Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I'm a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, 'Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!' and I took that as a great compliment. That's exactly my intention.
For me, songwriting starts with a melody. When a musician plays a chord progression, either the words and vocal melody come to me, or they don't. That's how I determine who to write with. It works, or it doesn't.
Country is bringing in a little rock element... a little '80s element. Melody is king now. But its just in the music, its not so much in the songwriting, which is still very basic to the storytelling aspect of it.
When it comes to songwriting, I grew up in the Seventies listening to AM radio. So I've all these pop songs running through my head from Paul McCartney and Elton John, and a lot of stuff that was written on piano.
I look at bands like the Beach Boys, Hall & Oates and Blur, and those are the bands I want to be in company with because their songwriting is intelligent, and yet you don't need to be a musical genius to pick it up.
Think back to the early rock n' roll records, and the average record length in the '50s - and well into the '60s - was two and a half minutes. It's very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.
With acting I am being led by the script, other actors, the director, etc. But with songwriting I feel it is much more self reliant and allows me to be in the creative experience without being as dependent on others.
When we try and blend the two together, the songwriting and the touring like we did before, it doesn't really work. We tend to become very focused on what we are doing. And we tend to be a little bit one-track-minded.
A lot of bands are influenced by other bands, and that informs their songwriting for sure. It definitely informs my songwriting, too. But it's more about not thinking about it, and if it comes out of you, it's better.
Live we're a lot louder and noisier on the album. I think for the album we took a lot of time for the songwriting and we wanted to make good pop music, and I think there's plus and minuses to doing pop music and noise.
Because of my interest in songwriting, I was invited to visit a friend in L.A. for songwriting sessions with him and his friends. We wrote six songs by the end of the weekend, and 'Hide Away' happened to be one of them!
This goes for our songwriting as well as our success as a band - the minute we stopped chasing what we thought people wanted to hear and started writing things that moved us, that's when people started paying attention.
I would like to work with Ed Sheeran at some point. I really admire his songwriting, and I just think he has a great voice and great artistry. Who else? On the producer side of things, definitely Diplo: that'd be awesome.
I lived in Nashville for about five years. It was almost like me going to college for my craft. I immersed myself in the songwriting community there. They embraced me, and I made some real friends but also learned so much.
'Gatekeeper' was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I haven't written many like that.
When I get all focused on songwriting, I get into all the marketing and promotion that we do to make it happen. Then the right song comes along and blows it all out of the water. The right song will do it for you every time.
I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense.
I have two or three guys that I'm really close to. We have a great friendship, and I think that helps our songwriting relationship. It's hard to start... with new people and cover the ground that I've covered with those guys.
It's not that I have resisted songwriting, it's just not something I felt I have had to do. I've just not woken up and thought, I must do this. But I have often heard music that I have instantly felt 'I have to sing that song'.
By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.
After writing quite a few songs now, I have not a method but a way of being patient with a couple of verses or a certain set of chords. I can match them up quicker now than I used to. The one thing you do improve is songwriting.
Where I've arrived now is the product of mixing the very straight with the very exploratory; there's a fine line between the two, although it tends to be getting straighter and straighter because my songwriting is getting better.
What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.
At the end of the day I'm not just sending beats in. I'm mixing the song. I'm recording the song. I'm engineering the song. I'm in the studio helping with the songwriting. I'm doing the whole beat - every single piece of it is me.
I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook.
The main way that being adopted has shaped my songwriting is that I was asked at an early age to consider the circumstances that led to my life, and in a way, I was introduced to how fragile and unlikely life is from the beginning.
I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.
I've been a list maker for years, even before I was a musician. I was always writing things down and kept long lists of things that would make good album titles and things like that. I'm constantly thinking in terms of songwriting.
I've been in the songwriting circuit as well. I've been in a couple writing camps where there are seven top writers or whatever, and they're writing songs for a young girl or a young guy that are coming up, and they're kind of nuts.
My third hire when I came to Spotify was Tiffany Kumar, who came on as our global head of songwriter relations. The whole idea was to put our heads together and figure out how to build and contribute within the songwriting community.
The art of songwriting is just stumbling your way to something really special, and you don't know what you're going to write until you are writing it. There is no formula. And, sometimes, you really have to work at it and hunker down.
I can perform easily; I don't mind getting up in front of people at all. I've always sung and felt confident about that, and guitar playing isn't a stretch, but songwriting is. We all have our challenges in what we do, and that's mine.
I'd say, at the end of the day, you know, from a songwriting practice standpoint, you write songs to make yourself feel something true and validating, and cathartic, maybe, and then whoever responds to it is, like, out of your control.
I started quite late. I only discovered that I could write a song when I was, like, 17... some musicians, they're starting out, writing songs when they're, like, 12, 13. I never thought I would go into songwriting when I was that young.
My dad helped me understand songwriting because of him playing Babyface a lot. I don't even know if my dad realized that him just being him, him just living his life, loving what he loved, poured more into me than anybody ever would know.
I feel like I kind of earned my stripes working with The Stereotypes. It was maybe my 6th songwriting session I've ever been to, and they just gave me and a writer I used to write with 3-4 tracks and kinda just let us come up with whatever.
Chuck is definitely my favorite co-writer, and my best. It is really hard to make yourself vulnerable enough for somebody to get inside your head while songwriting. Chuck and I find writing together very non-competitive and just really easy.
I've learned not turning things up to full volume is a good idea. Also, because I have the freedom, sometimes when I'm writing a song I'll get carried away with production when I'm only on the first verse, and that sacrifices the songwriting.
People keep putting limitations on themselves and creating this reality that soul music is dead. That's only in their reality. It's not true. To me, Adele is R&B. Bruno Mars is R&B. It's just good songwriting and songs. That is going to last.
I started singing very early. I was six or seven years old, and I was singing along to TV commercials and figuring out, 'Oh, hey, I can sing in tune. This is really cool.' But the songwriting thing came much much later, when I was 19 years old.
I have never been in a serious relationship and never had a break-up, so I can't tug on my heartstrings that way. But whenever I experience a strong emotion in life, I definitely have to throw myself into my songwriting. It is very therapeutic.
My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.
The only thing I could see myself doing is music - songwriting or producing or something. I've never seen myself being in any other business, I've been working in this one since I was 5 years old! I could do other things, but I wouldn't want to.
Within the songwriting community, there are these unwritten rules for the way that a song should be written in country music, and I think that those rules are constantly being broken over the years, and the molds change and the process is evolving.
I have always been musically inclined, whether it's been playing the santoor from a young age or writing poetry that has now evolved into songwriting. So, I wouldn't really call it a focus shift, but just pursuing a career path I am passionate about.
The new generation of musicians is writing music on computers, and this is very sad because the quality of songwriting has crashed and dived. There are some songs out that are made by only one guy who works a computer and doesn't play any instruments.
My songwriting process is based on a formula: Color, tone, words. When I hear production, I initially identify the color that resonates with me. From there, I am able to translate the color into tone or emotion, which may depend on a number of things.
George Harrison is perhaps one of the most creative people I ever met, not only in his music and songwriting, but just the way he lived his life, decorated his gardens and homes. He was a dear friend of mine. His entire approach to music was very unique.
I remember when I started writing lyrics, I was very grand. I tried to use a lot of symbols,because I thought that's how songwriting should be - with imagery and metaphor. I figured, after a while, maybe I should just write it as I would say in real life.
I think of the Tycho sound as something separate from the band. I think the methodology and approach to production I use on the Tycho records can be applied to a lot of things. But from a performance and songwriting perspective, yes, Tycho is a live band.