A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.
I'm sure every song has some kind of undertone of what I was going through with Chris. It was my life.
Solace is my favorite song. It was the last song we wrote for the record. It was right when we really started to mesh as far as music goes and we started really connecting with each other.
That's why 'Chandelier' was interesting to me... I wrote the song because there's so many party-girl anthems in pop. And I thought it'd be interesting to do a different take on that.
I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'
As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.
The vocal arrangements are a big part of the formula for a Bad Religion song - layered harmonies and background vocals. So when I start to describe the elements of Bad Religion's sound, it starts to sound like a Christmas choir.
He saw us play a few times in fact. I did this song called I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes, and Jimi loved it. He paid me a huge compliment when he told me that he was thinking of doing something similar himself!
This 'Making Mirrors' album is far more personal, even if there's a character element to the sounds I'm working with. Every song on this album I stand behind; I feel like I have a close relationship with them. There are older songs where I can feel myself writing a story, so this is the first album where I'm proud of every lyric.'
For most women, Greenham was a place of principle, growth and song. Often joyful, sometimes terrifying, and almost always cold. As it got harder, with constant evictions and mounting violence from a frustrated and humiliated police force, the women got more determined. It was a community with a shared purpose - to live in peace.
Nobody had song titles that were as long as ours. A lot of it was just inside jokes.
Most people who ask me what's my favorite song, expect that it's 'Midnight Train' or 'Neither One of Us.' But actually, it's always kinda been 'The Need to Be' because of what it says. I love the way that song was written, I love the melody, I love everything about it.
I think sometimes you are born with a song.
I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.
Unfortunately, we are living in an era where plenty of songs with vulgar, objectionable lyrics are also becoming popular. It's a disturbing trend, and I feel really sad when I see small kids dancing to such numbers in television shows. In my career so far, I have refused any song whose lyrics I haven't been comfortable with.
Often I have to move my body in a certain way, like exercising, to begin to get into the right rhythm for writing a song.
Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.
The beauty of music is that everyone hears it their own way, and every song you hear leaves an impression on you that alters the way you hear everything from that point on.
Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.
When I hear other artists talk, they talk about 'How come radio's not playing my song?' Well, you have to look at it under a microscope and know that each station is just trying to do what's right for their market, and it's scary for a radio station to add a song that they don't know how well it's gonna do for them.
I didn't never have to go to a therapist. I just always put it in a song and you heard me.
If I found a cure for a huge disease, while I was hobbling up onstage to accept the Nobel Prize they'd be playing the theme song from 'Three's Company'.
I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like that.
I'm not afraid of being thought of as someone who is associated with film music. Why not? If it's a good song, what does it matter?
Then all of a sudden, Quentin Tarantino comes along and puts a song from 40 years ago in one of his films and they've suddenly discovered you. That was a real gift that Quentin gave me.
You always gotta reach the people who feel bad about themselves or insecure about themselves, and I think 'Like 'Em All' was just a perfect song for all the girls, and I think that's why it blew up like it did.
I tend to write songs critiquing myself. The best way for me to deal with stuff is to write a song about it... That's not to say all my songs are like that.
'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,' if you go through the lyrics, is such a haunting melody, and the words are, for a pop song, pretty deep and dark.
The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.
The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.
There's times, in certain songs, that I might be in my own world, and who cares about who's out there, you know? You have a job to do, so you do that job of singing that song or telling that story because that's what you're doing.
I shouldn't have acted. I didn't exhibit any ability. I was one of the kids in the school play who was just mouthing words, and they weren't the actual words of the song. I was pretty lame!
The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
At the Muddy Waters thing, I played the first song by myself on an acoustic guitar. I thought that was great that y'all did that tribute to Muddy Waters. I had a real good time.
You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.
