I'm confused that there is a lack of faith in listening to and deciding what is a great song and instead going for these formulaic, bad songs over and over again. But that's what happened when people from beverage companies bought record labels and radio stations as opposed to people who love music owning record labels.
I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.
Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.
Basically, I wake up at nine o'clock in the morning, go to different record stores, go to the studio, think up different ideas for songs. Just workin'.
I always loved Willie Nelson, but I loved the songs that Willie made famous.
There are no rules when I compose songs.
When I sang my father's songs in concert, that was all people wanted to hear. I was always asking myself, 'Can I measure up?'
I used almost every penny I ever made to build recording studios in every city I lived in. I don't have much to show for all the TV money except a lot of musical gear and a lot of songs.
When I composed a song on Bhagat Singh, it flopped. But my other songs about partying and all that are superhits!
Once you put songs out, they're not yours anymore. They're everyone else's.
People say I look younger than the music I'm doing just because the songs are older. Hopefully I can keep my youthful look!
Along with a sense of humor, my songs have to be sincere, and they have to be sung from a position of inner conviction.
I don't think I understood guitar rock as well as I probably should have. I don't think I understood bands like Led Zeppelin. In their era, everyone had such a regard for them because of them ushering in rock n' roll and this larger-than-life lifestyle. But then they had these songs that would just not stop. I didn't fully get it.
I don't know if I'd ever sing a whole album because I don't know if I'd want to hear my voice for more than three or four songs.
I don't know if there are artists out there who love their own records. I haven't met any, and I'm kind of extreme in the other direction, but therein lies the impetus to keep working and keep making new songs and new records.
I'm still going to sing these songs because trap is a type of music very popular in the streets, and people want to hear it.
For people who write songs, it's a gift you're given. You become good at the craft, but you're given the gift.
The first music I remember hearing was the traditional songs of Kentucky - things like 'Roll Along Kentucky Moon.'
When you're young you don't think, 'This person is going to change your life.' But when you start recording your own songs, it comes back and reminds you.
I like songs in all different genres and types. My production and songwriting is everything from pop rock to hip-hop and everything in between.
I love songs that people can dance to and enjoy at the same time.
I think remixes give songs more life.
I'm quite glad I never learned to play the guitar, because I think I'd write songs that were more classically structured. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical. Everything's a big crescendo.
When I started out as a cover band, I was obsessed with Keith Urban and Jason Aldean and Eric Church; those are the songs I chose to sing as a cover band.
Lennon and McCartney have the best catalogue of songs ever produced. It will never be surpassed.
I was backstage at the House of Blues in L.A where I was about to perform, and Stevie Wonder and Prince turned up at my dressing room together! Stevie started beat boxing and Prince started singing one of my songs, all of a sudden it was like I was in a cypher with these incredible artists.
So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.
I do feel pressure from the outside world a little bit just because everybody wants new music, which is really nice. It just proves that everybody likes what I'm doing. But at the same time, I feel like it's important to just chill and experience things and really make the songs true to me.
When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.
My favorite music isn't necessarily the songs that One Direction come out with. That doesn't mean to say I don't secretly really love some of our songs, which I do.
When I wrote those first songs for the Truckers, songs like 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day,' those were strong songs, very strong songs. But had I been in the position of writing an entire album at that point in time, I don't think the whole album would have been of that kind of quality.
I'm very visual when I write and get a lot of inspiration from scrolling through Tumblr or Pinterest. I have picture folders to most of the songs I've written. It would be cool to release it as a book one day!
Sometimes I hate writing songs. Because it hurts sometimes. I'm very emotional.
I don't like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I'm recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.
I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing.
The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it's almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.
