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Each year, we're privileged to interview the famous, the not-so-famous and the outright notorious.

Sometimes, the interviews they grant are mundane and ... well ... not so interesting.

Others wax eloquent, not just on their chosen entertainment profession, but on the state of their lives, politics, world affairs ... you name it.

Here are highlights of some of the interviews of 2007 that made Weekend worth reading (and writing!):

From the Jan. 12 edition: Bill Cosby

Cosby still recalls the bond that comedy forged for him, first with those few bar patrons and later on as a fledgling performer on the New York comedy circuit.

“If you can perform something or draw or write something and people let you know that you did something to them emotionally, it does something to you,” Cosby said. “You write a poem and you give it to your mother, and she reads it and she loves it and she cries, and you both feel good about it. You draw a picture of a flower or something for Father’s Day and you give it to a man and he smiles ... these are things you’re doing that you’re giving to people and you make them feel good.

“With the laughter, it’s much more of a genuine one-on-one way of making a person feel good that’s not sexual. It makes a person feel friendly, and you feel happy that the person is happy. And at this point in my career, with people knowing my albums and seeing things about me on television, I can make people laugh because of that. It’s like you’re out with friends, and the least funny person in that group, without trying to be funny, begins to tell about something that happened to them while they were driving over ... and the next thing you know, everybody at the table is having trouble breathing they’re laughing so hard. And it isn’t that the person is a great storyteller; it’s that they’re a friend of yours, and you know so much about the person, you fill in all the gaps yourself.

“That’s more of the way I like to work,” he added. “I love to change at least 78 percent of what I’m doing each time I come back so that even if the person was there in the audience the last time, they’re going to see or hear a different form of a particular story.”

From the Feb. 9 edition: Mic Harrison

Recording “Push Me On Home” was a group affair, hence the decision to include The High Score in the album’s credits. High Score bandleader Robbie Trosper produced “Push Me On Home,” and drummer Brad Henderson contributed a number of song titles and lyrics.

“Putting these songs together, I was actually sitting there thinking about this particular band and what we had played live, and what it would be like for the crowd to hear us play it,” Harrison said. “I just really wanted to get up and have a good time and make that come across. I think it has so far, because I don’t want to be one of those droopy guys who strums his acoustic guitar and tries to make people cry. I want to have a good time.

“You can’t fake having a good time. If you are having one, everyone else will too. I think I’m finally starting to learn that most people don’t really care what you’re saying until they hear something they like. If they really like that one guitar lick, then they’ll start listening to what your saying. And I think that’s what we tried to go for on this one — the meat and the potatoes.”

From the Feb. 23 edition: Taylor Swift

Despite the accolades and the cheering crowds and the hordes of pre-teens who idolize her, Taylor Swift likes to think of herself as just a normal 17-year-old girl.

Of course, not many 17-year-olds will ever grace the stage at Knoxville’s Thompson-Boling Arena to warm up the crowd for country legend George Strait, as Swift will do tonight. But then again, not many 17-year-olds possess the self-awareness and the gratitude for their successes that Swift does.

“It never crosses my mind, ever, that this is crazy,” Swift told The Daily Times in a recent phone interview. “This is what I’m wired for. I’m not exactly as natural in a high school setting as I’m am in front of 20,000 people. And no, I’m not weird; I’m a normal person — I’m just comfortable doing my ‘work’ because it’s so much fun.

“I’ve always put myself in this position, since I was 13 years old. I had an idea that something like this could happen, that I could be a role model for people younger than me and people older than me, so when all my friends were experimenting, I never took a drink of alcohol, I never tried drugs and I stayed away from guys because there was this huge, big career dream that I had. And thankfully, it came through.”

From the April 13 edition: Switchfoot

“First and foremost, I think it’s an incredible honor to be associated with Christ, and certainly as individuals and as a band, we’ve always been very open about our faith, and it’s a big part of who we are,” bassist Tim Foreman told The Daily Times in a recent interview. “Yet I feel like at the moment you try to put your faith in your back pocket and market that, it seems like it’s very limiting to who feels like they can listen to the songs. Music has always been something that has pulled people together opened them to new ways of thinking.

“With any label you can put on our music, I hate to think that would limit the scope of what we’re trying to do or limit who we play these songs to. I feel like as a band, we’re no different than most people — we’re on the journey and we’re wrestling with issues as we go, and a lot of songs are about more about things we don’t understand than the things we do. Music is a safe place to open up a dialogue and not feel like we have to put the pen down at the end of the song.

“If there’s any finger-pointing going on in our music, it’s always pointing at our own chests,” Foreman added. “We’re asking, ‘Why can’t I get it together? Why can’t I figure it out?’ And it’s an honor to take a song that’s very personal and find out it means something else to somebody on the other side of the world.”

