And a pang is ultimately private. It's not a thing that gets broadcast to the world; it's a kind of internal alarm that sounds when something has to change and it has to change fast.

That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh god I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws.

Every time we put out a piece of art, it continues to define who we are. What could possibly be more important than that and require more of your focus and your time and your energy.

Well, playing a guy who writes songs and busks on Grafton Street in Dublin and falls in love with Marketa Irglova wasn't very difficult for me. There was very little acting going on.

I left my band on my own, and it took me a long time to find major success again - almost a decade. And everything that didn't happen during that time just motivated me to do better.

I'm always doubting because I've been told so much that, you're not the right look or you're not the right sound, and, you know, whether I do jazz or R&B there are always complaints.

There isn't a single artist out there, I'm sure, who wouldn't take the most perfect record deal. If the right record deal came along, like, the perfect deal, we'd definitely take it.

I used to go to the school folk club with my songs when I was only 13 or so and say "this is a traditional folk song" and sing it with a bad Irish accent to disguise the real source.

I think the goal is in general to broaden my fans' perspectives and their horizons. Not to be cliché. But to introduce them to things that they may not have introduced to themselves.

It was then I knew I'd had enough, Burned my credit card for fuel Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand With a one-way ticket to the land of truth And my suitcase in my hand

I used to be with a publishing house called Roosevelt Music. A gentleman there told me he had seen Peggy Lee perform Fever in Las Vegas and I found out later she wanted to record it.

Country music is a form letter. You fi ll in the blanks. You move from one broken heart to the next one and from this marriage to that divorce, from a beating here to a beating there.

Everything kind of happened like: 'Bam!' for me. One minute I was living on a council estate somewhere, then I won the Mercurys, then all of a sudden press and people were in my face.

Especially in the Dixie Chicks, everyone wants you to play a role. Natalie was the feisty one. Martie was the nice one 'cause she smiles all the time onstage, and I was the quiet one.

Well, I think that it is complicated in that the first four albums were all with Universal so they have the rights to that and therefore it is a lot easier for them to do that period.

Sometimes you give birth to something or you're part of a team that gives birth to an idea, and it grows and has a whole life of its own, and you feel grateful. It's just so humbling.

I want my songs to be heard by everyone. I want [everyone] to treat people with compassion. I want them to realize that we are all so similar, but we focus so much on our differences.

People let their frustrations out on me. I love Kanye West. They say the opposite of that. But I'm not going to say that. I'm only going to say what I'm want to put into the universe.

our product will speak for itself if it's that good and your fan base will come and people will want it. Having the right people in your circle is very important to help support that.

I was bullied by a few people who were much older than me. I went to camp to learn boxing. I was 12, and my coach was 24. I felt like if I could fight him, I could stand up to anyone.

If you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning. Do something to shake it up.

I don't know whether your heart ever necessarily changes, but time changes the way that you perceive the world. And you just hope it gives you more empathy and all those other things.

Fashion brings out what you are inside. A lot of people think it's got to be blue jeans, a Black coat, three inch heels. But it doesn't have to be like that. I enjoy just going for it

There's a definite machinery behind everything that a band does, and sometimes it's hard to figure out how far to go in delegating certain responsibilities and staying COMPLETELY DIY.

When you're a songwriter, people wonder about your personal life and the meanings behind the songs, and that can feel pretty invasive, so you become protective about your inner world.

But I never imagined that I could ever have a career in music. I always thought it was like a mafia, that you had to sell your soul and know the right people and be in the right place.

I have a good imagination. Look, I know what it feels like to have a broken heart. I know what it feels like to feel something for somebody. I'm just too weird to be in a relationship.

As a rapper, I feel like image is always important but even more so than image, I really love clothes, that's why I don't use stylists. I want to do it myself because I really love it.

An artist's career doesn't happen in the cycle of one week of news. An artist's career happens in a lifetime, and if you're a true artist you're willing to die for what you believe in.

One thing that I like to do is use words that have never actually been used in a rap song before. I also like to take words that have negative connotations and show their real meaning.

I'm not really a 'puppet' person in particular; I think they are very theatrical, and I've found different uses for them in shows, but my true interest is in writing Broadway musicals.

Some of the journalists who've ended up writing about our band - and this is disappointing to say - have a very narrow outlook. And because of that they fundamentally misunderstand us.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Folk music is where I come from originally. The very first thing that introduced me to playing guitars at all was skiffle - my cousin had been in London the summer that skiffle was big.

Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He's gonna fight and he's gonna lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle, he does not lose himself.

I always think I don't have any songs, I don't have anything I'm working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I'm thinking about. It's just kind of second nature.

I believe dreams represent the purest form of fantasy we unleash through our subconscious. They represent the truest freedom we can experience. Totally unrepressed and totally creative.

If you put a song on SoundCloud for free and it blows up, you'll drop it as a single and maybe get some change off of it, but the real fans are going to be those that come to the shows.

Scotland is a picturesque country where the people are friendly yet completely incomprehensible. Also, the national delicacy is a sheep's stomach filled with its liver, lungs, and heart.

It's always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don't pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once.

There's things that I say that people wouldn't say. And just putting across my vulnerability as a person in my music as well. A lot of people wouldn't do that, everyone wants to be hard.

The thing is you can be a great designer but you can also be lazy or not understand the other person's preferences or be more concerned about being a star than being good at what you do.

I never set out to write prayers at all. But there was a span of time when I didn't find it easy to pray, but, when I went to write one of the things I had to write, a prayer would come.

I got started at a really young age. I was about two years old when I started playing the piano and around seven or eight when I started writing my own chords and putting words together.

Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.

George Bush doesn't care about black people... They're saying black families are looting and white families are just looking for food... they're giving the (Army) permission to shoot us.

If you go into the eastern bloc countries we are huge, and in Russia. Maybe there is something about the depressing nature of our music and lyrics that some people find an affinity with.

The youth of this country are not behind what is going on. We all know that. If you looked at a [political] map of the United States 25 and under, it's all-revealing. It's a unified map.

At some point I decided I didn't want to learn any more guitar technique. I was at that level where the next mountain there was to climb was Van Halen and I didn't really like Van Halen.

I'd like to make an album with Slack one day. I'd like to use it as a collaborative tool. I know about it because I have friends that work in tech, and I guess you can use it in any job.

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