My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.
When I write songs I think about how it makes people feel, and I hope that when it goes into your ears you feel happy too. Not sexy happy but apple pie happy.
I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist.
You're not going to hear me singing songs about Wall Street because I don't know anything about that.
I've written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that's what's been fun about looking back.
I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
Songs really tend to connect.
A few songs with Him might change the way you sing. Forever.
To me, there's two types of songs, good and bad. And I just like to stick with the good ones.
Meanings of all songs come after they are recorded. Someone else has to interpret them
I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.
To be part of Kevin's [Drew] world, "Who Came First" is just kind of a magical symphony. If you're asking me what that emotional timbre what is my favorite, my favorite "why" is the question. The other songs also have a revealing quality, but it started with "Sister OK".
Listening closely to songs these days, there's a lot of lazy songwriting where people get away with it. I don't want to be too critical about it. But I also feel like I wanted to say something a bit different from just being a musician and singing about yourself. Ultimately, that's not really interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, I was interested in observing people and maybe making my own stories. That kind of reflects in my music.
I hope somebody does this to all my crap demos when I'm dead, making them into hit songs.
Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write.
I just listen to so much music that I like the role music can play in scoring something. I'm not doing song parodies or funny songs, I'm just adding some music to my words. So it's limited and specific, but as a performer I find it pretty enjoyable.
The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.
To get 300 songs to fit together on an album, it's not like I choose 300 songs and say these are the ones I wanted to pick. To get those 300 songs I sampled 1000's of songs and narrowed down the ones I felt worked the best musically.