If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.
You reach a certain point in your life where they things you do and say do make a difference.
What has worked before is never as good as something that has never been tried before, even if it doesn't work.
We as songwriters are in the same position as a professional fisherman. Our fishing grounds are kind of fished out.
The people who are making money are the ones who are writing and singing their own songs.
Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. . . . Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.
Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.
I like to play pranks on my girlfriend, you know, keep things fresh for me, make me laugh, you know? She hates it. But like, the other night, I put Saran wrap over the toilet seat, you know, which doesn't sound that original, but she's bulimic.
Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.
There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.
Turn off your mind, and focus on what you've got to do - task at hand.