He's essentially a Brit folkie (living, of course, in California) who prefers songs about (he reads a lot) arcane historical subjects - a song about Russian submariners dying in the hull of their sunken boat anyone? - to the usual boy-meets-girl/romance/relationships stuff and who only for a short time span in his career traded as a MOR/Yacht pop artist, those Alan Parsons-crafted Year of the Cat/Time Passages-years to which he himself has said: "
It was fun to go there for a while, like visiting a Hollywood film set, but I didn't want to live there, I always knew it wouldn't last. I'm not a pop star at all."
He's more comfortable doing stuff like this (a song about Germany's WWII attack on Russia, would you believe?, probably the only song mentioning "Tigers" that doesn't refer to the feline carnivore, but to the "Panzerkampfwagen VI"
):
By his own admission, he doesn't even like saxophones!
Record company talked him into using them for a more commercial sheen (and because they were en vogue at the time, think Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street'), he thought they devalued the earnestness of his music.
He's really into
literary music (eg the incident when Elvis saw Josef Stalin in the clouds and contemplated becoming a monk):