From the April 13 edition: George Thorogood

“I’m the last one — I’m it, the last of the old school,” Thorogood told The Daily Times in a recent interview. “Let’s say I’m about 50 or 60 (the Web site Wikipedia lists his birthday as Dec. 31, 1951); I’m the last of the card-carrying bunch that saw Muddy Waters play. I played with him. I opened for him. Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker … we’re the last band of that time, and it’s not the fault of the young people who came after me — those guys have just died and passed on.

“I think sometimes these younger people think I’m younger than I actually am, and that I only have two records out. Some of these young guys can really play, but unfortunately because of the time that they came along, they didn’t get a chance to see the real deal. Seeing it, witnessing it, experiencing it — that’s something you can’t learn off of listening to a record.

“Granted, I heard Robert Johnson on a record, but I saw Muddy Water play a Robert Johnson song two feet in front of me,” Thorogood added. “The whole time, I was saying, ‘This is it, George; this is as close as you’re going to get to the real thing.’”

“The music is bigger than me, and it’ll go on long after I’m not here,” he said. “The songs made me famous; I didn’t make them famous. I know where I stand in this thing. I always say, I went to the same school as Keith Richard and Eric Clapton; the only difference is that they graduated.

“I’m the last person to go to that school before they shut the school down. I got the chance to see the best, and you can never replace those people. Sure, there are guys out there now that might sell as many records and become icons of their own generation, but they’ll never do for music what somebody like Jimi Hendrix did.

“I’m so fortunate to have seen what I saw and got to be a part of,” he added. “It was a gold mine of education, and it can never be replaced or duplicated.”

From the May 25 edition: Blue Cheer

Most aging rock stars can count on a few things if they stick with it as long as Blue Cheer’s Dickie Peterson has. Callused fingers, grizzled appearances, hearing loss - they’re scars of a life spent playing for thousands, whipping crowds into a frenzy of electric guitar feedback and pounding drums. And Blue Cheer, which got its start in the mid-1960s, ranks right up there with the Rolling Stones as one of the longest-running rock bands.

Peterson, however, didn’t count on what his doctor would find the last time he went in for a physical.

“I’m very fit, but when the doctor looked in my ears, he said, ‘My God, what have you done to your ears? What do you do for a living?’” Peterson told The Daily Times this week. “At this point, I’m a little worried, so I tell him, ‘I’m a musician; why?’ And he said, ‘Because you have calluses on your eardrums.’

“Guitar players, because they’re playing in a higher tone, rip their eardrums. As a bass player, I’ve just developed calluses over the 40 years I’ve been doing this. It is physically taxing - we don’t jump around and do acrobats, but the sheer drive of it, I compare to riding a motorcycle. Yeah, you’re just sitting down riding it, but if you ride for 100 miles, you’re going to feel that baby when you get off.”

From the June 1 edition: Walter Koenig

According to Koenig, the role wasn’t exactly his most challenging, but given the fan response at various conventions (such as this weekend’s Adventure Con, taking place in Knoxville today through Sunday), it’s certainly been one of the most gratifying.

“Chekov will probably be remembered as the young navigator — a bit cocky but loyal, and all of those other good things that fans remember about him,” Koenig said. “He wasn’t a tremendously multi-dimensional character; when people think of him, most of them think of a couple of personality traits, but that’s it.

“Personally, I just would like to be remembered as somebody who had a firm hold on his craft, as somebody who did more than simply being the Russian guy sitting at the console going, ‘Warp Factor 4.’ I think in whatever time I have left, I hope I’m still able to establish in the public’s mind that there’s more to me than that character.”

From the June 22 edition: Sinbad

... it was in 1987 that he got his big break — after guest-starring on “The Cosby Show,” he landed the role of Coach Walter Oakes on that show’s spin-off, “A Different World.”

It was a role he kept until 1991, and it shaped not only Sinbad’s career, but the way blacks were portrayed on television. “The Cosby Show” paved the way by creating positive, socially conscious and upbeat role models for African-Americans, and “A Different World” continued that tradition. These days, Sinbad told The Daily Times, the focus has shifted drastically away from the ground broken by “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World.”

“I love it when white America tries to say, ‘Look at where you’ve gone! Look at how far you’ve come!’ But all ya’ll ever point to is hip-hop and basketball,” he said. “I’m not trying to put either one down, but I grew up with old-school hip-hop, when it was militant and about the neighborhood and community. Now, it’s about exactly what the man wants — making money. There are a lot of underground rappers who are positive, but they can’t get record deals or major distribution. And you know why? Because a strong black image is scary.

