Fredʼs memories of the interview and losing Dan Fogelberg

SAME OLD LANG SYNE INTRODUCTION BY DAN FOGELBERG.mp3
Wow! Thinking back on it, the Dan Fogelberg interview was almost as much fun to prepare for as it was to do. Dan had just released the 3 CD box set called Portrait - The Music of Dan Fogelberg. Having made Dan a staple on our weekly radio show, FM Odyssey, I thought it would be really neat to talk to him and bring out to the audience the side of Dan that most people never knew.
I spoke to his management company and they arranged to have Dan and I chat before a concert he was doing at the King Center in Melbourne, FL which ironically is in my backyard!
Preparing for it was fun. One of the perks in doing radio is the option of taking ownership! So I sat down and I wrote down my all time FAVORITE Dan songs. No CD's in front of me. Nothing between my brain and the paper but a pencil and I began to put these songs down. After finishing I went to the Portrait Box Set to see how many were on there and all but one was; so these songs represent all the music you hear in this 2 hour interview.
The other thing I had in my favor [to create an intimate interview] is that artists, for the most part, only want to talk about their most recent work which makes you have to get creative to slip in a question or two about a legendary song that they didn't come to talk about. In this case - since it was a retrospective CD, there were no "off limits" about what we could talk about.
The questions I asked him in this interview were not necessarily written down in advance but were manifested from the flow he and I had by being in "the moment" with each other. Dan and I had a real good time. In our minds, the microphones in front of us disappeared and it was like two friends chatting on a park bench!
He was charming, stimulating and was certainly relieved that he wasn't being asked the same stupid questions that most had asked him during his career.
I was in LA last December when I received a call that we had lost Dan. How did I mourn? The way I always do. By immediately going to my vast library of music and interviews I have done and continue to do over the past 17 years to try to find something to console my audience.
In this case it was my interview with Dan. We rebroadcast it and got so many emails from fans and even program directors at at our 30 affiliate radio stations about how much they loved it.
One of the passions I continue to pursue is to expand FM Odyssey's base of listeners. Remind many of them and reeducate others how radio is supposed to be done - and who the people were that played a role in the most phenomenal generation of music the world has ever seen. So I decided in April, that I was going to become educated on how to obtain licensing from Sony for all the songs I used during this interview. Talk about education through a fire hose - it was amazing.
So after many months and thousands of dollars invested in master licenses, etc. - it's ready!