Michael Franks Quotes

I started as a songwriter when I was teaching part-time at UCLA, where I had gone to school as an undergraduate. I got out of graduate school and got this part-time job… A friend of mine helped me get this job at UCLA. And I always wanted to write songs, and always hoped I would become a musician and actually make my living at it, but it seemed pretty far-fetched at the time. I was teaching a class at the extension at night at UCLA, where they were very liberal with the curriculum, and I came up with a couple of ideas which they liked. So I started teaching the History of Popular song in America, which was pretty exciting thing for me to do since I didn’t know that much about the history of popular song, (laughs) so I got to learn a lot as I prepared for it.
Michael Franks

I had written a bunch of songs, written them as spec and sent them to a bunch of people, which was kind of a shotgun technique. And after I did a short little tour with Sonny and Brownie, I worked on the record quite a bit and with teaching, I had a lot of time to be with them when they made this record. And, I spent a lot of time with them. Sonny’s wife called me one day, maybe six months after their record was released, and said there were these young people that want to start a record company in New York and were looking for talent. She gave them a demo tape I had given her at some time, and said they wanted to talk to me. So, ironically through Sonny and Brownie…I made a record before I was on Warner Bros. on a little company.
Michael Franks