I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.
To the audience, it's like I'm changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show's almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.
It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.
I've always wanted to release a song that could actually touch someone and help them through a tough time.
We must have song and dance in our lives; we've had it ever since the inception of cinema in India. Our stories are very social-based, very human-based. We are a very emotional nation.
With every song I have a person in mind who, in a perfect world, would perform with me. Usually I end up not getting that person, and I'm forced to settle for someone else.
I do not believe that people should steal music, but I think that fans need a better alternative, hence why I am such a fan of Apple, where you can simply buy a song for $0.99; it is very easy, it is a value-packed service... and this is a result of the shakeup... something has to happen in the music industry.
In the past, my process would start with a sample of another song, and I'd chop it up and use that as the basis of the song that I was making.
'Can't Get Closer' I originally recorded in about half an hour, just on my bed with a microphone. I actually re-recorded the song with a cleaner vocal take, but I decided to leave the demo version on there, just because I felt that instant where it was created is what captured the most emotion.
We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.
What you hear about the band is always going to be more disturbing than any particular song.
After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure.
I would love to do a collaboration with Lil' Wayne. I would have loved to sing on his song, 'How To Love.' I wanted to do the remix to that song really bad.
There's nothing like that feeling of having just written a song that you know is 'the song,' and you know it's really great, and you can't wait to share it with people; you can't wait to record it.
Before I can finish one song, another is knocking on my door in my head.
You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.
I was having a conversation with my father and he was talking about this thing - strangeness and charm. It's actually the name of the two smallest particles that there are when you split the atom, so I wrote a song around it. I even managed to fit the word 'hydrogen' in there. Isn't that a nice thing for scientists to call them though?
Since I have been singing for so many years, I don't always need to approach a song quite so laboriously and meticulously.
A lot of the music I write is about love. Sometimes I won't understand how I am feeling until I write a song about it.
Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it's pleasure, but you don't get wiped out.
I'm a sensitive guy. If you are a woman and you're in any kind of emotional duress and you write a song about it, I'll buy you album.
My songs aren't bubble gum pop dance songs and I don't have background dancers on every single song.
So I think it was a good thing It was a little surreal watching Leo scream 'I'm not going to die today!' with our music playing - that was the last thing on my mind when I wrote the song.
A song called Never. Which we never play. But it's a great song.
Don't Cry Daddy is a pretty sad song. He got to the end of it and it was just real quiet and Elvis says, I'm gonna cut that someday for my daddy. And, by God, he did. He lived up to his word.
In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.
When it comes time to where the new album gets closer, I start singing the song a cappella; I'll preview it on my Snapchat and get creative with it - just kind of bringing everybody into more than just listening to the record on album.
Sing your heart out and write the best song you possible can.
Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.
I became inspired while I was listening to music on the radio. I felt the music in my head sounded better, so I turned off the radio and scribbled it down on a piece of paper. I remember that it was in May. People liked that song. They said it was beautiful. I felt overjoyed.
Jim Morrison's very good looking, but I don't like this version of the song. The Feliciano version is better.
'The Warmth of the Sun' was a very beautiful song that Brian and I wrote in the time period associated with President Kennedy's assassination. We didn't write words about that, but it was around that time we recorded that song, and there's a lot of emotion involved there.
But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics.
I'm not sure how young kids get to the point where they're memorizing and knowing songs, but I knew the words to 'Missing You' from John Waite probably from when I was three years old. For whatever reason, that was the song that I gravitated toward when it was on the radio and I was driving around with my mom.
I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I'd play bass on one song, we'd switch on the next song; I'd play piano... we'd play mandolin.
There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.
