I can't figure out why fans keep coming, maybe it's because they dig the songs.
It's like a dream sometimes, a song just pops into your head and you can't tell if it's something you heard or it's new and you got to write it down.
Honky Tonk Badonkadonk wasnt some serious song, but it was huge! It was funny.
I base my track-listing and what songs I pick by what my fans expect from me and what they want and what I think they want.
Sometimes it could be just during the day, when I'm riding in the car or on the plane. I'll hear somebody say something that strikes a chord and I write it down and write bars at a time, and then when I'm in the studio I go to those bars and I'm like, "Maybe I should make a song about this."
What excites me is the idea of doing a record that's pretty clean and focused on songs. I've rushed a lot with previous albums and there's not a rush now - it's not a race.
The thing that bothers me is that it seems like all the sensitive stuff I write just goes unnoticed . . . the media doesn't get who I am at all. Or maybe they just can't accept it. It doesn't fit into those negative stories they like to write. I'm the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean's "Vincent," that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That's how I want to make my songs feel. Take "Dear Mama" - I aimed that one straight for my homies' heartstrings.
I only wrote one song in jail. But I'm writing new album - you're going to feel the entire 11 months of what I went through on this album. I'm venting my anger.
I can't wait to be a mom and a wife, and explore that phase of life. And also see how it affects and influences my song writing and creativity.
I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.
When I finished a song that I thought was good, I thought, I don't know where that came from, so I have no idea if I can do that again. I'm talking like, a hundred and fifty songs down the line. I still feel that.
Sometimes, I actually end up doing three or four different versions of one song, and sometimes, those versions can be done very differently. They can be very laid back, downtempo, or sometimes the same song can be quite uptempo. But it is always the same melody and chord progressions.
It's pretty much the songs I write that dictate what vibe it should be and what singers it should be.
Everybody has their own approach to songwriting. When you're an electronic musician, the whole writing process just depends. Some people have a very live way of writing electronic music, very improvisational. They set up a lot of gear and do live takes. I'm concerned with having a specific kind of sound. There's not one second that I haven't put thought into. I put almost as much time into my live shows as I do into writing music, but they're two completely different processes. Some people think the way I perform live is how I write songs, which isn't true at all.
If a band isn't coming up with two to four of those when they pick up their instruments, then they have problems - even if none of them turn into a song. If that's not happening in a band, it's time for therapy or breaking up.
When you wrote a song way back in the day, you were writing material to play live. And you would buy the CD at the shows if you like the show. You may not listen to the CD, you might just throw it in the back of your car and let it warp in the sun. The main thing was you saw the song at the show.
There's a lot of griping and groaning about wanting to play half-baked new songs live, but you don't want it to just end up on YouTube with like 74 thumbs down: "This is the worst!"
Enema of the State song is kind of like a tattoo, like a moment in time, but it aged well. It's not like one that you're looking at like, "Aw, God, I gotta get that s**t removed." It's something we're proud of.
I'm not sure if the next song I write is going to be about love or a song about a tree.
When I'm singing a song on stage, I hate hypocrites. If you don't put yourself in that lyric and emote and be what that lyric says that you are, then you're just going through the motions and you're being hypocritical. I just take that same approach with acting. I just take the dialogue and I emote it and become that. I use the same technic.
The challenge is to translate the song into something that works on the stage. It's pop music, but I try to keep it as loose as possible.
I took a lot time to do the first album, and I was really happy about that album. I co-wrote the songs and it was a learning process. When I was working on that album I realized, for the first time, that I could write my own songs.
It's important to tell the artist's story. It's their song! And it's always more fun to write together with the artist!
Sometimes it starts with a random lyric idea that sets the tone for the whole song. Chords and sounds build from the lyric and rhythm, kind of. Sometimes it's a track I fall I love with... but writing my own songs, I rarely write on tracks.
We haven't really changed, we've just gotten better at executing what we've always been trying to do. We're not really a band that has undergone huge stylistic decisions to change, we're just trying to follow the song. More and more, we let the song lead us - we don't try and put the song into a structure of our taste or our fashion.
