I can plunk out enough chords to write a song, but I'm completely afraid to play guitar in front of other people. It's a fear of failure, I guess.
The only reason I would write a break-up song is because my own problem of allowing myself to relate to people.
We have a song like 'Ready to Love Again' that is really, really special to me. It's the one that I relate to the most. It's very personal, so we really allowed ourselves to go there and be vulnerable and show the fans that we feel and we hurt and we love just like anybody else does. I hope they feel that when they hear it.
I wrote a song that basically turned into a public service announcement for the fellas out there, like, 'Should you run into this type of woman, run for your life!' So the name of the song is 'Run,' featuring the rapper ScHoolboy Q. It's one of the standouts on the album, in my personal opinion.
The music kind of possesses me when I sing. So whenever I start to sing on a show - I mean, first, I'm nervous, and then when I get into it, it's just like I feel like I'm the person who sang the song first.
It's not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn't sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?
I believe that tracks speak to me. Some tracks make me write certain music or make me feel sad or inspire me to write a sad love song. Each track has its feeling to me.
Creating a decent pop song is a challenge - and occasionally, once in every decade - it's kind of fun to do that.
I have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I'm not going to drive hard into 'You should buy my stuff,' because really, it's inevitable. If you like a song, you're going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.
We write the song, then it gets played for the artist, and they somehow fall in love with it and go back in and make it their own.
A good song has to have a great melody, and the lyrics have to touch my heart. Now, if it's just a little toe-tapper, got to make me feel good somehow or another, or when I sing it I can't make you feel good.
Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.
Sometimes you just want to write a party song.
I've been writing songs all my life. My mom said I wrote my first song when I was two.
I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.
The first time I heard 'Jolene,' I was 12 years old, and it was performed by Jack White. I remember watching that video and forgetting it was from a woman's point of view, and forgetting it was a country song, and forgetting it was originally by Dolly Parton.
In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
Between the record companies being the way they are and the fact that people can just download one song instead of buying a whole album, it's hard to make a good living nowadays.
A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.
I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.
The first song that I remember writing in its entirety was when I was 9 years old. I wrote it on a bus, on a field trip. It was called 'Mystery Man,' and in retrospect, it was the beginning of my exploration of what it was like to have a man in your life, because I didn't.
I've said before, if you're going to earnestly sing a song around a campfire, you'd better be a Muppet!
Most people don't really need to hear a six-minute guitar solo that modulates between five keys and time signatures. What they want is a good song.
You have a song, and people know it. It's like a calling card for you.
I think one of the biggest sleepers that people are going to be able to dig into later is 'Fermi Paradox,' it's the song before 'Exist.' To me it's got the coolest, it's just so bizarre because it's got one of the most melodic vocal melodies, but we put it over a black metal blast beats.
When you have Julio Iglesias on a song, I think that's golden.
Obviously, writing together is very intimate because it's sort of acting where you need to get to a really deep place to get the most emotional song.
I was in my dad's church, his Baptist church, and I think the first song I ever performed was 'Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.'
The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.
I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.
I secretly love the song 'No More Tears.' It's my go-to karaoke song that I do with all my friends.
I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.
I don't care if it's a Cole Porter song, or George Gershwin, or Lennon/McCartney, or Elton John, or you know, whoever, Bob Dylan. Great songs are great songs, and they stand the test of time, and they can be interpreted and recorded with many points of view, but yet still retain the essence of what makes them good songs.
That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all.
I would never sing a song which I cannot sing in front of my family.