There are about five or six songs that were written in full or in part while I was in Iraq, and that was definitely a life-changing experience. There was no shortage of inspiration.
I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.
It's good having a lot of different songs to choose from to do the show. It means you don't get bored of doing it in one particular genre.
There are many Broadway songs that apply to moments on 'Mad Men,' and I sing them on set all the time.
One day I'll wake up and I'll have 10 or 12 songs and think, 'Oh that sounds like it could be a record.
I'm not afraid of being thought of as someone who is associated with film music. Why not? If it's a good song, what does it matter?
I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.
Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.
Me and crazy Janey were making love in the dirt singing our birthday songs.
I'm not in any rush. I'm not somebody who, if I write a song, I get it out. That's not something I've ever really quite done.
I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?
A great singer has to learn how to inhabit a song.
Sometimes I do an automatic songs, songs that you don't really think about, or work on. You just look back and it sorta surprises you.
I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.
For me, once I count the band in, and I delve deep into my song, I feel a certain sort of integrity and integration that I rarely find in my daily life.
I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.
The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.
If I have a song that I feel is really one of my best songs, I like it to have a formal studio recording because I believe that something being officially released on a studio record gives it a certain authority that it doesn't quite have if it comes out on a live album or is just a part of your show, you know.
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.
The idea of having an indie rock "career" while living in a remote backwater like Seattle was too ridiculous to contemplate. It was simply about having adventures, one day at a time, one song at a time.
I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.
I like to think that if it hadn't gone as well as it has, if I wasn't able to make a living off of playing music, I would still be playing the music. But, of course, I wouldn't likely have had the opportunity to travel, and a lot of the places have inspired songs.
I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song: My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.
I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.
I'm particularly attuned to lyrics, and very often a bad set of lyrics will ruin a song for me, while my friends will be just grooving on the music. I don't mean that it has to be about anything in particular, but there has to be some art applied to it, simple or otherwise.
