Everyone is looking for connections between the songs. I don't usually approach a record as a concept. There's no overriding theme I'm trying to represent. It's all about the individual songs.
I finished 'Beautiful Creature,' and I felt somewhat unfulfilled. I felt like this other side of me needed to be released. Some of the songs I left off the album weren't intense enough to be what I wanted. They weren't hard enough.
One of the things I wanted to do with 'The Turn' was write a production of songs that could be stripped down to one or two instruments if you chose to do it.
We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.
I like to sing. I write music. Country songs. You have to if you're in Nashville. It's part of the lease. You sign a lease that says, I will write country songs and pay my rent on time.
We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.
I can't take credit for the success of my songs.
I only do private room karaoke where it's just me and one of my closest girlfriends. My mom always said I could really belt songs out, and the Dixie Chicks feed that encouragement.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
Adele Adkins' retro-soul debut, '19', was striking less for her songs than for that voice: a voluptuous, slightly parched alto that swooped and fluttered like a Dusty Springfield student trying to upstage her teacher, or at least update the rules.
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
Sometimes when you have a song, you listen to it and say, 'It's OK. It's music to drive to.' But then there are songs where you can actually hear it as a movie.
We never want to go into a tour and play 15 songs and say 'Enjoy.' We have messages: Number 1, follow your dreams. If I can do it, you can do it. Number 2, give your life to something. We say, 'Volunteer and add seven years to your life.' You can have your own personal ministry. The message we have is 'What do you stand for?'
I don't know that all the demons have been beaten, but I'm very, very proud of those songs.
Some guys record an album with songs that are filler. I recorded this album like it was my last.
Normally when we go in and write the songs we write, we think about doing a cover, but never a covers record. That would be, for us, a concept. We don't want to have a concept!
I'm still more comfortable with standards than with my own songs.
My mom played the recorder. But not having electricity, we had minimal exposure to music. As I got a little older, we had Walkmans and things that were battery-powered, but it would have been nice to be growing up in the iPod era. A tape only has six songs on a side.
Not really interested in covering other bands songs to be honest.
I am an incurable romantic. I am even in love with the idea of being in love, and hence, I write a lot of love songs.
People would always ask me how I came up with my music and what it felt like to make music, and I would always see colours, and then I found out that that was synaesthesia. It helps me understand songs and what I like.
I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
I never set out to write songs about the world around me... it just kind of came about as a result of paying more attention to things.
Writing songs helped me figure out how to communicate with other people. I finally figured out that if I could express something in a song, I could probably express it in my real life, too.
It's like, hey, some people cook for a living, and some people milk cows. I write songs.
When playing big festivals, I tend to play big, over the top techno tracks, like hands in the air songs that make sense being played in front of 30,000 people. I steer away from subtlety in the interests of big bombastic dance music.
Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.
I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?
You get royalties from certain songs that you do when you do background. It's according to the work that you put in.
Songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.
A lot of what I listened to growing up was blues, but also folk and indie music. So there's this marriage of songs that structurally are quite bluesy. Sound-wise, there's a lot of indie as well. But you can't really say I'm pop-blues, because that's insulting to blues. It just can't exist.
When I turned 14, I became very obsessed with writing songs, and it took over my existence.
A part of me was like, 'Man, do I even like doing this anymore?' That whole thing of 'I'm in my 30s, and I sing and write songs while people are fighting wars in Iraq.' You know? So everything had to have more meaning, and it couldn't just be about making money. So, I took a minute.
In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs.
I hope to bring people to God with my songs.
