The first thing I wanted to ask you is, I know that you studied music early on, and I wanted to know what made you decide to focus your abilities on songwriting?

I was always drawn more to the behind-the scenes roles in the music business. I played in bands from about the age of 13. All through high-school I was in a variety of bands, playing dances on the weekends, but I was always fascinated by the machinery behind the records -- the producers, the engineers, the songwriters. There wasn't much information available when I was growing up. The music press was more fan-based ... what the Beatles were eating for breakfast, rather than how the records were made. But any little bits of information I could find, the more I read the more fascinated I became.

By the age of 14 or 15 I was aware of George Martin ... I knew that Brian Wilson was writing songs for the Beach Boys and that Lennon-McCartney were writing most of the songs for The Beatles. So I started to study that, and toy with a bit of songwriting on my own. Nothing very sophisticated.

By the time I was in my 20's I was still playing in bands. The other guys in the band had learned to play their instruments really well, but none of them had spent time honing the songwriting side of things. So by default, I became a songwriter.

Do you remember the first full song that you composed?

Yes I do, and it's not very good! I still have a recording of it somewhere, on a scratchy old reel-to-reel tape. I think I was 15 or 16 when I did it, and I'm 55 now, so I can listen to it objectively, almost as if it was someone else's work. If it was sent to me by some young kid today, I' d probably write back to him and say, "A good start ... it shows promise".

What was the musical atmosphere like in Vancouver when you were first starting out as a musician?

I wasn't actually living in Vancouver at that time. I was living in a really small town (Vanderhoof) -- population maybe two or three thousand, a ten-hour drive north of Vancouver. It was remote and rural. The local record store maybe had 50 albums for sale. Saturday morning, the radio station played a little bit of Rock-N-Roll.

There were a few musicians in town, and we did the best we could to cobble a band together. I think I would've been better off in a big city, and I kind of regret that I wasn't, because I'm sure it would have advanced my music. A small town wasn't the best place to be, but I did manage to get a start there.

I know you've also done production work during your career. Did you enjoy working as a producer?

Yes and no. As I mentioned, when I was growing up I was really interested in production and engineering, and that was something I wanted to explore. I did one full-on production project in the mid-80's, with a Canadian band called "Glass Tiger". It went to the top of the charts in Canada and USA, so it was a successful project, but I discovered that when producing is done right, it's a 16-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job.

Some producers -- and they're well known -- show up a couple of times each day and have a quick listen and say, "That sounds fine". Then they go home and leave the "grunt work" to the engineer and the band. But if you do it right, like George Martin or Brian Wilson, or any of the great producers, then you're the first guy to arrive and the last guy to leave.

That's the approach I took, and I found, after that first album I produced -- three months of 16-hour days -- I was absolutely burned out. I did produce one more album after that, but then I gave up producing and went back to songwriting.

I've heard that a lot of bands are put in the situation of hiring an outside songwriter ... maybe when the label thinks they've hit a brick wall creatively. How much were you put into a situation like that, with bands?

Many, many times. Early in my career I was writing songs on my own, and trying to find bands to record them, and that was really, really difficult. Later on, after I'd had a bit of success with Bryan Adams, record companies and managers started sending bands to me. The typical scenario was: (1). the album was finished, (2). the record company had a listen, (3). the record company said, "We don't hear a single, we think you need to write a few more songs".

That's the point where I was brought into the picture.

Most of the time, bands were sent to me kicking and screaming, really not wanting to write outside the band. The first day of the writing session was usually spent trying to diffuse the hostility, because these guys really didn't want to be there. So, in addition to songwriting, I had to learn to be a mediator, a psychologist and a psychiatrist ... to get past that initial hostility and get them into a comfortable place.

Once the writing started, and they realized it was going to be OK, then "Day 2" and "Day 3" would go smoothly. A year later they would actually ask the record company if they could come back and write with me for the next album! But initially those encounters were often hostile.

How do you actually begin the creative process? Is there an initial idea that comes from either you or the band?

It usually starts with a pot of tea and a plate of cookies! Before you write, you just sit and talk. Strapping on guitars and starting to write is not always the best way to approach it. I prefer discussing what kind of song is needed ... whether they want to write a ballad or a rock song, mid-tempo or up-tempo. Maybe even subject matter ... does it want to be a boy-girl love song? Does it want to be a little bit political? What kinds of things do they want to say? Sometimes just talking about it can get you half-way there. By the time you strap on your guitars, you're already focussed and you're all on the same page.

One thing I've noticed with the songs you've written over the years, there's a great sense of melody. There's not a lot of monotone vocals. Where does your sense of melody come from?

I was fortunate to grow up in the 60's, which was really the Golden Age of melodic songwriting. We had Brian Wilson, The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Paul Simon ... these were all very, very melodic writers. They'd grown up in the 1950's and had the benefit of all the great classic songs, sung by Sinatra, Judy Garland, and all that. So, they came from a tradition of great songwriting, and they carried that on.

For reasons that I can't explain, as we get further and further from that time, songs seem to be more and more monotone and less melodic ... even to the point of Rap, which is devoid of melody altogether. Not to say I don't like Rap ... there's some brilliant lyric writing ... I think Eminem is a genius. But I do subscribe to the school of melodic songwriting.

