I love writing pop songs and I love the challenge. I love melodies and wanted it to be classy. I wanted it to have some substance because I feel as if I have a lot of things to say and wanted it to have something to it.
I think that a good song is catchy, and a great song is not catchy - but it has a deeper meaning.
Every time I write a song it feels like it could be the last one I do, or it always feels like a fluke.
I try to write a lot and my process is kind of back and forth. I procrastinate a lot so when I do sit down to write, I'm pretty lazy at it. And it's such a frustrating thing sometimes - writing - when you don't do it all the time, you get that thing in your head that you have nothing to talk about and you can't write songs.
I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.
People should be free to take whatever they want from music and I think that over time I realized that different people always find different things in my songs, which is really good.
"On Script" is one of my favorite songs I've ever written. I'd just been jamming on it one day, and again I was struggling with lyrics. I'm still figuring out what it's about. I've seen a couple of reviews that are like, "It's about the monotony of playing the same songs every night," because I say, "On script every night/Like a well-rehearsed stage show." It's not about that at all, but I find that funny, how people project what they think about me, or songwriters in general.
The music, I think, is just as important as the lyrics; it portrays the emotion of the song. I play the kind of music that I want to listen to.
I've never liked songs that are about writing, or struggling to write. Maybe it's because it's too relatable to me.
In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
When I'm working on a Slipknot song, it's like a switch flips in my head. I can go there easily - it doesn't take a lot of soul searching - and it's a dark, almost sinister place. Stone Sour is more the way I've always written. It's a different tone.
To me, it makes more sense to write different songs and to play different kinds of music and to find your own voice. But no matter what, get out and play for people. Get out and learn, and do everything that you can, you know?
A song is only as strong as its foundation, and when it comes so naturally in any setting, those are the songs that will hopefully outlive you, maybe even outlive the next generation of You.
When you're looking for a house, you're not looking for a house that's perfect. You're looking for that house to have character. And I think it's those little bits of humanity they come from the music. That's what the music brings out when you have that, it brings out the character of a song. You go back and listen to 30, 40 years of music, and all the great, great songs that we've had in our lives, they all have that character. They have that human nudge, they all have that human relation. You can relate to it.
I've always gravitated towards those ultimate lines in songs, the line you grab on to. That line in 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' 'Here we are now/Entertain us' - the irony, the antagonism; that's always stuck with me.
I believe that people want to hear good songs and they want to be moved.
I think people just want to hear good songs and I just want to keep getting better as a writer so that I can deliver good songs.
When I think about my career and how it all started, it really started with me getting to a point where I understood how to write songs that resonated with people.
When I deal with my struggles in my songs, I feel like most people are going to identify with my struggles because they are essentially dealing with the same things.
I just try to stay honest with myself and in doing that I feel like the songs are going to resonate.
I find that it is useless to worry about things I can't control and I can't control how many people come out tonight. All I can do is focus on writing the best songs I can write and performing the best I can perform.
The most important thing is writing songs that resonate and giving people a chance to listen to them.
There are a lot of people who talk about a formula for being able to start a fan base. But for me, it's been about songs and just being hard on myself as a writer, feeling like there is a purpose to it all.
Above these universal themes Truth Will Set U Free is also a song composed for those who were born gay. I am a straight man so I do not profess to understand or know what a LGBT person experiences but I do recognize injustice when I see it.
So many times nowadays it's about having two good songs on an album and a bunch of filler, and I wanted to make something that I felt every song on the album was fun for everybody.
