It is a fact that each song an artist creates is unique and although fans tend to be loyal, ultimately the quality of the record will decide how it sells.
That's what I've always loved about music, that I could go be another guy for two hours. But ultimately it all comes back to: do you have the songs, can you sing them, do you have a great band that can play them with you? You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours. I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.
I'm a soul maker. I write songs. I'm making cartoon shows. I'm planning on putting stuff out myself on my own, on a TV station online. I'm not limiting myself. I'm doing it all at once.
I don't think that good politics ever excuse a bad song.
My job as a songwriter is to write good songs.
We may exist in all universes, but 'hear' only one because of our limitations, the valve of our desires, our practical, physical needs. All is vibration, with nothing vibrating across no distance whatsoever. All is music. A universe, a world, is just one long difficult song. The difference between worlds is the difference between songs.
I don't know how other bands play the same songs every night.
I'm not a tech fan. I don't get that charge that comes from having the new little gizmo in your pocket. Maybe I'm a dinosaur. There's nothing battery-operated that will help me write songs any differently from the way I've done it for years.
I listen to old songs and remember exactly where I was living and where I recorded it and how I wrote it, the girl I was dating at the time or whatever.
I used to have to come home and write and then record work tapes of those new songs. So now I can do it all on the road and that has been a huge difference that has happened in 2016. It is the only way for me to really balance. There is a lot of overhead, but it's a big investment towards being a dad and a husband, which is ultimately my number one goal.
I'm a big fan of simplicity, especially with songs and I try not to make them complicated. I just make them simple and let people absorb that message themselves. That's my theory.
I think about everything first. I think about the scenario: the story and the characters, what I'm trying to say and I'll think about that for a couple of days until it's all locked in and then when I get to an instrument it'll just fall out. But the song's kind of all ready there in my head.
I think 'All Out of Love' is my favorite song because it's been the most successful. It's been in about 30 movies, it's been a number one record, and it keeps getting played on the radio, it's always somewhere.
I think with any songwriter the first 1,000 songs are always terrible.
I do not wanna write a song like 'Coathanger' so Andrew Breitbart can rage against me on his web site. It's not my idea of fun.
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.
In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.
After six or seven performances of any song, you begin to perform it rather than feel it.
All the signs were right. And when I mean all the sings were right, the only signs that we care about when we start a project of making a record is, do we have the songs - it's that simple.
It is amazing when you try and write songs without an instrument. It kind of forces the melody to be honed it. It has to be good. A lot of what I think are my best songs were made without an instrument.
The exciting part about sitting down and writing songs, playing shows, or being a musician in general is that you never know where those songs and that music is going to take you. There's such a cool feeling about that the phone could ring tomorrow and someone could say "he guess what? your song..." That really is cool.
It's was all the internet. I started writing songs in high school, right about the time of the onset of Napster. I went to college in Dallas, and when I'd get back from class I'd have fans emailing me from different areas of the country asking when the album was going to be out and when I was going on tour. It was crazy, because I didn't even consider myself a professional musician.
Some songs come from my head, some from my throat, but there will always be moments when it is an injection of the soul.
Anything that provokes a visceral or spiritual response and ignites my senses. Whether it's listening to the ocean, dancing to a song I adore, feeling the wind across my face, sampling a fantastic new dish, or witnessing a phenomenal show, if I experience it before I can even think about it, it makes me come alive.
