Hitting You With His Best Shot: Eddie Schwartz on Risk, Reinvention, and the Art of a Well-Crafted Song | The Sharp Notes Interview

From “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” to new music today, Schwartz continues taking the creative leap

Taking a shot, a risk, a gamble—whether in life, in love, or in art—requires a particular blend of courage, timing, and craft. Few folks understand that better than Eddie Schwartz, the Canadian musician and songwriter whose work has left a lasting imprint on popular music. Best known for penning Pat Benatar’s iconic “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” Schwartz has built a career on moments when he stepped forward, took creative chances, and delivered songs that struck a chord with millions.

After launching his career as a solo artist in the early 1980s with albums like No Refuge and Public Life and a Top 20 hit on the Canadian charts with 1984's "Special Girl", Schwartz quickly proved himself as more than a performer—he was a songsmith of rare precision and emotional clarity. His compositions, including “All Our Tomorrows,” “Don’t Shed a Tear” (Paul Carrack), and “The Doctor” (The Doobie Brothers), showcased his ability to blend melodic strength with lyrical insight. Many of his own recordings have since been reimagined by other artists, a testament to the enduring quality of his songwriting. Beyond the studio, Schwartz has also taken bold shots as a producer, music rights advocate, and leader in global music organizations, earning honors including the Order of Canada.

My own introduction to Eddie’s music came not through a chart-topping single, but through the serendipity of flipping through records in a thrift store—finding one of his albums on a random shopping trip and being struck by the clarity and heart in his songs. That chance moment became a deeper journey into his catalog and career. Today, he continues to write and release new music, proving that the instinct to take your best shot—to create with purpose and passion—doesn’t fade with time.

Evan Toth: As you pointed out, I have a lot of records behind me, so I'm an avid record collector, of course. Sometimes I buy things because they look cool. That's the story of me getting your record. Like all good record collectors, you bring the thing home, you clean it up, and then you hop online and you see, so what's the story behind the record? Of course, you've got this amazing story. I then of course uncovered some of the new recordings that you've released over the last year, which are really beautiful. You're such a great songwriter. It's really fun to connect with you. I said I got to reach out to this guy and say hello. I'm grateful for you to give me a little time today, so thank you.

Eddie Schwartz: My pleasure, Evan. Thank you for those kind words. Very appreciated.

ezt: You're very welcome. Why don't we start at the end, I guess, a little bit. "Special Girl", "We Win", "Waters Rise", these are some of the new tracks that I was alluding to. How did you get into that last year? They seem to all have been released last year. Like I said, maybe we work backwards here. What was the impetus for releasing some of those new songs, and are there new ones still kicking around yet to come?

es: Very good questions. I'm from Toronto, originally Canada, and lived there for most of my life. In the late '90s, I moved down here to Nashville with my family. I got into the Nashville two step, if you will, which is I was writing with two different groups of writers a day. I had a morning session and an afternoon session.

ezt: Wow.

es: I wrote five days a week. I was very regimented. You write from 10:00 to 1:00, then go have lunch and then write from 2:00 to 5:00. As I said, possibly with the same people, possibly with two different groups of people in the morning and the afternoon. I did that for a number of years. It was very different from the way that I wrote before that, but it was just the way things were done here. I fell into that regime, and of course had a music publisher who was quite happy I was doing that. We got some wonderful cuts, Rascal Flatts, Martina McBride, a number of really good cuts out of it, but I really burnt out of it. It just was so intense. The writers down here can write 1,000, 1,200 songs a year.

ezt: Unbelievable.

es: Yes, it is incredible. Some of the songs that I have written that I'm very grateful and fortunate have put bread on my table for a long time now, they took me two years to write. In terms of my process, it was the exact opposite of what they do. I just would stay with one idea until I got it right. Whereas they'll write all these songs and then maybe one or two, or three, or five will get cut. Very different process. I am answering your question, but it's a little bit--

ezt: That's okay. I figured. I imagined it was a little circuitous.

es: About, I don't know, probably 10 years ago now, I said, I can't do this anymore. I just knew I wasn't doing my best work. I was burnt out on it, and I didn't love the songs. If you're going to be in the music business, you better love it, because it's a hard way to make a living. I wasn't loving it. I stopped doing that and got very involved actually with advocacy for copyright issues, for songwriters and rights holders. Got very involved with that for a number of years and became the president of an organization based in Paris, France called CIAM, the International Council of Music Creators.

