Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?
Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
There's probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, 'I think that might have been about me,' or, 'I know it's about me.' I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don't think I'm ever gonna write a song and drop somebody's name in it.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
I'm young, but I've been doing this a long time... There's obviously a lot of hard work that goes into it. It's a hard town. There's a lot of talent here. It's all about timing, too. I just feel like I finally found the right town and the right song.
To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.
Every song asks to be sung in a different way.
I honestly think that with every song you release you have to keep winning your own fans over again.
The whole industry evolves around a great song.
There are people who can sit down and write a song about any given subject, and they can do it really, really well.
I feel like music can affect you in so many ways. When you hear a song with a happy melody, it can change your mood; it can change your day.
They would wake me up when I was sleeping, and say sing a song for our friends. I had a sweet voice, I had a nice little tenor voice. God knows what I sang, but my whole family would admire me.
I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.
Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
It's nice if people ask to use your song. You have to make a decision as an artist how you feel about that.
I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.
The song I like to do is 'Dead.' I'm constantly playing that one.
Starting in music, where I get a chance to connect with the lyrics of a song, I learned so much about performing on stage and connecting to your audience and to what you're singing about. Singing is very emotional. Every song has its own purpose.
When I perform on stage, I often pretend to be someone other than myself to bring a certain emotion or intent to a song.
Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
I can sit in my room and write a song that I think might be a hit. I can sort of make myself do that, and then I'll play it to a friend, and they'll say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But when something happens to me, and I sit down and write a song to get rid of my emotions, they'll turn around and say, 'Wow, that's great.'
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.'
The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.
I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.
What I say is from my heart. You must be sincere. So when I sing a song, people are supposed to feel it.
Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.
There's a lot of personal stuff that can go into songwriting but there's also a lot of dramatization and fictionalization. You have to do that to make a good song.
I've been training myself and listening to other artists and seeing where their emotion comes from, singing a heartbreak song when they're in a happy relationship.
My life has been many examples of shortsighted goals that I thought would fix things. You know, if there's something broken inside me, if there's a hole in there, I thought: If I could just write a good song someday, then I'd be OK. You know, if I could just be on stage in front of people I'd never seen before and be validated by them.
At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.
People are consuming more than ever, but I think they want a bit of honesty and depth. Adele, Gotye, Janelle Monae - they're giving you a catchy song, but it's also a challenging song at the same time.
To this day I get mail from women who say, I went to law school because of your song. But I would hate to think out of the wide spectrum of things I have done in my career, that's all I would be remembered for.
Sometimes I get in writing moods and I want to write a song every couple of days. Then sometimes I may not write a song for three weeks. It's just according to how it's hitting me at the time.
Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
I would love to do a Bond song, and I could have done a Bond song: I was offered a Bond theme, but I turned it down because I didn't like the song. But as it turned out, I was right anyway because the song was the only Bond theme that never became a hit, so I'm glad I wasn't associated with that!
