I have always struggled with expressing emotion, I used to think I was a very hard person but music has shown me I'm a big softy! Writing songs to me really is like writing a diary, it's very private and very personal. My most emotional songs have been written alone in a locked room, I'm able to express myself there.
The biggest lesson is that you write the best songs when you're being real, an honest and you mean what you're saying, not trying to be something you're not.
LATE will always be the most important song to me. I used to struggle to perform it live without getting upset but have performed it a lot now, which has really helped. Very often it makes people in the audience cry, and that means so much to me that they can relate to the emotions in the song. It was actually a really easy song to write, I wrote most of it in one day... it sort of flowed out of me. I was never good with dealing with emotion, so I think I kind of needed to write it!
I would say the main themes are love, loss and life. Although a lot of the songs represent hard times and situations I think my album is positive, the message is things will get better.
Singing your own songs live is so personal, it's like standing there reading out your diary pages. I still get really nervous so I would have to say performing is the greater rush for me.
I like the idea that a song can be something that you can lean on, both for the songwriter and for the person who hears the song.
'Unbelievers' was a song that we felt like we could tackle, so that's one of the reasons we wanted to start playing it live, we really believed in that song and we still believe in that song a lot.
I had no problem working for 15 hours straight when I was producing someone else, but I couldn't do it with my own songs. It took that moment of pointing the camera at myself to realize that it was okay to get lost in making my own music. I think before that I was scared of pushing myself to the point of staring into the abyss.
I wanted to make an album where every song is kind of interacting - where you can't tell what's the string arrangement and what's the song. I guess that came out of going to college, majoring in music, studying classical music, and even as a kid, being really drawn to classical music.
Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.
I guess I have some kind of a visceral connection with drums. I'm looking to create music that people can react to viscerally, and people will respond to viscerally. I think that you can listen to music, to a song you've never heard before and not really like it, but also feel like you're responding to it physically whether you like it or not. I think that's a powerful aspect about music, and I think that's something that draws me to drums.
I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.
There's nothing like a hardship song to set my toes a-tappin.
I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.
Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.
When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don't know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy.
I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.
Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.
I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.
I love the fact that 35 years later, I still hear my songs on the radio.
I love my songs, let's not get crazy here.
I learned when I started to study piano that I could play by ear. I could hear a song on the radio a couple of times and hear the song and the lyrics and sing it for you after a couple of plays.
I hope the Canada Pops can play in E and A. I do 'Forty Days' and 'Bo Diddley'. I don't change songs, just bands.
I was a Gordon Lightfoot fan before he ever had a song out. You just knew he was pure talent and he was going to be successful. Gordon has written and recorded some of the greatest music ever.
When I get all focused on songwriting, I get into all the marketing and promotion that we do to make it happen. Then the right song comes along and blows it all out of the water. The right song will do it for you every time.
