[Ballard: Writing for a Certain Voice with Glen Ballard]

But I always that my presentation on some level would lacking, so for me, I made the decision I wanna be a writer and a producer, and I don't wanna be the artist. And it was the best decision I'd ever made.

What the human heart is really – what really communicates is the human voice. It requires that. And the human voice is kind of like – it's really the vessel through which these songs really make their greatest impact. That's how they deliver the messages, the voice. So great voices were to me like great paintings. They're very rare and they should be treasured because 10 million people go by and then 10 million and one, God says, "You get a great voice." And then another 10 million go by.

So my whole life has been about finding the voices for my songs. Well, they were all my favorite voices. I mean, all I had to do is listen to my favorite artists. I mean, when I worked for Elton John, I loved his voice, and also in the management company, they managed Queen, so I was hearing great voices literally just being the gopher running around and hearing people singing and, of course, from Sinatra to Billie Holliday to voices that I had heard growing up and John Lennon and Paul McCartney, great voices that somehow transcended.

I mean, it's kind of like when the dance and the dancer become one. I mean, you can't really separate them. And it's when someone owns a song and a lyric and it's a great voice, it doesn't have to be technically great, but it emotionally is great. Those are the kinds of things that I knew it was like it's not going to be my voice, but I would love to write for great voices. And they were all around me. And when you're starting out, I mean, you can write for anybody you want to. And if it's good enough, you can have a good shot of getting it recorded. It's just making it really great and compelling is the hard part.

Well, I think that great songs have currency that kind of can't be devalued, even by a bad record. Great songs can survive bad production. Mediocre songs need great production to sort of bring them to some kind of parody, so you can somehow disguise its inherent deficiencies. So I feel like for me, as a songwriter, I was always pleased when someone cut one of my songs. But there were occasions where I felt like the production didn't match the song, but maybe I'm biased.

And I think that was one of my impulses to make records, was to sort of be able to have more control over really the final product as opposed to just being the writer. And so my sense and need for control over what I wrote sort of grew out of having a lot of songs cut. Many of them were better than anything I could've come up with myself. And there were some where I felt like I could've done a better job. So there was an impetus there, but no songwriter is ever displeased by getting a song recorded.