I stepped down last year from doing that. I didn't write at all during that period. I really felt like I needed to reconnect with the process that had produced Hit Me With Your Best Shot and Don't Shed a Tear, and other songs that I wrote back in the day. It just took me a long time to get the Nashville modus operandi out of my system. About, I guess a year, a year and a half ago, I started writing again. The songs you mentioned, and I'm, again, very grateful that you listened, and for your kind words, they're the new crop of songs that I've come up with since I got back, picked up the guitar and started writing again.

ezt: I see.

es: That's basically the story.

ezt: This is the, I don't know, 180th-something podcast that I've done speaking with the music makers and composers, and all kinds of things. I guess it's interesting, there's a segment of people that I speak to that are always going back to, say, the '60s or even that early '70s sound. Either we're talking about the music that they created then, or we're talking about maybe younger artists creating something in that vein in the modern landscape.

When I listen to your music, I feel like there's this underlying-- in a lot of modern music that I've heard, there's this callback to this '80s, this sort of sophisticated adult contemporary thing that you feel to me are one of the masters of that sound that I would imagine people would love the production on those albums and really emulate the way that you accomplish that sound on those albums and on those songs too, that Paul Carrack tune is what I'm-- It's just such a beautiful song that Don't Shed a Tear, such a beautiful song. You really don't hear anything like this on the ra-- Who listens to the radio anymore?

In pop music composition, I'm just a little excited about it. It's just really exciting to listen to that stuff and think about you creating music in 2024 and 2025, because I really have a fondness for a certain moment in time there where there was this, as I say, this adult contemporary-- a really serious approach to pop that was growing up. You were one of those guys. What do you think about what I'm saying there? Does it make any sense?

es: It completely makes sense to me. Again, thank you so much for those very kind words. People have always said, you just got lucky. I've been slightly insulted when they said that, but I've realized in recent years that they're right in one very, very important regard. That is that I got lucky and my generation of music creators got lucky in when we were born, it's just that simple. We got to experience what I think it's fair to say was a golden age of popular music. There was so much good music. There was so much to be inspired by coming out of the UK, coming out of Canada, the United States, all over the world there was incredible music being made.

If you wanted to do it, you were inspired by this incredible music that was around you at all times in the '60s, '70s, '80s, into the '90s. Also, if you started to get some traction professionally, which I'm again very fortunate that I did, then you're in competition with that stuff. You better step up, you better have some game, as they say. I think that that kicked our collective butts all to a better place. Yes, there was tremendous inspiration, musically, around at all times. If you wanted to play that game, you really did have to step up.

Beyond that, something else, and this ties into some of the advocacy work I'm doing, is you could make a living doing it. There was enough money in the system that trickled down to guys like me that I could just devote my life to writing songs, and yes, doing some production, doing some of my own records, but I could make a living doing that. Two things related to that point. One is if you do it every day, all day, you start getting pretty good at it. Either you get pretty good or you do something else.

ezt: You put 10,000 hours in, you get that 10,000 hours in and you start getting good at stuff.

es: That's right. The Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. Exactly. You don't have to work at Walmart or play bars, which I did for many, many years when I was learning how to do this stuff. Played bars all over Canada for many years. There was that. You could devote your life to it and you could support yourself doing it. Those are two things that are much, much harder now. I don't know if that exactly explains what you were talking about, but I think it's part of the answer at least.

