RLJ: “Covers,” I guess, is a word
used only with writers to indicate a lesser work. Your real work is what
you write. We don’t describe Sinatra or Ella [Fitzgerald] or Tony
Bennett as doing covers. We know [they] don’t write, and in fact we
don’t even think about it. It’s not discussed. But that’s jazz. The singer-songwriter genre was always sticky, and that was why from the beginning of my career I did “covers” and did them on the same record as my own compositions, to try to make the point that a song is a song. At
the heart of it, I‘m such an AM radio American girl. It’s all my
music. And The Rolling Stones did covers. It was before the sacrosanct
Dylan aftershock, and I think I thought I could expand the genres, keep
the walls from closing, and make a place for songwriters to sing and
singers to be respected the same as the singer /songwriter.