Well, I like songs that have like a little bit of quirkiness to them.
Heartbreak is good fuel for country songs. And cheating.
There are so many reasons to mark the passing of the great Joe Cocker - as many songs as he wrote, recorded and performed in his remarkable concerts. For me, Cocker was also the only performer who successfully covered and even improved on The Beatles.
I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution.
I think of the Jens Lekman in the songs as a completely different person who's stealing my stories.
I think that, whatever happens, I'm just happy I've written those songs and I've made an album. That's really big for me, and I'm proud of that.
Over the years, a lot of rappers - Lil' Wayne, Ice Cube - have used my name in their songs. I'm a real touchstone of history.
I understand it's my role to realize people's dreams. I'm O.K. with that so long as my songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.
The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.
'Haywire' is full of different kinds of love songs. It's definitely country and a little something for everybody. I feel like the subject matter goes a little deeper about love and relationships.
I find that when I get on stage now, I don't want to perform a lot of my songs because they don't feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.
Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.
At the end of the day, I'm a fan of great stories and great songs.
'I'm Sorry' was one of the first songs to come out of Nashville using strings.
Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.
When you're in a band, you spend most of your time in a van. Like, there were four of us, we toured all the time, and you're stuck looking at three other people for a month straight. And all of those times, we all just liked making fun of people, doing impressions of people, coming up with songs.
I want to make myself and the crowd happy by way of something different, and that makes things difficult. I'm never playing something that hasn't been released or no one has ever heard before because I care to deliver them what they were hoping to see from me. But also I play four or five songs that will definitely surprise them.
I've just always written songs in a style that appeal to me personally.
I'm not just writing songs that are narrating my life, but everyone else around my age because they're super-relatable.
That's one of my problems is that there are so many songs to sing that I sort of get indecisive about what I want to do in a show - because there are so many possibilities! There are so many great songs out there.
With songs, I've always pledged to be honest. I write my songs because I've lived them.
And I'm not trying to write heavy songs.
It's a farmers market. You can get whatever - peaches, a sandwich. There might be a little band there. I'd sit in with the band. Yeah, that's what I would do. Sit in with the band at the farmers market. Sing a couple of songs, eat a peach, and hug people.
I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.
I had this little Bon Iver phase a few years back; 'Flume' was one of my favourite songs.
I'm totally the 'decorate early, start listening to Christmas songs super early' guy. I've just always been that way.
There were songs I would write about breaking up with somebody before I broke up with them, months and months before I broke up with them.
I tend to name albums after one of the songs.
I think all the best songs do that: they offer some sort of hope and light in the darkness.
I love doing concerts, and I think my songs get another expression and energy when they are being played live.
You know, it's funny how songs continue to grow and evolve and become a new and deeper reflection of your life.
Writing songs out of my faith was a real natural progression. I grew up singing in my dad's choir and singing with my family. Christian music became the music that I identified myself with and was a way that I expressed my faith. Even at a public school I would take my Christian music in and play it for my friends.
'Miss Saigon' taught me what it means to help carry a big show, and it had some of the most gorgeous songs wrote.
I did a song in eight minutes. I thought everybody could write songs that fast. But working with a lot of them, they don't.
Most of what I've written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you're going through puberty.
'Sit Here and Cry' was one of the first songs I wrote with that overdramatic sarcastic dry sense of humor, which is why the energy of the song doesn't necessarily reflect the subject matter.
