The reason I do interviews is because I'm protecting my songs.
People who write happy songs are often unhappy.
People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records.
A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the wheel, looking out at me.
I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.
I think I just have to be myself. No one can write the songs I do, and no one can sing the way I do - I believe that's important for every artist to remember.
Because of my interest in songwriting, I was invited to visit a friend in L.A. for songwriting sessions with him and his friends. We wrote six songs by the end of the weekend, and 'Hide Away' happened to be one of them!
I do gravitate towards the sad songs because I find them to be more of a challenge for me from a writing perspective. There are things about those songs that do touch people in a way that a fun song can't.
I will always have my songs and I don't think I will ever dry-up.
Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.
The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.
My seven-year-old daughter knows old songs and how the neighborhoods got their names. There are little things: Businesses receive blessings from Hawaiian priests before opening, and everyone's kids have their debut luau. You can't really get through a day without doing something Hawaiian.
I wrote music. I was in a hardcore band when I was 14, and I wasn't good enough to play anyone else's songs, so I had to write my own.
That's what I love. Not being interrupted, sitting in a car by myself and listening to music in the rain. There are so many great songs yet to sing.
In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.
I see myself as a serious artist, but yeah, when people come to my shows, they want to hear 'What Was I Thinkin',' 'Drunk on a Plane,' and lots of up-tempo, fun songs.
Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.
I wanted to be that quirky girl who writes funny songs that still have meaning.
At a festival like Coachella, you're not necessarily playing for your fans. You're playing to some, but there is also a lot of people that have maybe heard one of your songs, but aren't quite fans yet, so you feel like you have something to prove.
I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.
Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that.
'Take Me Apart' doesn't feel cohesive in a singular way but in a varied way. You can fixate on individual songs, and there are references from all over the place: Anita Baker to Bjork. I wanted to show all the facets of myself.
I don't know about the time those songs were written. But he was jamming with someone in Colorado or San Francisco, and I'm sure he was working on the lyrics right up to the show because they were really relevant for the situation.
My songs are about not knowing who to be and not knowing how to act.
To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song. I guess it was just because I was really into music as a child, and I wanted it to say more. It was the thing, wasn't it? And now it isn't.
Kids know me from their Grease DVD, so they instantly respond. You can hear a pin drop when I do my old songs.
I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.
Until Mad Season, I didn't have that confidence to write songs, and I really got it, playing with these guys. It meant the world to me.
I make charts of songs that are good candidates, good targets, so to speak. Then I try to come up with ideas for parodies. And 99% of those ideas are horrible.
I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.
I love bummer songs.
The type of music I like to sing is really those classic songs, those Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra, classics.
With a lot of songs, songs that don't make a good statement, I forget the words.