ezt: It gets there. I think also there was a mastery of composition and music skill too that you and many others in, I think, the '80s and '90s, there was a skill level that maybe isn't there anymore. I don't want to offend. There are some great pop songs on the radio now and there's some things that really catch me. There is a skill in taking something really simple, which is really the skill of pop, something really simple and turning it into something that just is unforgettable. Again, that next level of composition, that skill, I feel like, isn't quite there. The big soaring bridges, those unexpected modulations, those shifts in the way-- I don't know if people can handle stuff like that anymore. I don't know.

es: Really good question again. There's a couple of things I want to say. First of all, lyrics. I think there's a lot of throwaway lyrics now, and so I think the storytelling aspect of writing songs has atrophied, if I can use that word.

ezt: It's almost like people are too impatient for a story. They don't have time for a story.

es: If you think about the great writers, again, that we were so fortunate enough to grow up with, the guys from Leonard Cohen to Joni Mitchell to Dylan, of course, and so many others. You think about how important the lyrics are. How does that answer your question? When you're telling that story, if you actually are thinking about telling a story, there are climaxes in a story, there's dénouement, there's climaxes, it builds to something. Then there's a climax. We had to train ourselves and learn not about the music side alone, but also about the lyrics.

I think that's a bit of a lost arc now. I think that created this understanding of the way of the flow of the arc of a song and how that arc had to operate. I don't know, again, if that makes sense. I think that had a lot to do with it. The other thing is you really don't have to learn how to play an instrument now. I use the same digital programs that a lot of other folks used, maybe not exactly the same, but there's a few two or three big ones. They can do so much of it for you now. The good news is they can do a lot of it for you, and the bad news is they can do a lot of it for you.

Again, a very good friend of mine who's a professor at Vanderbilt University here says he used to have a great sense of direction. Ever since he's had GPS on his phone, he's noticed his sense of direction has starting to go away because he just relies on the phone. It's a little like that too with music. You just start relying on the machine to do the work for you. Maybe some of that skill-set starts to get rusty. I think that's true of a lot of younger folks have never had to just sit down with a piece of paper, a pencil, and an acoustic guitar, and come up with something that was compelling.

ezt: What do I do? It's so strange to me to think of that being the old way of doing things because certainly that's how I grew up. Another interesting thing also, back to your advocacy and earning a living with these things, now so many of the hit songs have seven, eight, nine co-writers on these things, and so they've got to split these royalties up. I guess that adds a layer of complication too.

es: I don't even understand how that works. I think everybody in the control room when they're recording it-- a lot of it gets written actually in the studio or at the point of where it's actually recorded. I guess everybody in the room gets credit for the song. Again, coming back to how hard it is, I was just on a call talking about Spotify royalties. How do you divide 0.0003 cents, which is what we make now for a Spotify play, between seven people? That's a mathematical challenge that I don't wish to accept. You got to get millions, if not billions of streams before it's meaningful for any one of those people.

ezt: Now, speaking of your catalog, is your back catalog available digitally? I use a program called Qobuz to listen to my music. Of course I have the record here which I've been listening to. Is your earlier back catalog available digitally?

es: That's a really good question. I do have my own website, eddieschwartzmusic.com. I guess I just put in a plug for myself.

ezt: That's good. That's what you're here to do.

es: Thank you, and I appreciate that. I think we have some stuff there, but I'll have to check to see how much stuff I've got. There are links to just about everything, at least from from the website. A friend of mine put it together, so he knows more about it than I do. I'll have to go and check and and see if that's-- but I think there are links to just about everything.

ezt: Do you own those early masters? Some of them, I don't think this ever came out on CD. Do you own that stuff or is it owned by Atlantic or A&M?

es: It would technically still be owned by Atlantic. Of course, A&M is now part of-

ezt: Who knows?

