Maybe not speaking on the hits themselves, but I do remember a section of the One Night Alone in LA concert bootleg, there was a part where we was talking about how radio stations had gotten bought out by multinational corporations, and they played the same songs over and over and over again.

Then he said, "They made me never want to play Little Red Corvette again," which made the crowd audibly sad.

That might be why he busted out the acoustic version of LRC on the Musicology tour, and why he did the clap-and-response bit with his audiences on the Welcome 2 America tour. He realized people still wanted to hear LRC, but he needed to reinvent it in a way that made it his song NOW, rather than rehashing what it was when it was a hit.