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1. 

   Jim the Realtor on April 8, 2020 at 3:25 am

   What’s the best part of success?
   Being able to find a car on eBay and just buy it. I go window-shopping online and pick five cars I want, but I’ve got no place to put ’em. Even when I was a mailman, I thought success was, if you can get all your bills paid and you get to sleep late and your friends don’t talk about you, that’s success.

   What does being happy do to your songwriting?
   It slows it down. Not that all I wrote about were disasters, but some of the best stuff is. When you get your heart broken, you’ve got all the time in the world to write about it: how it feels, what the temperature was that day. When you’re happy, the last thing you want to do is slow down and write a song, unless it’s “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

   Your wife, Fiona, is Irish, and you live over there part-time. What’s the best part of living there?
   The Guinness. Guinness is a dreamy, dreamy beer when you get the right stuff. And the Irish are really nice people. And there’s characters. I met a guy named Johnny Cagney who was about 85, and he told me he’s written over 900 ballads and proceeded to sing some of them to me. We got a cottage just south of Galway town. The town’s got nine pubs and two grocery stores [laughs]. You just stop in for a beer here and there. Pretty soon, you know all the news around town.

   You didn’t become a father until you were 48. How did it change you?
   It brought me right down to earth. I was a dreamer. I
   learned real fast I don’t know anything except songwriting. Since kids have
   innocence, they can cut through the bullshit. I asked my son Tommy to sing with
   me in Birmingham when he was five or six. He comes offstage, and I said, “How
   was that, Tommy? Did you like that?” He goes, “That’s not real. Baseball
   is real.”

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