Dan Hill

Musician

1954-06-03

Quotes by Dan Hill

• Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.

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• I got the big BMW X5, and I didn't like it. It was just too big, and I didn't feel comfortable driving it. It was taking up too much room, and I was afraid I was going to smash into something.

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• At 10, I heard Neil Diamond's 'Solitary Man' and it moved me so deeply I stood, frozen in place during school recess, feeling such empathy for the narrator in Diamond's masterpiece that my heart was smashed.

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• I did have one bad accident up north near Deerhurst. I was driving back in the winter on these snowy roads, and these two snowmobilers were racing up a hill and they weren't looking, so they caught me as I was going up the other side of the hill, and they smashed into me.

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• Our house is a constant mayhem of music, noise, socializing and business. It vibrates life, as a house should.

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• Songs sometimes are so connected to the sociology of the time.

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• I just wanted to show people - maybe I'm wrong - that I can still really sing. I can sing better than I ever have before. My intonation is way better, my timing, my phrasing - there's a lot more expression; I feel it's a more lived-in, soulful voice.

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• In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.

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• Woody Allen movies notwithstanding, therapy, in the early eighties, was not exactly a hot conversation starter. Nor was it a favoured activity for dysfunctional couples or suffering individuals.

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• The tricky thing about songwriting is that, more often than not, what you consider to be your best work generates a collective shrug, and something you've simply tossed off bowls people over.

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• I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

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• Some stresses are unavoidable - it's just part of life. One of the things I do to avoid stress is not work with people that I don't really like or drive me crazy.

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• One of the things I did to make myself feel better is that I kicked up my running even more. I knew that I had to stay active, that I had to keep living as if my life was actually going to unfold naturally because when you stop, when you freeze, and you think about it, that's when the demons come and can drag you down.

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• In the music world, concerts unfold strictly according to plan. But, as I'd been finding out, in the book world, things keep changing by the second.

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