When I want to be popular, I pull on a guitar and sing a song. Pras did not affect me because, in the realm of politics, he has never stood up for anything.
Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!
I thought it would be interesting to write a song about a lonely person who is scared to see the truth that is right in from of him. I thought it would be interesting if you could watch yourself from a distance.
I'll try not to let a day go by without making a song. I don't think I've created a lot of music.
I always say a song is like a ship. Once it has been made, you let it sail. Let the waves take it in the direction it wants to.
I love Katy Perry! She gave me a song for my second album.
I signed to Def Jam and within two months, I heard that Ja Rule was looking for someone to do a song with.
It's actually harder to write a fun song.
A song is the most intangible thing in the world.
Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.
To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.
I like to do cover songs if I really love them, I have to love the song first.
I don't know what happens at radio as far as what is that X factor that makes a song click and have people get connected to it when it's in another language.
Sinatra was pretty astute - he used the best songwriters around, he used all the resources, he covered every song from the era basically.
I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.
You may take this as a general and central principle in criticism: that all science, literature or song, which recognizes conscious life as the ruling principle of the universe, is Christian.
At times I have a beat first and then I write. Sometimes I have a melody in my head and I pick up the guitar to develop the song. Other times I just write without any melodies, and I end up using those lyrics when I think I have the appropriate instrumental that would bring out and depict the emotions of what I have written.
I've never written a song in my life. It's all a big hoax.
To me, a song like 'Demons' or the title 'Trouble Will Find Me' are acknowledgments that you can't really plan for life, and you can't plan for trouble.
I'm still proud of what I've done, even if it hasn't been the biggest song on the radio or hasn't gone to number one.
We just did a few takes of a song and just picked the best one. It was real organic and genuine.
The very first song I ever wrote was called 'I See Between The Trees,' when I was 9. It was really bad.
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.
When it comes to making a song, whatever the beat tells me to do, I do.
Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together.
They were so good that you just had to sing the song to them once and they got it. It's amazing. Sometimes it didn't come out the way you wanted, but it was good.
You know when a song has a melody or some kind of element that affects you, and that is what I am trying to go for.
I count myself as not only just an artist, not only as a singer, but a business woman. I write my own songs; I write my own video treatments, manage other artists. I write for other artists; it's not just about getting on stage and singing a song.
They keep the song as street as it needs to be. It's got a good catchy hook where it can do what it needs to do on the radio, but they keep the song street where it will keep credibility in the hood.
The thing is, my life is a country song. I don't need to be manufactured, and I don't need anyone to tell me what to say or what to sing.
The thing I ran up against was everybody wanted a song so fast. It took me two years to finish 'Touch Me in the Morning.'
We always try to get new songs. That's what AC/DC has always been about. You can listen to what we do, and you can go, 'Well, it's AC/DC, but it's a new song.' So that's what we've always tried to achieve. So we've always got that style.
My mother and father come from that post-Depression, middle-of-World-War -I kind of thinking that says, 'Find a practical job. You know what I mean, Mr. Big Shot? So, you can sing a song ...'
I saw my dad doing it and thought to myself, 'I can do that.' I would be backstage watching him and running around the country with him singing to children. He would sing songs that taught children really good morals: like, 'Teaching Peace' was a song he used to sing to kids a lot.
