I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.
Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist.
I think that the best songs to sing are songs that you love, because you sing them with love when you love them.
For a while there, our writing got really edgy... I've always written about experiences, so when your life gets a bit crazy, you start to write songs that are a bit edgy.
There's probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, 'I think that might have been about me,' or, 'I know it's about me.' I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don't think I'm ever gonna write a song and drop somebody's name in it.
I started off making music that made fun of pop; now I'm nominated for helping produce pop songs that aim to be as honest as possible.
I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.
I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.
So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.
The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal.
Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
If I got dropped tomorrow or every single I released from now on tanked, I'd be devastated, but I'd also still be doing this. I'd still be writing songs. I'd still be recording them. I was doing that for four years in Nashville. This is just on a larger stage.
Marc Almond has done a couple of covers, a few people in Europa have done them. I own all the publishing. It's never really been addressed, as I haven't had the time to go out and tout the songs.
I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.
I enjoyed hearing people do their own songs. I became attracted to singer-songwriters. I became interested in them as people; was curious about what they wanted to say.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
Sometimes, I feel like my lyrics meander a little bit, and our songs are so big I need to write more words than are necessary.
I know a lot of artists say this, but it's hard to put myself in a box. I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming form a special place. There's no tricks.
I remember when I wrote songs when I was about 16, they all sounded the same because I didn't know anything. And all the subject matter was all the same because I hadn't actually done much.
I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words.
A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
If you look at the charts every year, there may be five or ten memorable songs from each year.
And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.
The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.
I had a lot of Bengali friends in Delhi. The bands there had Bengali musicians: for example, Indian Ocean. We use to have a good amount of adda and sing songs through the night.
Fortunately any of the songs we've recorded can be extremely fulfilling to perform depending on the variety of circumstances that surround any given show.
Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
I think I write songs because of pent-up feelings.
'Blueprint 3' is made up of songs, but it's also a commentary on the idea that in order for rap to survive, we have to stretch out the drama. We have to stretch out the audience. It can't be this narrow - we have to stretch out the point of view.
Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.
There are so many songs that we just don't play anymore.
I'm a 50-year-old guy making music for over 20 years. I've been writing songs since I was 20, so it's really been 30 years, and it's always been personal, but I've always told stories.
The difference between Tinted Windows and Hanson shows is a lot of just repertoire. Hanson has been a band for years - we have a lot of songs to pull from and it's a different dynamic - a common kind of thread. With Tinted Windows - it's kind of a little like 'hey, we're this new band.'
I was never encouraged to do it and I played the accordion, which I hated. I wish I had taken piano because I definitely would have written more songs of my own, but I didn't.
I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.
I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.
