I always sing them as though they are autobiographical, even if they're not, and most of my songs do come from something about me.
Bloody Hammer is a screw capitalism song about college kids banging hammers on top of the roof.
I'm in a state of my life when the essential is very important to me. I don't like long songs with complicated arrangements and breaks anymore.
Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.
Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
You're playing the songs for the audience and they still think they're good songs. So I tend to get excited by that, audience reaction.
Not one song on the charts is being played naturally. But when you go see someone live it's special. Even though you can fool people, I know there are people out there who still play along to tapes.
I feel there must be an enormous amount of really talented songwriters out there who can't sing.
Over the years, a lot of rappers - Lil' Wayne, Ice Cube - have used my name in their songs. I'm a real touchstone of history.
It's just kind of, we do a lot of songs when it's an artist of that magnitude, like Beyoncé. You're not sending her one song; you're sending her 20 ideas.
It's not a normal recording shift where you do a song and you get a day to tweak it and the third day you mix it. It's like double the work in the period of time it would take to do one.
That's common in our industry, where some songs make the cut, some don't. It's bad when it doesn't make the cut and you don't get in on the project.
I did like seven songs on Michael Jackson's Invincible album, but I might have done 60 songs to get to those seven. You don't know what's going to happen.
If you get a song right for its usage at the time, it can be useful to others. ...Those songs are more friendly to other artists looking for material.
Every now and then I'll get seduced by the idea of money, and I'll take a stab at that...and I fall flat on my ass. I've never written a lasting song with that mindset. It doesn't work.
If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.
I never trust songwriters who talk about what their song is about.
I'm not a natural songwriter.
What I do now is all my dad's fault, because he bought me a guitar as a boy, for no apparent reason. ... I wrote some of my best love songs ever when I was unhappy and my saddest love songs when I was very much in love. When I wrote 'You're in My Heart', which is an uplifting song, I had just broken up with-Now who had I broken up with?. ... Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It's the image, not what you sing.
You're every love song ever written.
I would be quite happy never to play any of my better-known songs again. But unless you're Dylan, you can't afford to completely disregard what your audience wants.
I've never been burdened with a hit record, so I don't have to play the same songs. I play songs people think they like.
If I played just one song from every album, I would be onstage for two and a half hours. No one wants a show that long.
I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.
I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity. So maybe I bring people into that pop world who don't usually find themselves there because there's not enough stuff for them to get excited about otherwise. I try to be genuine. I try to be real. It's such a subjective thing, but I try to convey an emotion.