es: -I think Universal, so I guess technically they would own it. There are newer versions. As you mentioned earlier, there's a new version of "Special Girl", which I did. They don't own that, but technically, they would own those masters. I think just about everything's available, but it does make me think maybe I need to consolidate everything. Maybe instead of links, I should actually have copies on the website so people can listen to them if they want to.

ezt: Maybe, if you don't mind, we'll go into the way-back machine a little bit and just talk about-- of course Pat Benatar's Hit Me with Your Best Shot was such a massive success and remain so. Maybe you could just take us back into that moment when that song was released and talk about how it changed your career trajectory and what you thought you were going to do versus what you ended up doing after that song. It must have been just such a huge impact on your life.

es: Great question. This is going to sound crazy because it's a long time since that was released, but I think I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that it became so successful, and as you said, and touch wood, continues to be. I could tell you a little story that I think is funny maybe to set it off. The first time I heard it, I was living in Toronto and it was the first really nice day of spring. After a Canadian winter, when you start getting a little bit of nice weather coming in, the people are like, take off their winter coats and there's a level of joy in the air that one hasn't experienced for probably three or four months, and the businesses throw their doors open.

It's still only probably 55 degrees Fahrenheit, but the sun's shining. Anyway, I was walking up Yonge Street and I had never heard "Hit Me". I think I heard it earlier, but the songwriter is the last person to know about when a song's released. By that time, it's in the hands of the label and the artist. I was really not feeling very connected to the whole thing. Walking up Yonge Street south of Bloor, and I walked past the hippest hairstyling place in town, which was called The House of Lords. I think it might actually still be there.

The two doors, it's like saloon doors are flung open. I walked by and they're playing music, blasting it out of the place. I'm listening, I'm going, "That sounds familiar." Then I realized what it was, was of course Pat singing "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". I stood in the doorway between these two open doors. There were two rows of barber chairs, barber chair things and people getting their mod haircuts. I stood there and listened to it and I was in a state of shock as I heard it.

When the song ended, I looked and at the very back, there was a guy on the phone, one of the hairstylists, and he was very animated, talking very animated and pointing at me. He put the phone down and I heard a car pull up behind me on Yonge Street. I turned around and two cops got out of the car. One guy put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Come on, buddy. Move along. You're freaking out the people getting their hair cut."

ezt: Because you were standing there so long. That's great.

es: I was standing there, and I probably was slobbering at that point. I said, "They just played my song." The cop looked at me and said, "Yes, sure. Just tell your story walking." Exactly. From that moment, my life has really never been the same. I couldn't get my foot in the door in the music business in Canada in particular. I was getting a little something happening in the States, but I'd been told before that someone was going to record my songs. Either it didn't come out or they decided on another song at the last minute. At that point, I had very low expectations. The music business had beat me up pretty well by then. I just did not expect and was not prepared for what happened to "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". That's for sure.

ezt: After that song comes out, it's this humongous hit, and as I said, it remains so. Did it really shift your thinking into saying, "I'm not just writing for Eddie Schwartz anymore," or, "I really want to be thinking about others"? Because of course, several of those songs ended up in others' hands, like Joe Cocker. Did it change how you were writing? Did you start to write thinking of other people, or did you say, I don't want to think about it too much?

es: You can't help but be influenced by it. It does have an impact on your life. I wouldn't say that it didn't affect me or didn't spur me on because I think it did. There are wonderfully talented people in this town, Nashville, and all over the world that can say, "You know what, so-and-so's looking for a song. Let's write one that sounds like them." I just have to say, through no fault of my own, I don't think, I've never been able to do that. I shouldn't say never. When I worked with The Doobie Brothers I really, really worked hard at it. I was able to write some songs with them and for them that I think were tailored for the Doobie Brothers, especially the earlier Doobie Brothers, the Tom Johnston, "China Grove" Doobie Brothers.

