Colin Hay Quotes (10 Quotes)

These are just weird times, but then the last 20 years have been kind of weird for me. It's just a matter of doing what you can. You just have to play the cards you're holding and letting your audience know where you are. I've been on my own pretty much for the last 20 years. I've just been touring and you could call the albums that I've been making my calling cards. I haven't even had a label until the last two or three years. Then Compass Records came along. They're out of Nashville and they liked the stuff, so I guess they could see some kind of potential in me. They decided to get involved and I like them. They're nice people. These days, every battle won is like hand-to-hand combat.

There were only a couple of people I would really trust, which has a kind of sadness to it. It doesn't really have anything to do with you, just to do with other people's perceptions of what's happened to you. It mainly had to do with people thinking you had untapped sources of wealth.

I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you... I wish that weren't true, but it is.

Let's face it, ... I'm not the most marketable songwriter out there today. But there are still some people who want to hear those songs. I'm grateful I've found ways to get the songs to them.

Sometimes I'm out on tour and you feel you're really getting somewhere and the audience is building and there's five or six hundred people coming to see you every night just from word-of-mouth. And then you go somewhere and you feel like you've gone back a decade and you're playing to 15 or 20 people. You think to yourself, 'Should I change my life, get another job.

I try to take people on some kind of journey during the show and people seem glad to travel with me. There is some kind of thread through it. I base it on the songs really, I'll think where I was when I wrote a particular tune, and the song leads me to what I want to talk about.

Most people remember me for a couple of tunes.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

There's a fine line between character building and soul destroying.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.