I had success. I had a number one record. I had a number one album. I have to make this kind of record again or else I'm going to lose it all. That's how you end up making the same song over and over.
I can't write story-songs, like I couldn't write a Bob Dylan or Tom Waits song. I can only write whatever weird phrases come into my head, and hope that they're good.
Whenever I think I know something is a classic, or an amazing song, I realise it's still so subjective, because you and your friends could be talking about something, say, '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' - an amazing classic song - or someone would be like, "'Hey Jude' is an amazing song!", and I'd be like, "I don't really like it."
Weirdly, by the way,[Bob] Dylan also managed to write several beautiful love songs, like "To Make You Feel My Love" (covered by Adele, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, and who knows who else) and "Most of the Time." Go figure.
There has been a ton of excellent music in this period (along with a few misses), evoking scenes like a bar-room brawl at a border-town dive, a washed-up singer in a smoky lounge, and the scenes of violence in Bob Dylan latter-day music videos.I think the ethos of this period is best summed up in the 2001 song "Summer Days".
[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.
The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.
In honor of his new Nobel, this hard-core Dylanophile wants to share with you a song or two from each of his many incarnations. Because you deserve to know.
I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to '65 when he wrote his most famous "protest songs," like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"
In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and "It Ain't Me, Babe."
[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.
Is it me or is President Bush's life starting to sound like a country song. He's from Texas, his dog just died, and it looks like he might lose his job. Next thing, his truck is going to break down.
I really love movie soundtracks and stuff like that. That's really a huge part of any movie. I actually think about... that this would be cool in a movie or something, like when I'm writing a song, or something you know?
I love writing with Colbie [Caillat]. We have something very magical together that's difficult to describe. We're very comfortable with each other, and that's really important for co-writing. I think both of us bring different things to each song.
Even before I started writing songs, that was one of my goals to be a writer, and I still have that goal. I've just gotten sidetracked.
When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.
Making a record's a real fight for me. I'm constantly fighting with this thing inside of me that says I should be sitting in a room with Matthew Shipp or I should have Han Bennink on drums or this song should be playing for the next 20 minutes in my head, not a silly little pop song. It's constant.
I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."
My songs get to a stage where they resist any further change, you know? And that's kind of where they are, short of re-recording or starting again. That's kind of where it's gonna be.
When it's a pop song, I don't really want to do pop songs, but they exist and sort of come out by accident.
I used to listen to so much doo-wop, and I've talked a lot about gospel music, but I realised a lot of that language came from doo-wop music. You know, "I Asked the Lord Above," "Heaven Sent Me an Angel." That's rock-'n-roll, and that's where a lot of this language is coming from. Also, I've said before that as soon as you start having a conversation with Jesus in a song you know you're dealing with issues of morality and how fragile it is to be human. It's a shortcut to putting those ideas across.
I've said the line about Ray Charles a million times, but nobody listens to him singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" and wonders who Ray can't stop loving. They apply that to their own lives. That will happen with my songs.
Through my years as a writer, I've learnt how to simplify the message and pen songs that have a more specific quality - it's not just about my ego and trying to meet girls.
I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.
It makes me feel great, knowing my songs are being heard and of service to people.