ezt: It's funny you say that because I was listening to "The Doctor" the other day, and the minute it starts you go, "Jeez, this sounds like a Doobie Brothers song." You must have sat down and put your Doobie Brothers hat on. That's pretty cool. You can inhabit these different characters a little bit.

es: I owe a lot to Tom Johnston and my other co-writer, Charlie Midnight. It was a collaborative effort, and we all contributed. Tom is the guy who wrote "China Grove", so I did have an advantage there. I did do a lot of the work on that, and I went to school on him. I just listened to everything he'd ever written and was able to come up with something that sounded in the right vein, I think. It's really hard for me. The thing is just writing a good song, like I said, I really work hard at it. That really was my basic modus operandi. Just write something. Just write songs that are as good as you know how to make them.

I grew up on popular music. I didn't have esoteric tastes. That also worked in my benefit. I liked what I heard on the radio. I grew up listening to the radio. I liked that stuff. It wasn't a stretch for me to just try to write good songs, make them as good as I could possibly make them, and that they ended up being in a commercial vein, just because that's the world that I lived in and was quite happy to be there.

ezt: Do you have a secret kind of a barometer in your mind where you're going, this is really going to work? How do you judge things as you go along? Or if you're working with others, in the case of a co-writer or something like that, how do you know when something either is really working or how do you know when it's really gone off track a little bit?

es: They go off track on a fairly regular basis. I can attest to that. Because I write mostly by myself, not completely, but mostly I write on my own, it's a long process, which brings me back to why I take so long. For exactly the reasons you outlined there. I'll think something's great, but when I do it, I get excited about ideas. I get excited about what I'm doing, and then I go away. I leave it alone, and I come back to it. That's when I know whether my excitement was justified or it was not. I never operate on the assumption that what I did was great or even good until I've gotten away from it, and I almost forgotten about it in some cases, and then listen again.

I'll probably have 10 or 15 different ideas going at any particular time, and I'll play around with them. Some I'll come back to and go, no, I'm just not going to pursue this. Then you winnow it down to two or three, or one that you go, yes. I'll start working on it. I'll take it as far as I can, and then I'll leave it for a while and I'll come back to it. That's how I always try to keep-- That's what gives me a sense of perspective.

ezt: That's interesting. Artists and creative people are very sensitive about the things that they're creating. It sounds like you've learned to have a thick skin when it comes to those creations go, "Ah, we're getting rid of that." Do you ever get sentimental about, oh, there's something about this that I really like, or maybe that's what keeps it going? Do you know what I mean? I guess that you've learned to acclimate to be able to cut things off when they need to be cut.

es: Not every song I write turns out to my satisfaction or is all that great. There are a lot of songs there that may be just okay. Or maybe I'll listen to even ones that I end up on records. I listen to them and go, what was I thinking? It's still hit-and-miss. Sometimes I do finish songs that I don't-- why did I finish that one?

ezt: Why did I finish this? Yes.

es: Why did I spend a lot of time on it? Fortunately, and especially now, been doing it long enough now that I think I have a sense of which ideas are really worth pursuing and really spending time on. Again, and I think maybe is common practice now, a lot of that comes down to the lyric. A lot of times it's really, am I saying something that I think needs to be said? We win is a new song that I'm very proud of because I think at this particular time in the world, it's a message that is really worth saying to people. What's important? What is winning? What does winning in this world? I'm very proud of that.

The other songs you mentioned, they're all things that I think were worth staying. It's a feedback loop. If you're conveying a message that you think is worth sharing with other people, or the world might appreciate at any given moment in time, which sounds a little pretentious, but I think you know what I mean, then do you want to go back and make sure the music supports that lyric as best as it possibly can. You get into a virtuous feedback loop where, I've got a lyric now, I've got a chorus or a verse that I think really is lyrically valid and worth presenting to the world. Now I want to make sure the music also is at that level. That's the process.

