What was your very first impression of Los Angeles, when you moved there as a young man? What did you do on your first day in the city? How did you feel, as specifically as possible?

I moved from San Diego to Los Angeles, really without knowing much about Los Angeles. My feeling was that when I arrived I had just joined a race.

A friend of mine said when he moved to Los Angeles he first read everything by Raymond Chandler, the popular American noir writer whose novels featured L.A. as a backdrop, to sort of get himself acquainted. It was good advice for me to follow, reading novels with L.A. as the setting. Though I didn’t read a whole lot of Chandler, I enjoyed the ones of his I did read, for instance Lady in the Lake. Others like Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain and The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald were more my style. I discovered John Fante and read Road To Los Angeles, West Of Rome, Ask The Dust, Dreams From Bunker Hill. I started to not feel so alone, and eventually enough time passed to where I got tougher. I’d visit Philippe’s, Musso & Frank and Angels Flight, as though touching the places I had read about would somehow endow me with a special power, like the gift of gab is given to all those who kiss the Blarney Stone.

On the day I moved to Los Angeles, my landlord, Jackie Jewels, gave me a tour of my rental, a cottage with an avocado tree and a backyard that folded out in to a ravine. She told me I was moving to the right neighborhood because all the artists in Los Angeles lived in Echo Park. Not far from my address was a drive that wound around the Echo Park hills of Angelino Heights, offering a captivating vista of the Echo Park pond. From there I watched people walking around the pond, the vendors selling their fruit with chili powder, the water fountain and lotuses, and beyond all that was a mural of figures running a race. I remember thinking on my first day in L.A. that it was all a race and I was just another runner.

Can you introduce us to yourself as a child? What were your personality quirks, wants, needs or hang-ups? Do they follow you to this day?

I hid a lot, loved music and really wanted to be Rick Springfield. I wanted to be older, I shaved my face with a spoon, bought near beer at the Piggly Wiggly with some of the neighborhood kids, lit matches in the alley. I loved church and the hymnals. I loved my grandmother Lillian.

Let’s flash forward from there. Please describe how you began to assimilate into the Largo scene in Los Angeles with Sean Watkins, Jon Brion and others. I think they’re some of the finest players around. Was it a result of happenstance or a calculated move to collaborate with those particular musicians?

Please tell us about you did yesterday evening, roughly to the minute or hour.

Yesterday was Pioneer Day in Salt Lake City. I spent it with my family at Cherry Hill, a local favorite campground and water park. I swam and got some sun, ate homemade potato salad, cucumber salad with vinegar and onion, a turkey burger, baked beans, and a can of cold diet caffeine-free pop.

It’s funny how our lives are spent in a series of vehicles. Some of my earliest and best memories were in my dad’s two-door Honda Prelude, 500,000 miles on it, The Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live For Today” on the stereo. What’s the first family car you remember being in? Do you still have an emotional attachment to it?

Can you tell us about the first instance of very severe heartbreak in your life? Does it linger? How have you processed it since then?

I’ve had some heartaches. I’m sure I’ll have more. Perhaps by comparison I’ve had it much better than the next person. I don’t know, but I always think of that when I’m feeling hopeless. There is no deeper heartache than the first one you experience.