As Rock Cellar found out in May 2019 in our feature interview with the man himself, Steven Van Zandt is a masterful storyteller with a deep, loving appreciation for the power of music — so there’s no doubt this new interview series announced this week will be great entertainment.

Here’s Van Zandt speaking at length about rock and roll in our conversation:

“There are five crafts of rock and roll. Of course the first craft is learning your instrument, but the second craft is analyzing records and becoming an arranger. You have to do that first and understand what the role of the bass guitar is or why the drums are doing fills where they are or what’s the configuration of a song? Why does this melody work with that chord change? You have to analyze all of that stuff.

Then the third stage is performance, but everybody is skipping that bar band stage these days, which is really a mistake, You have to make a list of 50 of your favorite songs and find a band and go out and play ‘em and by playing these songs, you absorb them in a very different way that you do just by listening to them. Why is that important? ‘Well, because now you have set your own standards, by playing your favorite songs for months at a time and now you go to the fourth stage of craft, which is composition. You’re writing to a standard, the standard of your 50 favorite songs.

You now have a standard set up, but if you skip that stage and you don’t have that standard set up then you’re gonna write in a very mediocre way. But if you have the greatest songs you can think of and you’re comparing yourself to them, it’s gonna raise your own standards so that’s what that’s about.

The fifth stage is learning how to make records. So that’s the kind of thing that I apply to myself now, This record, when it comes to fictionalizing your life, I employed that very same craft, writing songs that I’d imagine being recorded by other artists.”