I usually don't write songs by people calling me and saying, 'Write a song about this.' Usually I'm just going with what I want to write, so you never know.
In the beginning, I found it hard to give my songs away, but now I've realised it's exciting, and it's only making me better.
I knew the full 'Judy Garland Carnegie Hall' double album set at age 2. And then my mother wondered why I was gay. I was like, 'Are you nuts? You would make me get on the table to sing Judy Garland songs and you're upset?'
My dad's songs were really written to make certain people feel as though they had some kind of value. Because they were told from where they work and from the countries they had immigrated from that they did not.
Some of the best songs that I know are the ones I haven't written yet, and it doesn't even matter if I don't ever write them, because it's only small potatoes compared with the big picture.
I love listening to songs that are from the heart and that touch the heart. So, love is the preferred theme for most of the songs that I sing.
I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment.
When I look at my streams on Spotify, and I just see it's hundreds of millions of streams, I think, 'Wow, that's amazing.' But you don't really get it. Once you see people in front of you singing along to your songs, it's real.
El Perro del Mar sort of accompanied my time at 'SNL.' To concentrate and focus, I would play the bass to one of her songs from her third album.
The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.
Only directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who make period films, have songs in their movies that facilitate the inclusion of classical dance forms. No one else is concentrating on making pure classical numbers.
I really don't chase songs. I get in the studio, I know what I gotta do; I'm pretty much programmed to do it.
Every wedding is slightly different from the other. But you always get to meet the funny uncle and the weirdo relatives, and there's always someone trying to beat you up for not playing enough Beatles songs or something.
The songs from your childhood, when you hear them you get chills all over.
I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.
Prince was a child of our city, and his love of his hometown permeated many of his songs. Our pride in his accomplishments permeates our love of Minneapolis.
We all know about love, faith, sadness, despair, hope, hopelessness, longing, desire... those are things we all have inside of us, and that's what my songs are about... what it means to be a human being.
When I sing along with Britney Spears I will sing in an American accent. But eventually I found my own voice. My songs are so brutally honest, it would be alien to sing in any accent other than my own. Don't get me wrong - I can imitate singers. I can do bar mitzvahs and weddings.
I sequence during the entire recording process. The sequencing changes as I'm recording and as I'm listening. From when I'm, like, four songs in, I start trying to figure out which song should come after which. Which is important, and it changes as the album goes.
Yeah, if someone's selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they're trading it I don't mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand.
I used to write a lot of songs. I was an English major in college. I was a deluded poet for a year. Totally deluded.
I say, 'Yeah, Taylor Swift.' I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she's making all the right moves. She's got a good head on her shoulders. She's surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she's living and standing by that.
I try never to focus on the radio, just find great songs, find emotion and just write the best songs you can. I think when you get fixated on trying to do something too accurate, it becomes more washed out and less what you intended it to be. So I think each time the challenge for me is to try and reinvent a little bit.
I'd love to be in Paul McCartney's shoes for a day. I'd love to pick up a guitar and write songs like he does. Or to experience what it might have been like to be a Beatle for a day.
We loved country songs in New Order. That's our big secret!
My songs are always on the tip of my tongue. It's always bubbling and brewing and about to come out. I can't really put it into words, but the best way to explain it is feeling like you constantly have some things on the tip of your tongue.
At first, because this genre of music was so urban, sometimes we would sing songs that were so aggressive. And my parents didn't like it. They would break my cassettes and say, 'That music is garbage.'
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.
There are some commercial artists that have number one after number one, and you go to their show, and the show's one-note. Yeah, they're all hit songs. But there's no emotion, because they're the same kind of hit songs, because they're what works at radio. That kills live shows for me.
Democracy can tie your hands in a rock 'n' roll band, you know? It can be a great thing, but if you've got a certain amount of vision and you write a lot of songs, it's sometimes better to have your own band and make your own decisions.
Yes, threadbare seem his songs, to lettered ken - they were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.
I base my track-listing and what songs I pick by what my fans expect from me and what they want and what I think they want.
My earliest memories of Gwyneth first singing is in bed when we would make up songs. The most I could do was harmonize, like, a third above, and at two years old, she'd be doing sixths. I said, 'Where in the world did that come from?' She'd just make up songs.
