I enjoyed singing, I loved song writing, I loved recording. All those things that involves with creating music was great.
When I was younger I would always listen to female artists that are my age now and I felt like I couldn't always connect with them because all these people would constantly sing these party songs and I couldn't always relate to them. When I was younger it felt very alienating and I try my best to be the person that I would've needed, for other people.
I try to tell a story musically in a song.
Years later, you can hear a song, and it brings you back right to that moment, what was happening at that time, whether it was a relationship or a difficult time, or maybe a great time in your life, and you had that album you were listening to. Twenty years later, you can put on that song you fell in love to or your heart was broken to, and you hear that song and it brings you right back there. I think music is the most powerful tool we have.
Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it's overcompensating for something missing in the song's structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it's never like an assault.
If I write when I'm low, it will be a dark song, but I don't care. I want to be honest with myself at all times.
I know my fans look up to me and that's why I make my songs so personal; it's all about things I've experienced and things I like or hate. I write for myself and hope that my fans like what I have to say.
My sound is constantly progressing and maturing. It's hard with all the songs that I have written over the years to compile them all into one album. It's almost impossible to categorize them into one genre.
How could I have kept out this incredible fiction? That's when it all started for me. I was, and still am, a HUGE Star Trek fan. "Songs Of The Ocean" is my tribute to this great story, and it's based on the Star Trek IV movie, the one in which they go back in time. [The Voyage Home ; It's the one where they bring a pair of whales to the future -ed.]
As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.
I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet, I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She's sort of become my fairy godmother.
I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.
Songs are usually unfit for whistling - indeed, whistling (except to the person doing it) is unbearable.
When I first started writing songs and being very explicit, it was hard, but one of the main things people respond to in my writing is that 'just say it' attitude of my songs. There really is nothing personal or private; it's all universal, if you can just find the courage to be open about your life.
Why do you think I write these feminist songs, to try and teach myself to respect myself. You know, it's not because I'm a hero.
I know it sounds so lame, but the songs are like my children.
I don't believe people when they say their songs have nothing to do with their personal life.
I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.
I feel like I have a pretty eclectic taste in music and art, so for every song I can see a different kind of video.
Every song has a memory; every song has the ability to make or break your heart, shut down the heart, and open the eyes. But I’m afraid if you look at a thing long enough; it loses all of its meaning
We're really into combining lots of different styles into one song: that's normal for us. It might seem arbitrary but we listen to a lot of music that does that.
Weird, isn't it Somehow in the dead of winter when its 40 below, so cold your words just freeze in the air, you think you'll never hear a robin's song again or see a blossom on a cherry tree, when one day you wake up and bingo, light coming through the mini blinds is softened with a tick of rose and the cold morning air has lost its bite. It's spring once again, the streets are paved with mud and the hills are alive with the sound of mosquitos.
Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.
I listen to music every day for study reasons, and I confess that I have very little knowledge of what is going on in the hit parades around the world. I have no prejudices for any kind of music genre, and I listen with pleasure to many songs on the radio that my children already know of by heart, while I hear them practically for the first time.
To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation.
