Singer-songwriter Eric Andersen: Why are we still here? And what are we doing with it?

Greenwich Village folk musician Eric Andersen was friends with Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joni Mithcell, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, but never had a big career, which a new documentary 'The Songpoet' tries to find an answer to. Rolling Stone interviewed the songpoet about his past, and success that was within his grasp plenty of times but he never managed to get hold of it. Andersen says Warhol once gave him "a beautiful painting and signed it. I sold it dirt cheap to a German buyer. Fast forward, years later, I open The New York Times and there’s a full-page ad with my fucking painting for sale for something like $12.5 million". His album 'Stages' was lost for 20 years, and Andersen believes it was lost intentionally - "instantaneously and unwittingly, not through will or a life choice, you instantly become a Buddhist - because if you get attached to this, it will destroy you. Even though it’s your work". Just when Brian Epstein was about to take him and manage him, the Beatles manager had died. Plenty of his musician friends, however, are dead - "the music business isn’t especially conducive to good health" - Andersen is alive, living with his wife in the Netherlands.