I tended not to be concerned about whether a song was going to be a hit when I wrote it. Because it became evident that none of us knew what was a hit and what wasn't. So I thought if I just write what I like, why shouldn't people like what I like?
Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
That was my intention, was to have it be from the perspective of my high-school-aged self, and to try and emulate the music that I listened to at that time. So to write essentially like a pop-punk song about musicals. I wanted the dichotomy of the tone of the music with the lyrics and my singing voice.
I usually start with a guitar riff or some little pattern of chords, and then I kind of go from there. Usually my lyrics are the last thing to go onto a song. For years and years I only ever did instrumental, so I'm still trying to get confidant with my lyrics and find the right balance. I'll generally get inspired from the music. I'll have a guitar line, and then I'll have a melody line, and I hook the lyrics up to fit that rhythm. So, my lyrics to tend be very rhythmic as well. They work with the music rather than the music works around them.
Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L. A. , but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.
But I always loved songs with great lyrics.
In the depth of my soul there is A wordless song - a song that lives In the seed of my heart. It refuses to melt with ink on Parchment; it engulfs my affection In a transparent cloak and flows, But not upon my lips.
There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music. . . because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs.
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.
I wanna be able to stand on the stage and hold out the mic and people sing all the lyrics to my song.
You would never hear any song played twice in the same way. The words were retained, but within a certain frame there was great latitude, and the musician could improvise to his heart's content; and the more the variations and combinations, the greater the musician.
I got an email from my dad after the Super Bowl, and he was like, "Will you send me all of the Beyoncé Knowles songs that you have on your computer?" I'm like, "You never listen to Beyoncé. I'm so excited right now. " It's good to embrace new things. I like when I can show people that it's not all one genre, and everything is very much inspired by everything else.
I'll hear a song I love and suddenly I'm isolated from everything around me just for a nanosecond. That's a moment between a moment.
On every album I've put out, I've put diverse Canadian songs on it. They're not provincial album; my albums are national albums. There'll be a song about Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Nova Scotia on there.
When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.
Like our title song “Clap”, I want to become a singer that receive the applause from all people.
I think it's silly when people try compartmentalize musical genres. That was always my problem with the chillwave thing - people were trying to make it into some kind of musical movement, when it was not a movement. A couple dudes had a couple songs for a couple months. It's going to be a disparate onslaught of people throwing ideas at the wall.
I think when you are doing a song you're trying to give people enough details that they connect.
His desperation and misery swept her up like a storm capturing the sea. She turned her mind to even these feelings, because they were his, like his terrified rage in the lift when they had first met, being wrapped in his arms in the cold well, being dazzled by his wonder at the woods and her home and her. Like being a child, awareness of him the morning chorus that woke her and the lullaby that sent her to sleep, his thoughts always her first and last song. I love you, Kami told him, and cut.