_Dino Perrucci_

Gregg Allman will open up an unprecedented 10-night residency at New York’s City Winery this Sunday, and the singer sat down with The Wall Street Journal for a new interview in which Allman opens up about his recent health scare that took him off the road, his naiveté about publishing rights when he first came into the business and how he and the Allman Brothers Band are in talks to set up a major-city reunion tour.

Allman recently returned to the stage at his Laid Back Festival at Colorado’s Red Rocks in late September after being sidelined by pneumonia for over a month, and he went into detail about the treatment he received, including his eight bronchoscopies. “I had a little talk to the surgeon before we started and I said ‘Listen now. I’m a singer,’” Allman says. “And he said ‘I know, I bought your records.’ I said ‘Please, just be as careful as you can.’”

Allman also talked about learning about his vocal chords after seeing them on the screen at the doctor’s office. “You see exactly where the songs come from,” he says. “[The doctor] said ‘Man, you have amazingly great looking vocal chords for as hard as you sing.’ He said ‘I expected to see an old ragged American flag, after blowing in the wind. But they’re as smooth as they can be.’”

The conversation turned to the early days of Allman and his band, when the group didn’t know anything about publishing rights and how much money they should make, giving up the rights to their manager Phil Walden. “It’s not good to talk about people who have passed away, but the first two, three, four years, he took all my publishing,” Allman says. “I remember when we first signed, I went and asked my brother about it. He said ‘Man, I don’t know. All I know is they’re feeding us!’ That was way back in the beginning. I went ahead and signed. But then I met Dr. John. He said ‘You stupid bastard!’”

Finally, Allman returned to the often discussed possibility of a reunion tour for the Allman Brothers Band, who officially disbanded in late October 2014 with a final run at New York’s Beacon Theatre. “Been talkin’ about it recently…having a tour,” he says. “Major city tour. Been talkin’ about it, now let’s get that straight. Nothing signed in blood yet.”

Read the full interview here.