“‘Brave Strangers’ is about the end of a relationship. It’s a motif I’ve never done before. It was a challenge. We’re knocked out by the tune and have been playing it in our show the last two months. There’s a line in ‘Brave Strangers’, ‘Radio blasting silly little love songs, we only listen to the beat.’ And that’s the key line to that song. That’s the way it was back then. I write songs and want them to translate to the stage.”Bob Seger (1002)

“But anyway, ‘Her Strut’. The very title conjures up an image to me, ya know? And it’s something I had to work my way around, ’cause saying ‘I love to watch her strut’ is almost an automatic sexist thing. ‘Her Strut’. I really struggled with that, I did. But I loved the hardness of the word ‘strut’ in the song, ya know? And I worked real hard on the verses to try to put across the idea that this is not a sexist theme, that what I’m trying to say here is that at the bottom line it’s human nature, that men are still gonna love women for being sexual in spite of all this other stuff. Women have to understand that it’s still gonna be human nature. Can’t turn off the hormones. I didn’t wanna look like I was some sort of sexist monster, and I’m not, I’m really not. Honest to God.”Bob Seger (1003)

“Those two are sort of a two-part novel on the state of the Midwest as I see it, being from here.”Bob Seger (1004)

“The idea is that you can get through dark moments by doing that – by saying, well, it happened. I have to accept it, and now I’m either going to let it pull me down or I’m going to pull myself back up. And how am I going to do that? I’m going to accomplish this today and this tomorrow – to pull yourself out of a hole when something crushing happens to you. So that’s basically what it’s about – going the distance.”Bob Seger (1004)

“Likewise, a lot of people think I wrote ‘Beautiful Loser’ about myself. I got the idea for that song from a book of Leonard Cohen poetry by the same name. The song was about underachievers in general.”Bob Seger (1005)

“People who do drugs probably recognized it right away. That song isn’t from my experience, but from observing the experiences of those around me. I’m no saint, but I’ve never had a serious drug problem. I thought it was a bad thing three years ago, but it’s gotten worse. It’s a world problem now. Personally, I was never really affected by drugs. I was the kind of guy who, in high school, would buy a six-pack out of peer pressure, drink half a can and pour the rest out. Cocaine is just bad stuff. I’ve seen too many people act like idiots on it.”Bob Seger (1005)

“Ha ha ha! It was just a goof. I wrote it with Doug Brown, who I worked with on Del Shannon songs. He was a very humorous guy and we played in a group called Doug Brown and The Omens. He just wanted to have a hit. The A-side was called ‘Florida Time’ by the Beach Bums – a Beach Boys take-off. On the B-side, ‘The Ballad Of The Yellow Beret’ was just a goof on how stoic Barry Sadler’s song [The Ballad Of The Green Beret – Ed] was, trying to make fun of its seriousness.”Bob Seger (1006)

“But certainly many of my friends went and bore the scars. A sad period. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have made fun of it, wouldn’t have done ‘The Yellow Beret’. I was very young and just thought it was funny. Several years later I wrote ‘2+2=?’ about the waste of war. I had a friend who was killed in Vietnam, and when I go to the Memorial Wall, which I do when I’m in Washington DC, I see his name and remember him…”Bob Seger (1006)

“It’s funny, I remember that when I wrote ‘The Famous Final Scene’, all my friends asked me if I was breaking up with my girlfriend. I wasn’t. It just seemed like a rich and dramatic topic, and I just tried to imagine what it would be like when a relationship is really over and how terrible that must feel.”Bob Seger (1007)

“People have asked me for years who it’s about. It’s an amalgamation of characters I met when I first went to Hollywood. All ‘Type A’ personalities: overachieving, driven.”Bob Seger (1008)