I usually write from my own experience, and that's definitely a true statement for me. I think having a song about desiring to live and wanting to get it right, which many of my songs do, often I have to clarify that I haven't figured it out yet.
My best sunsets are always going to be in my home town, San Diego. Watching the sunset from the Pacific knowing that you're sleeping in your own bed, there's something special about that.
Faith, hope, and love remain. But the greatest of these is love.
I try to write songs just for the song itself. I don't try and think about where it's going to end up, that way you're writing for the good of the song.
I love the idea that you can create a world through song.
I've got a variety of different sources of news that I follow and every day there's going to be different headlines, different stories spun different ways and different sources that they're going to cite as their facts.
Pain is a common emotion in many of my songs mainly because I often don't know other ways to express it adequately. In my songs I wrestle with the things that I don't understand.
I do have an obligation, however, a debt that cannot be settled by my lyrical decisions. My life will be judged by my obedience, not my ability to confine my lyrics to this box or that.
Your faith is what you do daily, you can't separate your heart from your body and keep them both alive, they're almost the same thing.
If you're leaving your family behind, you better believe in what you're singing.
I think despair and cynicism are two different things. On the flip side of hope is despair. Belief and doubt are the same thing, in that to believe something you have to actively doubt the opposite. And from my perspective, that's the deep end. You're dealing with the unknown; you're dealing with mystery.
For me, I want to create a environment for the songs to live in. So one song by itself only tells a piece of the story, but in the context of the album, more of the colors are revealed.
I've always been fascinated with the strong emotional ties that music can have. A song can bring you back to a place or a season of life like no other art form can.
I think that's the beauty of live music - creating from the destruction.
Please be slow to judge ‘brothers’ who have a different calling.
Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home.
When I'm happy, when I'm enjoying life, I'm home, I'm surfing, I'm spending time with my wife, my friends and I'm not thinking about the pain. And then the moment I encounter something that feels difficult, I feel like that's when, for me, I turn to writing and thinking and maybe a song comes from that.
Music is a handshake where I, as a songwriter, am only part of the equation. I love that, the fact that you can make the song your own.
It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about.
Experience is all I have. I equate song-writing with archeology. Every day you dig. You dig into different places within yourself - even finding places that you've rarely been. And buried within the soil is song.
You want songs to sound cohesive with the other songs on the record but when you first start writing you just want to write to tell the truth.
Why is it that everything is collapsing if gravity is pulling us together?
I began thinking about the idea of a 24 hour concert. What if you tied songs to certain hours of the day - creating a 24 hour world of lyric and melody. So that was the inspiration for this project.
Usually for me, the melodic structures come out in the water and the lyrical ideas could come from a book I'm reading.
The song can be a little bit more of the mystery and leave the whole thing open ended. But there's something really gratifying about saying exactly what you mean.
