We are firm believers that the first time somebody hears a brand new song from the band, it shouldn't be on a cell phone camera with the distortion or anything where you can't make it out. We want to present it right.

I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.

I think we all attract troublemakers; I don't think it's particularly about anyone. I had it actually as an album title, and I thought it would be really cool to write a song about a girl that's a bit of troublemaker.

Queen songs are not about the life of a rock star - they tend to be about the lives of normal people, which is why I think the songs connect so much. We're very lucky that they seemingly connect with every generation.

I like to make up songs. And it's my opinion that all these songs mean a lot to me, but that doesn't mean I think everything needs to leave the house. If it helps me through my life and doesn't bore anybody in theirs.

No one knew what Rococode was "supposed" to sound like. Now we have a sound and we have a good idea of what we want to create and the type of songs we want to present to people. I think it's really exciting, actually.

If you write a hit song for Britney Spears, it's worth several million dollars. Just one song! And it might have taken you two hours to do it. It's like mining for gold. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of technique.

Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great.

I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.

For music, unlike a $500 software program, people are paying a buck or two a song, and it's those dollars and pennies that have to add up to pay for not just the cost of that song, but the investment in the next song.

From very early on, I've realized that and I have a mission statement with my songs to entertain, to encourage and to challenge the Body of Christ. That's always kind of the focus of the songs that I write for 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.

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art.

I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.

Once I grew up and realised 'What am I doing?' I started re-listening to the music I was playing and I realised there was so much finesse - it was dynamic and simple but I wanted to be authentic to the original songs.

People don’t realize, he said, how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart.” J. Krishnamurti. “The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices.

Now one thing I think is really lame, is if you're an artist and you go to a karaoke bar and sing your own song. I like to get up there and sing stuff that I would never sing on stage anywhere else. Like Neil Diamond.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

'The Taxi Ride,' from my second album, is one people want to hear a lot. I'm consciously trying to walk on the sunny side of the street, to really lift myself into a place of greater positivity, and that's a sad song.

I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.

Find your balance and stand with it. Find your song and sing it out. Find your cadence and let it appear like a dance. Find the questions that only you know how to ask and The answers that you are content to not know.

I've never been a fan of getting someone to sing the generic, love song lyrics and sticking on top of the feature. If I'm gonna collaborate at all, it has to be in a way that makes the track a whole and not two parts.

I like to make sure I don't sing songs that are like self hating and feeling sorry for yourself 'cause that's not the kind of legacy I want to leave really. I want people to feel like strength, especially young women.

Every now and then, I might listen to music, but I try not to listen to it too much because when you turn on the radio and hear the same song over and over again. You won't appreciate it as much; it won't be as fresh.

In real life, I am emotionally confused, which enables me to write songs. I'm a Pisces, and they say that Pisces are very sensitive. If men were just honest with themselves, they would see that they all have that side.

When you write an album and you're writing about relationships, the stuff that I've been through in my relationships, 99 percent of it is really good, but it's that one percent that always inspires you to write a song.

A lot of the early songs I wrote were about the experience of going to London and meeting rent boys and transvestites and drag queens. A lot of my early material is that: the wide-eyed adventures of a middle-class boy.

I've really been writing a lot of country songs. I used to get criticized for doing a 'Bump & Grind,' then turning around and doing a gospel song. But the truth is I'm glad I have a gift that allows me to switch lanes.

I just wanted a song to sing, and there came a point where I couldn't sing anything...nobo dy else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn't find it anywhere. If I could I probably would never have started writing.

I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.

When love moves to the fifth center then whatever talents you have, any creative dimension, is possible for you. This is the center of creativity. It is not only for songs, not only for music; it is for all creativity.

Every song I ever wrote, I wrote to be heard. So, if I was given a choice that 50 years from now I could either have a dollar or knowing that some kid was listening to my song, I'd go with the kid listening to my song.

I wanted to deliver the emotions a man feels when he's in love. For example, through song "GG BE," I wanted to the express the feelings of being deceived by a woman (the song also contains the woman's counterargument).

When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.

From the age of 16 on, I brought my guitar everywhere. I just fell in love with learning the guitar, and I wanted to learn songs and chords, and that led to wanting to start a band, and to wanting to do our first show.

The Country Music Awards were held Wednesday night at Universal City. The best country songs are always about drinking and guns and love gone wrong. Next year they're giving Robert Blake the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling.

The universe is in the habit of making beauty. There are flowers and songs, snowflakes and smiles, acts of great courage, laughter between friends, a job well done, the smell of fresh baked bread. Beauty is everywhere.

When you listen to an album, it shouldn't feel like, "That's the girl song," "That's the club song." I shouldn't know what you're thinking while you're making the song. I don't want to know what the artist is thinking.

I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.

But I like to listen to demos. I like to hear the finished product. It's like listening to a song - I mean, a story. If you're going to sit here and tell me a story, I just like to listen. I don't want to make them up.

And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.

And the great spirit of darkness spread a shroud over me...everything was silent-everything. But upon the heights soughed the everlasting song, the voice of the air, the distant, toneless humming which is never silent.

We kind of write pop songs, but we don't fit in the pop world. We're really bad at being pop stars and walking down red carpets. We've got our own little bubble, which we really like. We've learned to really like that.

I get asked all the time, "What is a George Strait song?" I know it when I hear it. I don't seek a specific tempo or lyric or melody. It just has to make sense. Maybe it is natural because I was given the gift to sing.

Lots of these songs I hadn't performed, but I've always wanted to. These are songs that I wanted to get in my wheelhouse. I sang them over and over and over and over again. Of course, I've fallen in love with them all.

As cheesy as it sounds, I feel like I do write a lot, not necessarily for a message to be taken away. I feel like it is a little bit egotistical to be like, "I hope they are a better person after listening to my song."

Even though we didn't actually record it as the Move I had already written a song called 'Dear Elaine,' which I subsequently put on the Boulders album. I thought at the time that was probably the best song I'd written.

You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like 'Ritual,' a song like 'Absolution' or 'Idolatrine.' You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.

Sometimes I do a Dylan song and it seems to fit me so right that I figure maybe I wrote it. Dylan didn’t always do it for me as a singer, not in the early days, but then I started listening to the lyrics. That sold me.

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