“It was a really honest revelation about my relationship with my father.”

Dan Fogelberg (103)

“If I could have only written one song in my life it would have been ‘Leader of the Band’ because what that meant to my father and to me – there was no way I could quantify that or even explain it. My father passed away almost 10 years ago now and he got to hear that song, he got to enjoy the success of that song. People were calling him on the phone and interviewing him in his last days, “Who is this man, the leader of the band?” He loved that and I loved that because I respected him so much. He gave me everything I am really. My mother and he were both musicians. The idea of being a living legacy is really the truth. I don’t think I’ll ever be as accomplished a musician as he was but I’ver had a different gift, it came to me in a different way, I’ve been able to reach and touch people with the songs I write. And that one has probably touched more people, more deeply than anything else I’ve ever done.”Dan Fogelberg (1284)

“That I wrote just after moving to California and I was really pissed off at my girlfriend. The person I perceived to be my girlfriend. This girl in college I was mad for. My first love. She didn’t even give me the time of day. It was an absolutely fabricated childhood crush, basically, an unrequited love.”

Dan Fogelberg (104)

“I had the music and wanted to write a song around it. The year before, I met my girlfriend at the grocery store when she dropped her purse. So I said, “Okay, let’s see if I can write a song about something as trivial as that.” And then I came up with the idea of toasting our ignorance and time and all this.”

Dan Fogelberg (104)

“That might have been a Nashville song. Because I was dating a girl in Nashville who was a dancer.”

Dan Fogelberg (105)

“We were up in Maine at the house. My wife and I were asleep at dawn and we heard this huge crash, like a shotgun, and we said, “What the heck is that?” And we went down and found this dove laying there. We are both serious animal lovers and we were just heartbroken by this. Especially out of a sound sleep. There was glass everywhere. It had shattered a huge picture window. The bird couldn’t possibly have survived: its neck was broken.”

Dan Fogelberg (106)

“The great tragedy of youth. That one was about that same girl [as in “As The Raven Flies” – Ed]. She didn’t give a fig for me. I remember I finally realized this was not going to happen. I had done a concert at the Red Herring and she showed up and just devastated me. I went home and wrote the song. It was me saying, “Okay, this is not going to work.” It was the first time I had to confront that in my life.”

Dan Fogelberg (106)

“I wrote “Old Tennessee” as really a “cop,” as a joke. James Taylor was real popular at this point, and I was hearing this kind of … in James’ writing there was a lot of similarity. There was this east coast folky type of thing. And I said, “Well, hell, anybody can write something like that.” So I wrote that and it’s really just a send up of early James Taylor work. And I just wrote about whatever was happening at the time, you know, about this girl I was with at the farmhouse who left, and all this sort of thing. So it wasn’t anything I did seriously, I just thought it was a send up of a particular style. Now I’ll probably get a letter from James.”Dan Fogelberg (1037)