The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.
I think different musical collaborators bring out different qualities in my songs and I like that.
I think there's a weird self-affirmation thing that happens in popular music in general. It seems like every song I hear on the radio is like, "Listen to me roar!" or "This is my fight song!"
We're going to sing about things that matter to us. The balancing act is to present these ideas but also make the music exciting and sort of fun enough that even if you're not paying attention to the lyrics, you might still like the songs anyway. That's the idea.
Each Desaparecidos's song has a seed that it came from. We're trying to take that and broaden it out and make it resonate with people.
Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.
I love story songs. It's just, for me, they're harder to write, and sometimes they sound too intended or something.
To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that's less divisive. Even if songs aren't overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.
To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.
When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me.
For a song I was bought Now I lie when I talk With a careful eye on the cue card. Onto a stage I was pushed, With my sorrow well rehearsed. So give me all your pity and your money, now (all of it).
My dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
Every time I finish a song... most of the time it's in my own head, like this sounds too much like a Townes Van Zandt song, or whoever. I realize there are so many melodies and chord progressions in pop and rock music that are so similar that you can kind of trace it back to other things. Most of the time it's just in your head.
If you're writing a song about a relationship ending, what you're really doing is honoring how much that person meant to you.
There's no way anyone's going to understand my own personal experiences, where the songs came from, because they're mine. But I was very conscious of leaving loads of space in the songs so that people could interpret them with their own memories, feelings, and emotions. I love the process of taking stuff away so that people could finish the songs themselves. I was hoping it'd end up being as universal as possible, even though it comes from the most personal place.
I think the trick is that you have to change how you take stuff in. Maybe the early beginnings of a song come out in a subconscious way, but then you might have to crack it to a certain degree, where you might use parts of your brain that you don't normally use.
I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English.
Im a songwriter and Id love to make that a part of my career.
Young people don't want to be second to anyone. Everyone wants to be an overnight star. Look how many years I had to wait, how many roads I had to travel, how many songs I had to sing. And now I'm just beginning, never ending.
Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Every song a hit, every hit a smack!
I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it. It has just as much power in creating a kind of perpendicular sentiment in the music, creating a nice friction that also plays up some of the tension in the song.
The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
It was a nice relief to be able to work on individual songs.
