Well, let’s start by saying I was a musician before I became a songwriter. I started studying classical piano when I was four and took lessons for ten years. Even then, music was my life. The minute I woke up I’d run to the piano before school and when I came home, I’d sit down to play right away again. It was such a natural thing for me. When I was about eight I discovered rock music, and the louder the better. Just like everybody else, I thought that the artist wrote their own music because in rock bands they usually did. I didn’t know anything about the Brill Building, for instance, when I listened to Motown records, which I loved. I even thought Elvis wrote his own songs. While my mother had aspirations of me becoming a concert pianist, I had dreams of being in a band because I wanted to play my own music; I thought that was the only way you could do it. I really didn’t think about being a songwriter as a full-time profession until I was a young adult. I had joined my first band, Spider, and we were gaining notoriety in NYC. The other band members were as determined as I was to write our own songs, and while they were writing more progressive rock stuff, I seemed to have a natural ability to write simpler, hooky songs.