I want to throw out a couple of names, and if you could give me a small idea of what each experience was like. First would be Bryan Adams.

Bryan's a great singer. When you're writing a song for someone, you're writing for "the voice", and that can provide a huge amount of inspiration. When you know what the voice is capable of, then you write to that level.

Bryan is a great singer, and a great writer to collaborate with. He has a wonderful sense of melody and phrasing, so when you're working with someone of that calibre, right away the bar is high.

How about Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from Aerosmith?

Again, y'know, amazing talents. Steven is child-like in his approach to everything. Writing with Steven is almost dangerous, because everything you say, every note you play on the guitar or the piano ... even if you drop a pencil and it makes a noise when it hits the floor, Steven is like, "That's great! Let's sample that and use it on the record!". He's easily distracted, and he has a thousand ideas a minute. So you have to stay on top of Steven, draw those ideas out of him ... help him edit, because he has so many ideas coming so quickly that you have to choose which ideas get used and which ones don't. Steven is hugely creative and talented.

Joe can write a hundred riffs a minute ... and every one of them is great. He's just a genius with riffs, and a wonderful guitar player and a great musician. Working with Steven and Joe is amazing. Really enjoyable.

The last one ... I always wondered what this situation was like ... Ozzy Osbourne.

I love Ozzy. The perception would be that he's a little bit "slow" and he doesn't contribute a great deal to the songwriting process, which is absolutely not true. He's smart, talented, very melodic, and he knows exactly what an "Ozzy Osbourne" song should sound like. Working with him is actually very focussed, and he contributes enormously. He's a wonderful guy. I adore Ozzy.

Do you think that songwriting to day is a lost art ... and if so, do you think that artist are not spending enough time working on the finished product?

I don't really have a theory, other than, as we were discussing a few minutes ago, the farther we get from that Golden Age of the 60's, it seems that we hear less and less melodic songwriting. And I wish I knew why. I really don't.

I guess, in some ways, music has to keep reinventing itself. If we were stuck in the 60's, it wouldn't be very enjoyable either! We need new frontiers to keep the process going. But I think it's devolved rather than evolved.

I'm hesitant to speak negatively about Rap, because I think it's a really valid art form, but it's contributed to the demise of melody. Even the Michael Jackson era, which, in terms of record sales, was probably as good as we'll ever see -- especially now that we're in the Digital Age and record sales are pretty much "history" -- Michael set the bar very high in terms of sales, but if you take his songs and deconstruct them, take away all the production elements, all the arrangements, all the musical parts ... if you take a song like "Thriller" or "Billy Jean", and perform it just with an acoustic guitar and a singer, there's not a whole lot there.

Michael's work was as much "production and arrangement" as it was "lyric and melody" ... whereas, if you take a Lennon-McCartney song and strip it down to vocals and acoustic guitar, it's 100% valid. It can carry itself. So why have we devolved to this point where lyric and melody seems to be less important? I just don't know. If you have a theory, let me know.

Personally I think it's a fact that artists don't place as much emphasis on songwriting as they would maybe live performance or recording.

There are some great bands out there who can really play, but the recording technology has made it more and more possible to take a mediocre performance and turn it into a good performance. If a band was a little bit "loose" in the studio, the engineer can spend an hour with ProTools and fix all the little flubs and create a tight performance. Whether that creates a "magic" performance, I'm not sure.

Back in the 60's, when machines only had four tracks and there were no gizmos that fixed mistakes, you had to play the song top-to-bottom, and play it well, as a band. I think the fact that that's no longer required may have made musicians a bit lazy ... there's no real need to play super tight ... they'll fix it in the Control Room. That may have been a contributing factor. Technology has surpassed the musician as the main factor in making records, and that can't be a good thing for musicianship.

The production topic led me to another question. I wondered, were you more happy than not, with the production angle that your songs have taken on, once you've written them?

That's a good question, because it's gone both ways.

Whenever I write a song, or participate in the writing of a song, I have a vision in my head of what the finished product should sound like. In fact, I always record a demo that reflects, to the best of my ability, the production elements, the arrangement elements, and then I hope that the artist and the producer will use that as a template.

I can think of a few examples, like Joe Cocker or Bonnie Raitt. They recorded versions of my song that were even better than I anticipated. They not only listened to the demo and respected the intent of the demo, but they took it to another level altogether, and in those cases it's really thrilling to hear the song come back, having been recorded so well.

Other times you scratch your head and wonder if they listened to the demo at all.

I wonder about aspiring songwriters these days. What's the best piece of advice that you could give to them?

That's a tough one. If you're a songwriter and you're in a band, then you already have a "vehicle" ... you can write a song and immediately you have someone who's going to sing it, perform it and hopefully record it.

If you're not writing in a band ... if you're just a songwriter on your own ... that's a virtually impossible hill to climb. So, you need to find a vehicle ... a band, a singer, someone who can record and perform your songs.

This will get you onto the first rung of the ladder, and once you've had a little bit of success with that artist or that band, then other people will hear about you, and you can go forward from there. But getting to the first rung is the toughest part.