My independent songs are actually about me, so if you really want to know me, listen to my songs and know what I have been through in my life.
For my shows, I don't play too many slow songs.
I'd say three years ago we played in my hometown of San Antonio for 55,000 people at the Alamodome and walking out there with a crowd like that is just, you're excited, you're scared. There are just so many emotions going on. I still get nervous for things like that until after I sing about the first one or two songs, then I settle down.
I would be involved with music whether I had a career or not. I'm always going to be writing songs and recording them.
We love great melodies and great songs that have great hooks and melodies, so we start a little bit more on that side as opposed to other people that start more lyric-based. Sometimes we'll do it the other way.
A lot of those songs are actually about Sarah, who I was recently divorced from about five or six months ago. I'd been seeing her off and on since I was about nineteen, so a lot of those songs are about her.
I download, like, forty songs a day, I'm a big music collector and a big record collector.
I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.
One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up.
I work hard at that, but the fact that there are a lot of good songs means there are also a lot of really bad songs I've written that you never hear.
I've got all of the old school vinyls from the '70s - even further back, like the jazz music in the '40s, '50s, '60s. Then I've got all the '80s stuff underground, hip-hop when hip-hop really first started. The '90s stuff. All of the good stuff, because I'm really into music, and it helps me create new songs now.
We became the songs we wrote.
I always knew I couldn't sing, but I also knew I had a voice that isn't heard by many, and that I could learn how to stretch it and make songs sound good.
He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.
I have hundreds and hundreds of songs waiting to get on albums, but I don't know about the three-month radio tours and if I'll be interested in that. I haven't figured it out, but I will definitely be doing music, whether it is independent or with a major record label.
But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.
I just couldn't get anyone to sing my songs, so I had to sing my own tunes.
I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me.
We're playing the same songs, the same way, that we have for years.
I would describe my songs as just a collection of my thoughts, with melodies that probably occurred to me in the grocery store or cycling home, sung as best I can over a bunch of chords.
Some people might go to the gym and swim laps, but I write songs. Every single day, I write something new and record it.
I make the songs and part of making them is singing them. But what you hear is not me. It's the song. It's through me.
Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.
I do love to interpret songs in American Sign Language.
I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
I get to go make music, and I get paid to do it, and this is what people love me for. I couldn't ask for anything greater, so how could I not go in the studio and make a million songs?
There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, 'cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else's songs.
That's my dream job, to be able to mail songs out to people who want to hear them. Paste my face on them and not travel all over the world trying to sell them.
There's a bootleg album that was recorded when I was 14 or 15, a compilation of things live at different clubs. Songs like Girl from Ipanema and Cry Me A River. I don't know what the title of it is.
For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again.
We have always wanted to write songs and be experimental in that way.
I'm not really good at anyone's songs but my own.
In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.
I play keyboards and sing. I've written a couple of songs too.
People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.
