SB: Most writers agree…the process is different for every song, some songs pour out and others have to be pulled. Do you have some memorable pouring or pulling stories?

McT: I have never been someone who writes really fast so when it does pour out it is somewhat of a special occasion ...I wrote the lyric for Birmingham pretty much in one night ...I knew once I had the first line "Virgil Spencer's got a 19 inch Hitachi" I was on to something special... where that line came from I have no idea I was just glad to be on the receiving end. I was in LA at the time staying with friends and I stayed up most of the night 'til I was sure I had taken it as far as I could.

SB: Your writing career has spanned decades. How have changes in your life changed your writing?

McT: I think when I came off the road with the band I was part of in the 80's and got my first staff writing deal I started to look at the whole thing a lot differently. I started to go to Nashville a lot and did what ever I could to get better at my craft. Nashville is a very lyric driven town and I think I learned a lot about the art of lyric writing in the first few years I spent time there. There are guys there that write 150 songs a year and there are guys that write 10 or 20 good ones. I tried to go the quality route.

SB: Who was/were the most inspirational to you, your music and how?

McT: Other songwriters have always inspired me the most... Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, just to name a few. I can remember going to the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville and hearing Gary Burr sing a few of his tunes for the first time and coming out of there as inspired as I have ever been in my life.

SB: They say, you can't write what you don't know, but if that were true we wouldn't have Sci fi... so considering that, how much of your songs are a product of your imagination and not your experience.

McT: I think one of the great things about being a songwriter is you get to put yourself in any situation you can imagine. If I wrote only what I knew my catalogue would be very small. There was a time a while back when most of the cuts I was getting were by females and about female situations...last time I looked and I wasn't a woman so I had to get in touch with my feminine side, which I must tell you was very exciting!

McT: I've made mistakes like most people in this industry I've given my publishing away when I shouldn't have in the early days, did some things for the wrong reasons but for the most part I'm pretty happy with the way things turned out. I never had a real hit until I was in my forties and I dare say that if I had been more successful earlier I would have done something really foolish with the money.

McT: I have spent a lot of time co/writing over the years so I am very much an advocate of that. I find you will always learn something by knocking ideas around in a room with another songwriter even if it's that you will never be in the same room with that writer again. Also I think that if you go into a writing situation with preconceived guide- lines you may be setting yourself up for failure. I have worked with people who are so caught up in the "rules of writing" that it gets in the way of the creativity...more time is spent on what shouldn't be said then what should be said. Rules are there to be broken or at least bent from time to time...those are all the do's and don't I have.

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