really need a lot of hype and to be famous to sell songs.”

“I didn't have a phone there for about 10 years.”

“I was mainly a songwriter; I really wasn't much of a performer.”

“That's the nice thing about songwriting: You don't have to punch a clock or be in a specific place to do it. There's really a lot of freedom to it.”

“I rarely have any contact with the artists who cover my songs.”

“I would never ever sing at all if I could get away with it. I had pitch problems, no range. So what I did was manipulate the sound... that way you couldn't tell that I wasn't very good.”

“Playing out in a band all the time at least you made money. Even if you have a hit song, it takes about two years to pay.”

“I'd like to have the fortune, but I don't care too much about the fame.”

“I wanted to be able to play music, and then when I went out in my private life, my personal life, I didn't want to be famous.”

“I was kind of a sideman. Then I became kind of a singer-songwriter.”

“The only albums that I have personally named were 'number 5,' 'number 8' and 'number 10.'”

“Probably the only thing that I really don't like about being an old guy is so many of the people who understand what we know are gone.”