DAN HILL

Songs sometimes are so connected to the sociology of the time.

I'm highly distractable, and I have too many things on my mind very often. When I'm driving in the city, it drives me so crazy - the city traffic and the parking - I just take cabs everywhere.

Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.

My problem is I don't have this incredible, hip image. I'm not some flamboyant or gorgeous-looking guy who's going to sell records based on his image.

To be 23 and riding the crest of a song sweeping the world country by country is to live an altered and wholly rarefied existence.

When you look at the lyrics of 'Sometimes When We Touch,' it's really very much an adolescent song.

In Don Mills in the Sixties, nothing comes close to the humiliation of losing an argument. In our weird little creative circle, no one cares who has faster fists, but to lose an argument suggests inferior intelligence.

I didn't have that thing that Michael Bolton did; my star power - my charisma - was not a match to my writing ability.

Due to my work as a musician, songwriter, recording artist and author, hundreds of people stream in and out of my basement studio to help me with my creative projects.

When you think of bike couriers, you think of hyper speed. They get paid by how fast they can drop stuff off. The faster you go, the more chances you take. And the more chances you take, the greater the war between cyclists and cars.

I'm an intense guy. I run 10 miles a day, which helps alleviate my intensity. Also, singing helps defuse my intensity. Playing the piano helps, and writing helps.

At 10, I heard Neil Diamond's 'Solitary Man' and it moved me so deeply I stood, frozen in place during school recess, feeling such empathy for the narrator in Diamond's masterpiece that my heart was smashed.

I feel like I have adopted the Philippines as my second country.

While I've won five Junos, I've donated four of them to the National Archives in Ottawa. Which left my fifth Juno sitting, seemingly abandoned by its four family members, on my bookcase in my dining room.

You succeed and accomplish and accomplish; the problem is when you stop, you become depressed because you could never do enough.

So many songwriters peak in their early 20s because they're living off their passions.

I cannot emphasize just how dangerous it is cycling in the city. Especially now. Even though it is against the law to do this, you'll see people texting while they drive.

The hits I had in the '80s - I made those deals directly with American companies.

In a world where people are hungry for quick fixes and sound bites, for instant gratification, there's no patience for the long, slow rebuilding process: implementing after-school programs, hiring more community workers to act as mentors, adding more job training programs in marginalized areas.

If we don't invest now in so-called priority neighbourhoods with music classes, athletic facilities, and skills training and mentoring, we will all pay more in the long run.

I missed my father so much when he died that writing about his life and mine was a way of bringing him back to life and getting me to sort of understand more about him and what made him the father, the husband and the man that he was, and how that made me the man, husband and father that I am.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

Since the dawn of recorded music, every generation has felt shocked by the musical tastes of the next.

I lost myself in the bubble of music - driving myself to be a success.

Let's face it: pop music in its myriad permutations will always be sexually presumptuous, racially controversial and, frequently, politically charged.