You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.
If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
More times than not, it's a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.
For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it. ...Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.
When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record. I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like. I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla's bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play."
I take things a little bit more critically now, like, "What did I think I was saying in that song? What is this song about?" I thought the lyrics were incredibly descriptive, and now they sound really cryptic and weird. I'd like to also think that when I listen to songs from Something About Airplanes that I'm proud of my development as a writer. I don't think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
