"At the beginning I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be able to write beautiful songs and beautiful lyrics and melodies, but things just kind of developed a little bit at a time and I began singing and making records of my things."

"People liked the demos that I made of the songs and I got offered some recording contracts so I became a recording artist. And when that became successful, I was asked to go out on the road and perform.  

"So I'm in a very lucky position right now. I can sing, I can write, and I can make records."

"My very first recording session that I did for Bang Records...we recorded 'Solitary Man,' 'Cherry, Cherry,' and a song called 'I Got The Feeling'." 'Solitary Man' was chosen as the first record to be released. I was thrilled. I liked the record a lot. I had a couple of great producers, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I was using my real name on the record so I was quite excited about it. It made the charts. It didn't go up to the top 10, but it actually made the national charts, which, from nowhere I was very happy."

"We followed it with 'Cherry, Cherry' which was like a top 5 record around the world.

"Suddenly from just inching my way on to the charts to "Cherry, Cherry" (which was top 5) and really established, begin to establish me it was very very exciting. I considered myself very lucky at that time and it was all like a dream."

"I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. My dad was stationed in Cheyenne, WY at Ft. Warren for a couple of years. We lived on base and lived in Cheyenne, which was  nice because it was a change from Brooklyn... horses and singing cowboys and all that stuff. So I came beck with a taste of that and I think the meshing of the two was good for me.

"It got me out of the city and gave me a little taste of what else was happening in the world. Both of those things affected my music. I can see it now."

"I was surprised the first time I wrote a song. I was studying guitar. I learned my first chord progression and with that chord progression (for some reason) I started to sing a melody.  I was going out with a girl at the time. I'll just wrote her a song...and I did."

A clip is shown of Neil singing "Sweet Caroline" with Cher and Glen Campbell on The Glen Campbell Show.

"My first public performance was at a hop in Pennsylvania. I lip-synched a record that I made under some other name. I remember it because I walked out on stage in a big park. I walked out on stage and tripped over a wire and went right on my face while the record was playing. You see these were lip-synch days and the guy on the record was singing away, and I was getting up off my face. I finished the song and kinda beat a strategic retreat from the stage. That's why I remember it."

"When Barbara and I did "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" on the Grammys it was the second time we had actually sung it together other than the recording session.  She called and said we were invited to do it on the Grammys, and what did I think. I said 'Great, let's do it!' And she made me do it with her over the phone, and that's how we rehearsed it. We rehearsed it over the telephone.

" I said, 'Now how did it go?' I started with (sings) 'you don't bring' and then you sing and then I sang the second line on the phone. And then she sang the third line on the phone. And by the time we go to the end, we realized...O.K., if we can do it on the telephone, we can do it on the Grammys. 'Let's do it!'"

"The Kim Carnes duet on the Lovescape album came about really as an accident. I was in the studio recording with the band and we were being produced by Val Garay, who also produced quite a number of things for Kim. She came by just to say 'Hi' to everybody. She knew some of the band members and we had met before. 

"As soon as I saw her there in the studio, I said:

'You gotta stay and let's sing a couple of songs together. We're here. We have this fantastic band. Let's just for the fun of it, sing a couple of songs together.'

"She was very open to the idea. We did...we sang a couple of things and "Hooked On The Memory Of You" was one of them. People liked it so much it just ended up on the album. So I was very happy she showed up that day."