“From day one, it’s all been scary to white America. From when we first got off the boats and went to work in the fields, ya’ll were asking, ‘What have I done? Who is this that I’ve brought over here?’ You’ve always been fascinated with us — the way we walk, the way we talk — but you’ve been scared of us, too. You’ve wanted to absorb what we are but get rid of us — like squeezing the juice from a lemon and throwing it away.”

Corporate America has caught on to that inherent fear, Sinbad said, and used it for financial advantage — by playing up the thug-like qualities of hip-hop and downplaying the Malcolm X, “by any means necessary” attitude, record labels have robbed the art form of its soul, he added.

“You can’t sell militant to young white kids because it’s about revolution, so they got rid of the consciousness and made it about guns and gangstas,” he said. “White kids love the guns and gangstas; all kids love that, but people equate the violence that comes from that, that’s talked about in that, with black people. Is that our legacy? Violence? We’re not one color, and we don’t come in one shape, so how can you define us by one type of genre?

“But sometimes, you become your own worst enemy if you don’t see what the big plan is. You don’t have to sell to white teenagers — if you sell it to us, everybody else buys it. Whatever we’re wearing, everybody else is wearing; whatever we’re buying, everybody else is buying. The ‘bling’ is killing us, man. I grew up in the ‘70s — I wanted stuff, too — but all I wanted was a nice car and a house. It’s crazy now, because those things aren’t enough. You’ve got to have the rims, the sound, everything!

“It’s just so much that we want now — we’re consumed by being consumers,” he added.

From Sept. 14: Hinder

They’ve not exactly endeared themselves to critics of “serious” rock ‘n’ roll — (All Music Guide called the band’s debut album, “Extreme Behavior,” one of the “year’s worst albums”), but 2.5 million album sales later, it’s the guys in Hinder who are having the last laugh.

“Honestly, it stung at first, because you never know what an album’s going to do when it’s first released,” guitarist Mark King told The Daily Times this week. “People read those reviews, and they can take them to heart. But here we are, 2.5 million albums later, and I think it’s hilarious. I love getting online and reading what people write about us. One of my favorites said, ‘This album is so horrible, it sounds like (Limp Bizkit front man) Fred Durst wrote all the lyrics and played all of the music.’ That’s great!

“Honestly, if you look at what the critics who hate us do like and you go look at the charts, those bands have sold maybe 200,000 copies. We just go out and have a good time. We try to write good songs where you can get the lyrics — they’re not hard to understand, and they’re not a bunch of crap. It’s just good old rock ‘n’ roll, and I think people are really wanting that again.”

From the Sept. 28 edition: The Avett Brothers

That vulnerability and honesty is what makes the music made by the Avetts so genuine. Perhaps it’s earthy, rootsy, bluegrass/folk/Americana sound of the instrumentation. Maybe it’s the uplifting two-part harmonies, earnest and pleading and urgent. Perhaps it’s the punk-rock intensity carried over from their days in Nemo. Whatever it is, when the Avetts sing, you believe them. They don’t present their emotions with a sense of melodrama or maudlin weepiness; they do it with honor and integrity. They stand up and proclaim themselves as men — men with wounded hearts, heavy with grief from lost love or the longing for what could have been — but men just the same. It’s a reflection of their own personal philosophies as much as anything else, and how fervently they believe in the dual nature of love as a life-giver and a destroyer.

“I get so weary of hearing people in this day and age talking about how they can’t get married now because they’ve got plans or they’ve got a career,” Scott Avett said. “At what point did love, or your heart, get affected by your means of finance? At what point, through human growth, did that happen? Maybe it’s always been there, but I see it as a much more honorable thing to change my life for a true feeling and a true, honorable relationship.

“I realize now, looking back, that being vulnerable, using it as a tool in the music, is something we strive for. At first, I wrote songs claiming to be better than any human really is or could be, but now I’m saying, this is something I strive to be like and want to be like. It’s not something we can claim to be, because we’re human, and we screw up, but it’s something we strive for.”

From the Oct. 5 edition: Hank III

His first solo album, “Risin’ Outlaw,” was released in 1999, and while critics and peers alike fawned over both the physical and audible likeness of Williams to his grandfather, the man himself quickly soured on the state of country music in Nashville. He’ll never be able to completely escape the shadow of his family’s musical legacy, and he’s come to accept that. Besides, he’s his own Hank.

“I’ve at least made my own niche, even though it’s something I’ll never be able to get away from,” he said. “It’s just part of it, and I hear it every night — ‘Hank Williams is the one!’ — but this Hank Williams is the only one who’s gone out and played hardcore and screamed and taken a different path, and that makes me unique.”

