That’s Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I’d never worked with before.

I have been with the record company and Tommy was there doing records with other people.

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.

I really do see it as the start of the second half of my career.

That’s the way I try to live. I think it’s the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.

I’m really looking forward to it because it will give me the opportunity to do the whole other kind of approach to the music live that I haven’t had a chance to do. and I think is important for me to do.

I’ve thought about doing it as soon as it is possible with this new CD getting some wings and getting out there. I don’t know how soon that will be.

My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time, and there were these big bay windows, and there was the blue in the sky, and the sun on the trees, and it was drizzling.

I don’t know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it’s not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles. The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.

That’s Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I’d never worked with before.

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I’m introducing some new music that people haven’t really heard me do in quite this fashion.

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

We are just fanatics about using the technology to make it all wonderful. We laughed at the fact that we were having such a great time working this way.

More live recording. I have missed the boat over my career by not doing every second or third CD live because things happen onstage that don’t happen in the studio.