I am a true believer that a record should not be a bunch of songs that sound exactly the same.
I think I come under the singer/songwriter badge. I've always written songs right from the very beginning. Because of my style of playing people tend of me more of a guitar player than a singer sometimes.
Basically it takes me very little time to write a song. If I find myself taking more than an hour to do it I usually forget it, and try something else. I like to work quickly; I never like to waste any time. I never write half a song and come back to it later at all. It all has to be done at once. I lose interest if it doesn't.
The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.
Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
The way I see it, there's only one melody for any song.
Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
I'm a songwriter. So I'm OK. But when I wrote "Stand By Me" as a song and to know that the song will probably be here for hundred and hundreds of years to come, it's great, you know. And it was just simple lyrics.
With a stroke of love on the canvas of my soul I'm painting a perfect world with shades of Michelangelo With each promise made in every heart that knows we can live in a perfect world in shades of Michelangelo I hear songs of children echo in the sky I hear songs of children a tomorrow so bright!
It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.
Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability.
Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.
The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives
Do me a favor... Stand up, walk to wherever the nearest window is, and just look outside. You may not know this, but there's an entire planets-worth of summers, friends, sunsets, street lamps, songs, late nights, great films, and night skies waiting for you. Your life is as amazing as you want it to be, but first, you have to let it be that way.
Using what you have always enhances what's to come no matter if it's an album, song, artwork or whatever.
The mall tour was right off of my second record, before it came out. It was very different. I did an acoustic performance every day in a different mall! One interesting thing I remember is playing "My Happy Ending" a lot, and that song was so new that I remember getting emotional when I would play it.
I started singing in church and I was probably around seven and I started singing anywhere that I could. I used to sing at my school. I was in musicals and then it kind of got to a point where I started to - wanted to do my own songs.
I have those songs as well. It depends on what I'm going through in my life but I'm a huge fan of Bjork. Sometimes I get so emotional because she's so amazing.
Every song is something that I've been through or an emotion I've felt - like falling in love or heartbreak.
I'm not stuck strictly doing hip-hop. Songs from the dance/electronic scene are my favorite to make and remix, and I like that world.
The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?
...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.
You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle.
If you want to open a supermarket chain and put your face all around the globe, selling your baby and your dog, if it makes you happy, who am I to disagree, as the song goes. But it's not for me. I've always tried to keep my integrity and keep my autonomy.
I also started writing songs because I had this burning activity in my heart and had to express myself.
