I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.
The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil.
I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.
I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.
I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I'm concerned I'm actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I'm a man.
Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.
I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.
When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself - especially in those long and grim hours in the office - is to write stuff I find funny.
I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.
Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.
I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
I write hate lyrics really well. It's not every day you can use them, really.
I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.
If you took love out of the equation, I wouldn't know what else to write about.
When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.
I have to be able to see the thing that's going on that I'm writing about, or else it just doesn't make any sense to me.
