Words matter. These are the best Adam Schlesinger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve never really had the desire to be a front person or a solo artist. I don’t really create that much of a hierarchy in my mind.
A band can define their own success.
I like switching gears. I’m kind of a chameleon.
We were called ‘Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.’ We had that name for a week or so. We were also called ‘Are You My Mother?’ for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names – almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.
I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you’re afraid to say that it’s done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.
For me, it’s just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while.
As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
It would probably be better if I got involved in fewer things just because I’d have more time to write for my own purposes… But if somebody calls you up with a really cool project, it’s hard to just say ‘no’ because you don’t feel like working.
I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn’t want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon.
Really, music is what I’m interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing.
Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline – like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever – or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don’t write anything.
I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I’ll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.
I just like to stay busy, and I like to work with interesting people.
Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful – and definitely enough to keep doing more.
I’m just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that’s writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work.
Most of the jobs I’ve gotten are from people calling me. I don’t actively solicit a lot of work like that, but maybe I should.
With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics – maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it’s much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.
What should a song be about? It’s a trick question for songwriters because lots of amazing songs aren’t ‘about’ anything. Or, at least, they’re not about anything that’s obvious or logical.
If you’re sitting in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, I don’t think you’re going to write a song about a ski resort.
Cheap Trick has played with every band on the planet.
I am not very regimented unless I have to be. I wish I was someone that could just write every day, but I tend to work on specific projects for a specific period of time and then stop.
The nature of the music business is such that it’s better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that’s kind of been my attitude all along.
I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook.
I don’t know if there’s a particular project, but one movie that I was really disappointed I didn’t get to work on was Judd Apatow’s ‘Walk Hard.’
Coachella is a magnet for music-biz luminaries such as Tara Reid, Paris Hilton, and Cameron Diaz.
Saxon, if you are unfamiliar, is a British heavy-metal band that has been around since the mid-’70s and was in no small part the inspiration for Spinal Tap.
It’s always been my philosophy to keep a lot of balls in the air. With music, most things don’t pan out, so you try to increase your odds by being involved with a million things at once.
The Ting Tings have been a huge hit in my family. I have two young daughters, and both of them love that record, so I pretty much have to listen to that ten times a day.
The truth is that I don’t work any harder than anyone else in the world. I don’t work 18-hour days. I don’t stay up until 4 in the morning trying to finish a line.
When you’re writing for a show, you’re writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.
