I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.
It took me 29 years to finish that song. That's a typical Jardine move.
When I can write a song in a way where I feel like other people can relate to it, and I can take it past being cathartic just for me, that's when I know I can share it. Otherwise, I'd just feel like it's selfish.
There's a lot of craft that goes into achieving a hit song - at the beginning of your career, you're usually more inspiration than craft, and you get great when those intersect. A skilled songwriter can get you to that intersection.
'Mean' is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.
If my life were a song, what would it be? 'A Never Ending Road of Musical Good Times'.
Sometimes I don't even know what to name a song when I get done with it, and I'll let somebody else tell me what I should call it because it's whatever stuck in their head.
Every day, somebody has a song they want you to hear, and you're stupid if you don't listen to it because you never know what you may find.
I have always thought it was important to maintain some connection for myself to what it takes to make a song work by myself, to put a song across to an audience by myself.
All men that date me have to know that their name may end up in a pop song.
I remember a song I did called 'If the Good Die Young' - I wanted to have a lead guitar solo on there, and the label flipped out! It was too rock and roll. They made us go back and put fiddle on the solo.
It has been wild, you know? I started out just putting a song that I made out on the Internet without being sure if anyone was going to like it, and it took me on tour around the world with Justin Bieber. It's been amazing!
I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.
I love that Euro-pop dance music, but with girl power. I also listen to Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. I have a Beatles song tattooed on my foot. I'm all over the place.
We weren't raised Muslim - we were born Muslim. I didn't go to a Muslim school, but it was just the theme song. It was ambient.
I feel like a lot of people in the hip hop world don't take me seriously as a rapper, and I feel that first-and-foremost I came up as a rapper before I started singing. All a lot of people know from me is 'Cupid's Chokehold,' and they don't scratch the surface and see beyond that dude who sings the song about his girlfriend.
My opinion is that music is music. As long as you approach doing a remix with truth, I don't see the dance remixes being any different than an hip-hop remix- it's really a different version of the song.
If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.
To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
As a songwriter, there's nothing better than winning Song Of The Year. But I couldn't really celebrate, because it wasn't right. Luther wasn't standing next to me, to receive the award.
Technically, I've been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turned 80. I wrote a song for him called, The First 80 Years are The Hardest.
I'm about to start working with a singer I met on my last trip: she'll get international exposure, and I'll have a song out in that market sung in Cantonese.
It's tough as an artist to have such a specific vision for your video in mind when you write a song. Reaching out to directors is like going on blind dates and trying to find someone who sees the exact vision behind your music, which can be really difficult.
Best of all is it to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song.
Each time I play a song it seems more real.
Why can't you write a great pop song when you are 85? Maybe you can.
If a musician wants to be an actor, everyone thinks that's pretty cool. But if an actor wants to play a song, even if they've been doing it for 40 years, that's bad news.
It doesn't take a year to sing a song. Takes a year for people to figure out how to market it.
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.
There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.
There's this notion that allows people to create their own collection of songs, so it rewrites what a song is. They may only want 10 seconds of something, or they may only want this particular song, or they want this group of songs. It becomes much more user-controlled.
My main goal as a songwriter is to make something that inspires people. To write things about my life that people can relate to. Whether it's a whole record or just one song for someone, I hope it can do that for them. Knowing that I have the ability to do that is inspiring to me.
You spend all day getting the song goo,d and you're listening to it late at night, and you're happy with it. But you should sleep on it and come back in the morning and make sure.