ezt: I'm not trying to blow smoke or anything here either, but I listen to a lot of music. I listen to a lot of music all the time. When I played those tracks, immediately, my attention was caught because your brain kicks in and says, oh, wait a minute, this is a guy that knows what he's doing over here. If people are interested in the craft of songwriting or they're just interested in quality stuff, it's just fun to listen to those songs because it's clearly written by someone who has written a lot of music and understands the process that you just outlined. They're really fun. It's just fun to hear things done really well.

es: That means a great deal to me, Evan. Thank you so much.

ezt: You're very, very welcome. As you mentioned, you did do a lot of work with the International Council of Music Creators and SOCAN. Talk a little bit about that transition from creating music and going more into that. I know you mentioned a little earlier about maybe feeling a little burnt out with the road you were on in Nashville, but what else nudged you into that more administrative direction?

es: That's a really good question too. My friends and colleagues on the music publishing side of the equation have a lot to do with it. Going back to it at one time in the early '80s when I was first having some success, we were getting, in Canada, 2 cents per side. The law was written that a song, an LP, never mind a song, an entire one side of an LP, so five songs, let's say, back in the day, that would be paid 2 cents, and the other side would be paid 2 cents. Remember, in the case of most songwriters, including myself, maybe you get one song on a record.

What is one-fifth of 2 cents? Again, we're back to such small amounts of money that it was almost impossible to make a living, to keep body and soul together even if you had a lot of success. The publishers at that point came to me and a number of the writers, Jim Vallance, who worked with Bryan Adams, and Brian and Randy, and Burton from The Guess Who, and a bunch of us, they came to us and said, we need you to go to Ottawa because we'd like to have that law changed so that we can negotiate for better rates. It wasn't legislated to be 2 cents. We could negotiate for better rates in the sort of an open marketplace.

I went to Ottawa with all those guys. I got to know Brian and Jim, and Randy, and Burton and a bunch of other folks, and we met with the Prime Minister and met with MPs, and eventually we did get the law changed. That was the beginning of it for me. I started realizing I would love to just spend all my time writing music, but if I am going to be a professional-- like other professionals and other businesses, if you think about almost every other profession you can think of has some kind of professional association that advocates on behalf of its members' interests.

Being a songwriter or an artist was no different. We needed folks who could step up and put a little time back into making sure that we could make a living. Again, if you're successful, you should be able to make a living. I'm not saying that everybody is going to be able to make a living, but if you have reasonable success, you should get some kind of reasonable compensation for that. That's how the journey started. From there, I got elected to the board of SOCAN by my fellow music creators and thought, let Schwartz do it.

ezt: Canada has such an interesting way of supporting their music and their arts and creativity. I just spoke with this young songwriter, her name is Anastasia Minster. I got a record, and the Canadian records always have all these, "This is brought to you by the X, Y, Z fund and the Toronto Fund." They seem to have such a great support. I wish we had more of that in America. Or even regionally here in the States, I'm here in New Jersey, it'd be fun if there was a record that was--

Maybe there is, but I don't know about it, but something that was supported by your local government, I suppose. It would be interesting if they push that forward, like the New Jersey sound, which is its own thing. Maybe you could talk about, do you have any opinions about that Canadian support of music and/or is there a flip side to that? If you're using funding like this to release some of those albums, are there ever any parameters on the artist to say do it this way or do it that way? Does it ever impede what the artist tries to do?

es: I have mixed feelings about it. Most of my success has been here in the United States. I'm a dual citizen, my mother was from the States, my father was Canadian. I've been a tale of two countries for my whole life. My preference is let people make a living. Legislate and regulate the music industry in the United States, in Canada, anywhere in the world in a way that if people are doing well and people are enjoying your music, if hundreds of thousands or millions of people are enjoying your music, we should have a framework in place. That means as a songwriter or an artist, you're getting paid enough to support yourself so you can keep making music. That's my preference.

