Finally one good enough to get me in The Guardian's
top 100 songwriters of all time.
I'm not bitter about that,
you know, at all, that kind of thing.
But one time I came home from making a record
that I forgot which one it was,
but I was proud of it.
You know, it happened so infrequently.
And I was going to watch television.
I watched the making
MTV used to have these shows,
the making of this record and that
re cord.
And they had it, and I was watching,
I felt I could take it.
So I watched Stevie Wonder,
it was like Songs in the Key of Light.
And I'm watching him,
and he says, well, this is what I did.
And he's got his synthesizer out,
making that sound he always made.
He put one layer down,
and then he put another layer
down.
And it was like watching
Bach.
And, you know, by the time I watched it,
I wanted to shoot myself.
You know, I thought,
and that's what everyone's
been telling me,
oh, you're so great.
So I look in the paper,
and it's Leonard Cohen,
the greatest songwriter of all time,
and there's lyrics by Dylan in the paper,
which are good, by the way.
I forgot how good he was
60 years ago.
I'm just kidding. My God,
it's so easy to talk badly about other people.
Why do we do it?
Does that make me any bigger?
This is a song about
my mother's town,
which is incapable of fixing itself
and someone should have fixed it.