She's got a way about her, And everywhere she goes, a million dreams of love surround her, everywhere.
Usually when I'm writing, I try to write fairly quickly. If a song sits around too long, it starts to take on a stink. Most of my songs are written in one sitting, two sittings maybe. Those are the ones I like the best, anyway.
I'm really a singer, so I love songs and I love singing. I like rap music, but I didn't grow up freestyling.
It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play.
The Killer in me is the Killer in you.
In 1992, with the weight of a perceived world on our shoulders, we disappeared into a parking garage to write the songs that would change the course of our lives forever. 'Siamese Dream' represents all of our dreams coming true, while the dreams of a happy band fell apart.
I want to make great songs.
People try to make a big deal, like I don't want to play my old songs. That's not it. I don't want to play my old songs if that's my only option. That's a different thing.
In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn't have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote.
I don't think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they're fans because I'm a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around.
I was playing heavy metal when I was 18. I had to evolve out of that into an alternative consciousness about what it meant to change the way I played guitar, and the kind of songs, and the subject matter, and singing about child abuse, and all this stuff. I had to come from somewhere, and I had to take chances to do that.
The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present.
If I can entertain people and get them to open up a little bit, then they're much more conducive to any ideas I might have, whether they're about relationships or politics. The most interesting songs, I think, are the ones where the two overlap.
A lot of ideas took us to dead ends or we found the tone wasn’t just right. I think we discovered very quickly this wasn’t just a song to end The Battle of the Five Armies — it was a song to say goodbye to Middle-earth.
I was probably about fourteen I think, and probably like every boy who's fourteen that writes a song, it was about a girl. It was about a girl who I really liked, but she didn't like me as much as I liked her. I think most guys go through that.
Sometimes the songs you think will be best don't turn out to be best.
I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.
Songwriting and screenwriting aren't that different to me.
My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.
Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.
When we were making the record, I just decided, at the last second. I thought, "This song ["Ordinary World"] makes a lot of sense, being on the album [Revolution Radio]."
With the Rhythm Kings, I can involve myself in arranging and producing the music as well as the choice of songs.
I say if a novelty Christmas song is funny one time, then it is funny every time. - Calvin
[Peter] Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-'60s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.
I had a guitar sitting around, and it just happened to have four strings on it, and I would sit around watching TV and playing it. I ended up writing bunches of songs around four strings.
