If you play guitar and know who Richard Thompson is, you’ll probably find his Gear and Tunings Q&A an interesting read. If you don’t play guitar, there’s an assortment of
mp3’s available from his site, both serious and otherwise. His 1000 Years of Popular Music album is a brilliant idea, well worth checking out.

In writing songs, you ought to pull things into a sharper focus, so you draw characters who are larger than life, and you write about experiences that perhaps most people don’t have from day to day. People are not really interested in the story of a soccer dad, necessarily. Unless it’s the story of a soccer dad who can’t take any more and shoots his family. There’s a ballad. There’s your contemporary “Tom Dooley.”