I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are.
My old songs used to take place in Gothenburg; then, when I lived in Melbourne, the songs just naturally took place more in Melbourne.
There are so many songs out there in the world that - if I know we have to come up with a new cover, then I'll just sit in my room and sing song after song and figure out which one I can kind of sing the best.
In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
I feel like I write songs for the future or something. Not in an arrogant way, but I feel like maybe my songs were, like, before their time or something.
My favorite music is never the music that anyone else likes, and other people's favorite songs are always my least favorite.
My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.
The songs come from a vulnerable place, but expressing that part of yourself can also make you feel fearless.
The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.
I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs.
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.
All my first albums, they're full of heart and emotion, and the songs are wonderful, but they wouldn't have been the takes I would have chosen.
History is important but... I just wanna sing Beyonce songs all day long in front of a mirror.
I'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.
I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about. The first song I wrote was called 'Kitten.'
My love songs are very personal and quite weird. They don't really have the big radio hit choruses because basically they're my therapy, stuff I have to get off my chest.
I was listening to one of my favorite songs that Phil wrote and had an extreme emotional moment just before I got the news of his passing. I took that as a special spiritual message from Phil saying goodbye. Our love was and will always be deeper than any earthly differences we might have had.
Most of the people I hang out with who sing love it, and they just want to do it until they die. I still look forward to the performances. And believe it or not, they're all kind of different. Even though you sing the same songs, and maybe you go to the same venues, it just feels completely different every time you go on stage.
To be honest, I think about the clubs when I write. But I should probably start thinking about stadiums, because the songs sound even better there - and bigger.
I don't see my singing for films as a transition from singing my own songs because I see it as part of the same picture.
I was invited to L.A. when I was 16 for a weekend-long songwriting session by a writer I had met through my voice teacher in Pittsburgh. My first hit, 'Hide Away,' was one of the songs written during those sessions. It was played for a radio rep who then started a new label; the song got a pretty organic start at radio and then took off.
The records in the house I really remember were, well, Glen Campbell's 'Wichita Lineman' and 'Galveston.' Even as a kid, I knew these songs were glorious. My dad also had records by Merle Haggard, Charley Pride, Waylon Jennings, and then there was also the Eagles and Don Henley. Anything Texas, which includes Don Henley, was big.
I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.
I prance around and dance by myself to hip-hop songs in the mirror.
You can't explain the feeling of singing hit songs to an audience - it's like being a genuine sports star at the peak of their powers.
A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.
When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work, my mother was the master, or the mistress. There were three or four songs she wrote about my father - songs about failed love.
When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.
My first instinct when I write songs is not a negative one. It's something positive... Everything I've ever done has some form of hope in it, I think.
What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.
When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.
When I first started writing songs, I never intended on singing. I didn't really consider myself a singer at all. I was just kind of recording the demo vocals as a holding place until someone else came and sang.
We're not writing songs to solve a cultural problem. The goal for us is to express what we're going through, and it's great if people find commonality in that.
It is one of the most validating things for an artist like me, to have people sing along to your songs.
With the release of her fourth album, 'Red,' in 2012 and a handful of highly publicized romances, Taylor was criticized by the press and other entertainers for such sinful acts as dating people and writing songs about it, gaining a reputation as boy-crazy and love-ridden.
