To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand.
If I was writing a song one night, I would leave the studio and come back the next day, and if I could remember the same melody on the same song, it was definitely something worth working more on. If I couldn't remember it, maybe there was a purpose about that.
I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too!
Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs.
I've always seen the songs as having a consciousness. Since I was two-and-a-half they would come to me from nowhere. I never thought that I was conjuring them by myself, and I was always grateful they would come and visit... They've always been very much alive. They don't have a physical body like we do but there seems to be an awareness.
I like to work with people who have a sense of putting a song over, and can sing in tune, and with passion. With technology you can polish a turd, but there's still no button you can press for passion.
When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it.
When a song gets its legs and begins to come to me, this is the euphoric hook that keeps me wanting to continue.
We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals
I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.
I came in with a completely new perspective. I would write songs and they would pick tunes they felt were in the Purple vein.
I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.
Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.
Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.
Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows They have nothing that will ever capture your heart They're just thorns without the rose Be careful of them in the dark Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one Oh baby can't you hear me now, can't you hear me now Will I see you tonight on a downtown train Every night it's just the same, you leave me lonely now
The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.
Songwriting is as much a craft as a talent.
My best album is called In Search Of A Song. That was my best shot right there. My finest hour, as they say. I could listen to the whole thing all the way through. There's nothing really crammed into it.
A mockingbird... was heard to blend the songs of 32 different kinds of birds into a 10 minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
I would never put my songs in a commercial.
You're dealing in magic-it's this intangible thing that has to happen. And to seek it out too much might not be a good idea. Because, you know, it's very shy, too. But once you've got the essence of them, you can work songs and improve them. You see if there's a better word, or a better change.
I just never really thought of not being involved, because when I write the songs I take them to a certain place and by that point I kinda know what I want them to sound like.
You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.
My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.
I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.
