It's a great gift in my throat. When you have a gift, you think about the giver. Who gave this to me? And this takes you to a spiritual sense of God. That has captivated me all through my life, serving that lucky gift.
I'm the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you're not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do.
We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.
We'd go to the fraternity house. It was a good place to practice. But we really wanted the kids to overhear us. And whoever heard us would go nuts over it.
I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.
Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly.
