People like Prince don't have to care about anything, but they care because they want music for the future to be great.
A lot of times with artists from back in the day, they do a new album and they don't sell as much. People say they love them, and it doesn't always translate to new music.
I mean, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, I think the young kids sell lot of records. But for an older kind of artist, more of a sort of heritage, vintage type of artist, you have to think outside the box.
It's not like I'm the first man ever to do this, y'know? You gotta go back to Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr. Those are people who've done music well and movies well, and y'know, Frank Sinatra and Elvis and all these dudes have made the transition. I don't know about Elvis, 'bout doin' 'em good, y'know? It's nothin' new.
Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.
When I came up, there was room for the new and the old. For every new artist, an old one didn't have to be pushed out.
I would like to see more airplay for all artists, no matter what age. I think there's a lot of money being spent toward the young guys, but a lot of the older guys are the ones who blazed the trail for those young guys.
I've studied Charlie Chaplin for years. I've studied Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, all of them. I don't play around. This is not a game.
I admire those old road dogs, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan. That's their life.
I grew up listening to all kinds of music. When I came up, you would hear people like Marvin Gaye talking about Sarah Vaughan. You would go to a show and see Ella Fitzgerald performing the music of the Beatles.
Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.
I'm really influenced by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.
You just don't see the same type of all-purpose entertainers nowadays.
Once you establish a foundation of knowing what the greatest recording artists of all time were... Wouldn't you want your kids to know this stuff?
I think someone like Jack Kirby, for instance, would suffer greatly in the transition from print to digital were he still around.
I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'
Why is this generation looking to aging icons like John Lennon and Bob Dylan for inspiration? Why not raising up their own icons?
With the new ways of getting music out, you don't need a label if you're a legacy artist.
A lot of festivals on a worldwide basis that I am seeing, they're trying to multi-genre it. Like, they put a wild card band on, like, us old guys that happen to have a record that has stayed in pop culture for as long as it has.
The difference between me and the newer artists is that I have the history with the architects, the masters that started the music. I know where the music came from.
People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment.
Being a new artist, I was trying to make a good album and hope that people like Kool Moe Dee and Melle Mel and some of the firstborns appreciated it. I was being influenced by them brothers there. That's where I got my start and my first listen.
Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner are the funniest dudes ever, and they have great careers on their own. They made great art in the '90s, and they still have dinner three times a week.
