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stuff he wrote and recorded in the '40s in some
really big movies and TV shows. I called him up
one day and I said, " I just want to congratulate
you. All of us here at TAXI are so happy that at
your advanced age you're making money doing
music, and that the stuff that you recorded in the
mid-'40s is now finding an audience out there. "
And he said-and I'm cleaning it up here a bit-
but he said, " Listen young man, I don't give a
[damn] about the money; it's the fact that this
music has been sitting on a shelf since 1943, " or
whatever it was, " and finally, through your efforts
in getting me to a publisher that got it in all
these movies and TV shows, millions of people are
hearing my music, and that's all I care about. " It
made me cry.
Yeah, and there's a little sidebar on that. My
agent is a guy named Sterling Ward. He just
turned 100. He just made the deal on my most

" If you're a writer, keep reading, even
if you can't find work. Read the good
stuff. Get it into your head; get it into
your DNA.' I'm sure there's an analogy
in music-keep listening, exposing
yourself to what other people are
doing, and studying them... "
-Steven Pressfield
recent book a couple of months ago. He made
the original deal for Jack Kerouac's On the Road
back in 1953, or something like that. The offer
was 900 bucks; Sterling got them up to a
thousand!
That's great! You know, you just talked about the
advice you go to " Read. Just read. " Well, the
advice I give to our members when they get frustrated by our screeners telling them, " This is
really good, but it's just not contemporary
enough. " And more often than not, the people in
the industry want contemporary-sounding music,
because the story is contemporary. It's taking
place in a contemporary time period, so they need
music that matches that. And our members get
very frustrated when they hear " not contemporary, " and my advice to them is, " Just listen to
contemporary music. Go on Spotify and listen to
the charts on Spotify every week. Don't turn on
oldies radio. " I mean, I personally love The Eagles,
The Beatles, Steely Dan. If I were writing music,
or if I was going back to engineering or producing, the stuff that I would do would sound like
The Beatles, The Eagles, and Steely Dan. I would
have to spend a year absorbing myself into contemporary music so that I could analyze. What's
66 RECORDING March 2021

the hi-hat doing? Oh, that snare sound is a little
different. Oh, the vocal doesn't start right on the
beat, it starts before the " one beat. " All these little things. Melodies have become different,
choruses used to get big and pop, but now they're
more even; there is all this little ear candy around
them that designates it as the chorus. The rules of
the game and the fashions change, and you have
to keep up on it if you want to be in the game. It's
just that simple. So, yeah, read, read, read, listen
to music, listen to music.
Although, let me take the opposite side of that,
Michael. Sometimes... If you think about it, a
guy like Steve Jobs and the products that he
came up with-the Macintosh, the iMac, the
iPhone-nobody was waiting for those products, right? He led them; he was ahead of
them. If he had done focus groups and said,
" What do you guys want? What can I give you, "
Nobody would've come up with the iPhone, but
he did... So there's a lot to be said for being a
leader and for being ahead of people. And I

" There's a lot to be said for being a
leader and for being ahead of people.
And I know it's hard to sell that stuff,
but it's also a question of sort of
what's your muse telling you to write?
What is your heart telling you to
write in terms of music? "
-Steven Pressfield
know it's hard to sell that stuff, but it's also a
question of sort of what's your muse telling
you to write? What is your heart telling you to
write in terms of music?
Well, there's an adage in the record industry, that
is, " Just do what you do, do it well, and eventually
the industry will come around to what you do. "
But not everybody is going to be like our 96-year-

old TAXI member, where it did come back around
to him; it just took like 50 years to get there.
So, it's the ongoing battle of art and commerce,
and a lot of the creative types, in all the creative
fields I know, might say, " Why do I have to follow
a story arc? " Well, because human beings like
things presented to them in a pattern within
art-with structure. You know, songwriters say,
" I'm just going to be the greatest songwriter ever;
I'm just going to create what my muse tells me. "
But I think if you develop the craft and then let
the muse take hold, that your stuff comes out
better, because you've got the underlying support
of the craft. Which you obviously earned by
spending all those years writing and reading. So,
yeah, you should follow your music, but you have
to have the craft as well.
Here I am telling Steven Pressfield... Oh man,
this is one of those moments when I watch the
Road Rally later, I'm gonna go, " What the hell was
I thinking? "
Anyway, art and commerce. Any thoughts about
the ongoing battle?
I have certainly been one of the guys that is on
the art side, in the sense that the two books
that were my most successful in terms of novels were The Legend of Bagger Vance, and the
book that came after that, Gates of Fire, that
was about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.
Both of those books, if you think about the
idea for them, sound like the dumbest idea you
could possibly imagine-the least commercial
ideas. And I thought so as I was writing them. I
thought, " Nobody is gonna like this except me;
nobody is gonna be interested in this except
me. " But I was seized by both of them. You
know, I absolutely had to do it, and those were
the ones that were the most successful. And
when I've had ideas where I think, " Ah, this is
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