It's good to support those things. I know the movie industry is supported in many states, I think New Jersey included, that they have public funds to bring movie companies to do movie and TV shows in each state or in many states. I think there's a balance there. In Canada, Canada had a unique problem when I was a kid, because when I was a kid, all the music on the radio, which I loved, came from either the US or the UK. That's it. If you were a Canadian, if you weren't Gordy Lightfoot, you couldn't get on the radio at all. I think even Gordy had some problems back in the day.

What Canada did was say Canadians have to get at least 30% of airplay. That was good because that meant a lot of us could get a toehold on radio. Remember, that still meant that 70% of what was on radio still came from the UK or the US. A lot of people just misunderstand that. It was still dominated by American and British music, and it was great stuff. I'm not complaining. It gave some of us who were in Canada in those days a bit of a leg up.

That's a unique situation because Canada's a very small country next to a very large country. Not only that, but United States to this day is the world's biggest exporter of music and movies, and culture. It wasn't a conducive situation for Canadians. Those regulations helped a little bit, and I think that's okay. Yes, like I said, I would prefer a system that you're rewarded for the contribution you make, and if a lot of people love your music, then you should be fairly compensated for that.

ezt: What would you tell someone who's really serious about beginning a career in the music industry or even just the songwriting sector? I don't know if there's a songwriting sector, but just the songwriting, specifying on songwriting. With your experience and with an eye toward the 21st century here, and with all the developments that we touched on with AI and different things, what sorts of things would you tell people? Would you tell them to really embrace that technology, or would you tell them to, hey, get yourself a notepad and a piano, and a cup of coffee, and just figure this out?

es: I think it would be very presumptuous of me to tell anybody else how to go about doing this because there's no rules, there's no law about how to make great music. The younger generation, they have a facility with the tools, which I envy, frankly. I don't know that it gets you to great songs, but it certainly is great in the studio and leads us some fantastic tracks. We have to differentiate between a record and a song because they're not the same thing. There are great recordings.

Learning the art and craft of songwriting, and particularly lyrics and song structure, a lot of these things, I do bemoan the fact a little bit that they seem to be becoming lost arts. A combination of the two is there's a sweet spot between the technology and what you have to do as a human being who's trying to create something. You can certainly go too far in relying on the technology. I think that's pretty clear. The pendulum should swing back towards people putting all that away and learning how to play an instrument, and thinking about what's really important to say. What do I really want to communicate from somewhere a little deeper inside to my fellow human beings?

I think that that makes for much better songs and much better music. Will we get there? I don't know, I hope we do. Obviously, generative AI, we haven't mentioned yet. Will that be a tool for people to connect with their own creativity and make relevant and valuable music and other art forms, going forward? The jury's still out on that. That would be great if it did, but I think it's going to be a very challenging environment. When you can just press enter on your computer and it does everything for you, again, it's coming back to the Google Maps idea. If people inherently are going to move towards that technology and using it, and becoming reliant on it, then I think that wouldn't bode well.

ezt: You've got those songs that I began our conversation with. Is there a thought to join them with other stuff, and maybe there's a new album in the works here?

es: Funny you should mention.

ezt: There you go.

es: Yes. I wanted to put my toe in the water and I get out a few songs. I'm delighted, particularly We Win have done quite well, and relatively, and the new version of Special Girl which was released-- Actually, it was released in the States by America and Meatloaf. Meatloaf, I think in the UK, did quite well in the UK.

ezt: Oh, I didn't know that. That's pretty cool.

es: I'm just very gratified that those are out and getting some response. I'm really encouraged to keep going now. I'm really enjoying it, and yes, I think get a few more songs under my belt and probably put them out as an album. I'm very excited about it. Stay tuned.

ezt: That would be exciting. Of course, I promise you, as I go record collecting, whenever I see Eddie Schwartz there, I'm going to be picking those records up and we'll get them on the shelves back here. That's it. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate you doing this. This was fun.

es: It was great. Thank you so much, Evan. I really appreciate it as well.