From the Oct. 5 edition: Isaac Hanson

No matter how much the three brothers have accomplished in the past 10 years, they constantly battle with being overshadowed by both its success and the ensuing backlash. A lot of it, Isaac Hanson said, had to do with being in the right place at the wrong time — grunge was on the way out, and youth-oriented bubblegum pop by such acts as the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls was taking over mainstream radio. Hanson, unfortunately, was lumped in with the latter, even though the guys play their own instruments and, to their credit, write most of their own material. (On their major-label debut, “Middle of Nowhere,” “MmmBop” is the song credited solely to the Hansons without any additional co-writers.)

“At the time, we certainly we weren’t going after that market intentionally — that movement toward more upbeat pop stuff — but ‘MmmBop’ was the right song,” he said. “It was a catchy song that came out at a moment when everybody was looking for something like that. And because of our youth, there was a huge level of misunderstanding. I mean, it’s really easy for a 26-year-old to make fun of a 16-year-old with an 11-year-old in his band. It’s easy for high school guys to say, ‘Huh huh, you’ve got long hair; you’re a girl.’

“We were easy targets because we were young, and unfortunately, I think, you then had a huge insurgence of manufactured stuff that immediately followed our record. I think that created a larger level of backlash. People associated us with the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, and we were sitting there going, ‘Huh?’”

Poking fun at “MmmBop” — and, by association, the brothers themselves — became something of a pop culture phenomenon. They took it in stride — they even played themselves on a “Saturday Night Live” skit in which comedian Will Ferrell and host Helen Hunt took them hostage in an elevator and forced them to listen to “MmmBop” over and over until they went insane — but it still stung a bit.

“It’s hard to be the butt of a joke all of the time on some level,” Hanson said. “There were guys and girls alike who poked fun at the band, but the people that mattered to me were people like Lenny Kravitz, who walked up to us at an awards show in 1998 and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Man, I love your stuff; we should work together sometime.’ It’s that kind of thing that’s worth the misunderstanding that was out there.”

From the Oct. 12 edition: Troy “Cowboy Troy” Coleman

Genuine — if ever an adjective were apropos in describing Coleman, it’s that. He wears a Stetson atop his 6-foot-5 frame because it’s how he likes to dress; not to get noticed. He listens to metal because it pleases him; not to be different. And he performs in the country genre because it connects with his roots, his soul, his love of the blue-collar identity country sums up so well; not because it’s fashionable.

And for anybody who thinks otherwise … well, Coleman couldn’t really care less.

“I think the big deal is that it’s something that’s not the status quo,” he said. “It’s so far afield from the norm for me to not only be, in my estimation, one of a few black country artists getting national attention. When something sticks out like that, people are immediately drawn to it.

“I’ve had a lot of people scratching their heads, a lot of people with question marks above their heads when I walk in the room with a Stetson on. It took people a while to realize I was doing it because it’s what I like — not to grab attention or become a focal point of conversation.”

From the Oct. 12 edition: Billy Joe Shaver

He may be 68, but honky tonk singer-songwriter Billy Joe Shaver is still living life like one of the characters out of his songs.

A year ago, he broke a few vertebrae in his neck — in a bar fight on his wedding day. With his best man. Last April, he turned himself in after getting into another bar fight. This time, it involved gunfire.

When you’ve been a hell-raising hardcore troubadour all your life, though, such incidents come to be routine after a few decades. (Ask him about the time he stole a horse, back in 1987, and rode it across the stage during Moe Bandy’s set at Willie Nelson’s annual Fourth of July Picnic.)

“I just went over there and got booked — turned myself in and put up $50,000 bail and got out,” Shaver said of the spring shooting scrape. “It was over an altercation at Papa Joe’s, this little place just outside of Waco, and it was one of those things where it was self-defense. I’ve done the same thing, over and over and over again.

“I don’t feel bad about it — I did what I had to do, and it was either him or me. I’m no stranger to that kind of stuff. I knew what kind of situation I was in, and I knew what kind of shape I was in. This guy was young, and he looked like he was built like a bull or a fire hydrant one, and looking for trouble.

“I didn’t kill him,” Shaver added. “It just went in and out of his jaw, right where he said all the things he said.”

From the Dec. 14 edition: A Flock of Seagulls

“I’m not really playing a song like ‘I Ran’ for myself; I’m playing it because that’s what the fans want,” he said. “I look at doing a show as being able to give them what they want and educating them to what you’re doing now. They come to see what they know, and hopefully you can show them you’re not a dead donkey by playing a new song, and hopefully, they’ll like it.

“Of course, 80 percent of the people come out to see ‘I Ran,’ and that OK. It’s been a part of my life for almost 30 years now, and I think it’s like owning a pair of old jeans. They still fit really nice, and most of the time, you don’t even realize you’re wearing them until you look down and think, ‘They still feel great.’”