I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.
Sometimes the teacher would tell me that if you're singing a love song and you just don't feel it with a person or something you've experienced, just think of a dog or cat that you love.
My life is as good as an Abba song. It’s as good as Dancing Queen.
Songs Like Mony Mony aren't really written, they're sort of hanging in space - waiting to be found - I'm just thankful we found this one.
I don't know if any genuine meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.
I wanted to do a set of love songs for Valentine's Day so I went through my old material. I found myself scraping around the edges of good taste.
Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good. I have become, you might call it mature - I would call it senile - and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.
I like writing songs - I keep saying that one day I'll do something with them, but I haven't yet.
One of the best records I’ve ever heard. Seriously, maybe top 20 all-time… I think if Rich Mullins had been given more time here, and if God had blessed his life with love and a wife, if he had the chance to see as much of the relational beauty as he saw of the natural beauty, I think he might have written some songs like the ones we find on BiRDS OF RELOCATiON. And you know that’s about the highest praise I can give someone. You will not find a combination of more beautiful poetry, raw honesty, and gorgeous melodies for a long time.
I've written 90 percent of the songs in my career, on all my albums.
Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are.
I started off just trying to make a wish list for myself. I wanted to work with people I really admire myself. I wanted to work with other artists from other scenes so they could make my songs improve in a different way - people who have artistically different things to say.
Most Radiohead songs are actually REM songs, I just have a mentally ill child read the lyrics aloud and then I change the melodies a bit.
Hunting Bears is a complex song. A bear, as you know is another term for a chubby chaser. The guitar line is actually the sound of a fat man's thighs rubbing together as he approaches another lardy male for a night of sexual deviance.
I think the best thing about music is that someone could be writing a song that's so personal, and it tells so many other people's story at the same time. It kind of exemplifies that we are all kind of on the same wave[length] - it's amazing how comforting somebody else's story can be, because we have experienced their story in some way or another, and I can totally relate, and I get to feel that feeling and the expression of that emotion. I get to feel like as a listener, that somebody understands me, which is pretty incredible.
I love to write honest songs that name real people, then get up onstage and live out those emotions in front of 15,000 people.
Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.
I'd love to collaborate and write a song with Will Gallagher from Oasis. I think he's a great songwriter.
Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
I don't just sit down and write all day, or the songs would be weird or stupid. They would be about different stupid thoughts that I go through.
I won't be indulging in anger anymore, vehemently and self-righteously singing protest songs, and expecting them to bring peace to me or anyone else.
I plan to write more songs of my own, especially on behalf of the animals we needlessly raise for food, at their great expense, and at great expense to our precious, deteriorating planet.
There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.
It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.
