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Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson Books

Songwriter

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“Sitting around home I mostly play acoustic. I've got seven or eight guitars of various sorts, including a baritone. Sometimes at home, because a guitar is just lying around, that's the guitar I pick up rather than actually choosing something. I try to plan ahead for my laziness by leaving interesting things scattered about. If I leave a baritone guitar lying around, that's the one I'll pick up, and I'll start writing baritoney things.”

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“I'm glad I can do both full-band electric and solo acoustic performances. It's nice to have contrast, so if you get fed up with one, you can just switch to the other one. It's great to go to a town and play an acoustic show, and then you can come back a year later and play electric, and the show's really fairly different. The repertoire will be 50 percent different. The musical energy is completely different.”

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“I think there are shades of political songs; some are more subtle and can be more effective for being subtle, for being more metaphorical. I've written a lot of songs like that, where it's not really clear if it's a war song or a relationship song. The metaphor can be the most powerful thing of all, but sometimes you have to speak more clearly to more people, and I think this is one of those times.”

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“The good part of writing is where it gets out of your control and turns into something else. You look at it and think "Whoa, where did that come from? That wasn't what I meant to write, but it's more interesting than what I was intending. Which part of my subconscious or my experience did that come from?" Often the answer isn't clear, and often the line between fiction and fact isn't clear, either.”

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“An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.”

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“If you're up there performing a song for the first time, it's as if you're hearing it through their ears. You become acutely self-conscious of the song in performance, so that's a good thing before recording. But I like to have some surprises for the audience; I don't want the audience to know everything that's going to be on the record, because these days, with the Internet, people become avid collectors of pre-knowledge.”

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“People want to be the first with the record, they want to be the first to know which songs are on the record, all that kind of stuff. So I like to just stall them a bit. Personally, I love the idea of an album that's completely new, that no one's heard any free downloads, any pre-record releases, all that kind of stuff, and nothing's been played on the radio. Totally virgin, you know, a sealed record. That's my ideal, but it's very hard to get anybody else to agree to do that.”

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“Over the years, I've had fairly benign record companies who gave me a lot of rope, but in spite of that, there's still restrictions and expectations. It's nice to be at the cottage-industry size, which I think is kind of the business model of the age anyway. It's the way to be. The Internet makes a lot of that possible. Having a loyal fan base is also very useful to keep me operating; people can find your website, and the venues that you're playing at, the merchandise you have for sale, all that kind of stuff. It's great to be able to reach the audience in a more direct way.”

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“I think whatever you believe in affects whatever you express, whatever you create. It shapes your morality in some way. But I don't think that's something that you have to shove down people's throats. I'd rather keep it in the background, and I'd rather people came to the music in an unprejudiced way. I'm glad, in a sense, that most people don't know about me, what I do, much. I'd rather they hear the music, and then say, "I wonder what kind of person created this."”

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“I think it's absolutely possible to write a song and go somewhere where no one's been before, uncharted territory. In terms of content, I see limitations where there should be none. I know there are things I wouldn't write about, but that shouldn't be the case. You should be able to make a song out of anything, out of any situation.”

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