I just want the songs to have the staying power as my favorite songs. If you listen to any Hank Williams song, when you're in a good mood, it's going to put you in a better mood. If you happen to be bummed-out, you're going to feel maybe a little more bummed-out and better at the same time. At any time in my life, his music has had meaning and value to me. If a song can shape-shift in that way, that's a sign of success.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
During the songs, you transcend yourself. The best way to be in the performance is to be without pause and be essentially in the moment, in that moment of expression.
But I'm just having fun playing and giving Botox injections to the older songs.
You always have your complaints about your own music. I never finish a track because I decided to finish. It's like, I just finish a track because I'm tired of it, you know? So you could be finishing songs forever, I think, if you are quite a perfectionist.
When it comes to writing songs, I've always got to be commissioned to do it. I won't write unless someone has got a real genuine purpose for it.
I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off.
The Medicine Man, taking his music with him, is passing quietly into the Great Silence, where the old songs were "Received in Dreams" by "inner-plane communication. "
[My mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.
I write songs about my own experiences. You can't lie to yourself. You can't pose to yourself.
I mean, whose songs don't focus on tragedy and loss?
I can write songs, I've had songs in movies, but I can't compose film scores, you know?
The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs - whether they love it or hate it. Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people.
I'm just writing love songs. I'm not trying to be pop. I'm not trying to be jazz. I'm not trying to be anything. I'm just writing love songs. And everyone loves a love song.
As a kid, I always had a super vivid imagination, like "Man, I like those shoes, but they should've made them in purple" or like, "Man, I wonder how people make songs. "
Lil Wayne is the best rapper on Earth. Can't nobody touch him. He's the only guy who can put out 300 songs a year and they all fire.
Once a song comes out, these songs aren't mine. They're everybody's. So there you go.
I just do as many songs as I can and then I put it together when I get sort of in the middle, maybe 30 songs, that's when I start really thinking about the name of the cd and what direction all the songs are going, that kind of stuff. But I don't ever want to corner myself, I just want to be able to express whatever I can express in songs and just pick after that.
No matter how long you play rock n roll songs might change just as the balls are there, the rock balls. And that's what's important to us.
