I came down to Orange because I sold the Smothers Brothers a song called ‘Chocolate,’ and that gave me enough money to move down here. I was washing windows down in Orange County when they called me up and said they wanted me to do their TV show.
Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‘Lights Please’ happens like that.
I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.
If I want to do song and dance, I will and I would like to but I don’t want to do it in every film. Where is the novelty then? It just takes the fun out of work for me.
Once at the White House I was asked to conduct the Drum and Bugle Corp. The man just handed me the baton and I finished the song. It was great. I got to keep the baton.
In 1999, I just came out of putting out the song ‘Vivrant Thing’ and ‘Breathe and Stop’ off the ‘Amplified’ album. Clive Davis signed me to Arista.
I think ‘Lost Boy’ is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don’t picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.
It’s very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there’s no creative crop to harvest.
Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.
Music is a diary. Sometimes people make music as if no one’s going to hear it, as if they can just be completely honest. Things are a lot more acceptable said in a song than it would be in person. Art excuses a lot of things.
I am outraged that the Gorillaz have infringed the copyright of my song ‘Time Warp,’ claiming their song ‘Stylo’ to be an original composition.
I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was ‘Good to Be a Man.’ That what’s got me signed.
‘Free Fallin’ is a very good song. Maybe it would be one of my favorites if it hadn’t become this huge anthem. But I’m grateful that people like it.
God knows why – no pun intended – but every time I write a song, I feel a need to touch on religion.
On the second half of ‘Under Pressure,’ I talk about my family, and there are voicemails on my phone from when I was on the road that actually make up the second half of the nine-minute song. I transcribe them and rap them as if I were my sister, my brother, or my father.
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.
The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.
I’ve got CDs in my car, listening all the time for that next song, because everybody’s looking.
Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There’s no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.
If I write when I’m low, it will be a dark song, but I don’t care. I want to be honest with myself at all times.
As a musician myself, I wouldn’t be confident if I received some other composers’ song, because I choose to express myself through the music that I make.
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
You’ve got Lil Uzi Vert – you do a song with him, you ain’t doing nothing but gaining new fans. You gotta keep up with the time and the pace.
For me, my favorite Mariah Carey songs were never the singles, ever. My favorite Mariah song of all time is ‘Sent From Up Above’ from her first album, or ‘Vanishing,’ songs no one talks about.
My muse is my wife. It’s not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.
There are still artists that do a great job with a song, and they care about the lyrics, and it’s not just mindless drivel.
I was in a movie with Angelina Jolie called ‘Life Or Something Like It’ where I played her fiance, and I have a song in there.
At college – I went to Yale, and everybody’s very smart, and everybody has their thing that makes them special, and people at Yale would pretend they didn’t recognize me. Only after they’d had a couple of drinks would they start singing the ‘Life Goes On’ theme song.
To me, the lyrics of the song define the kind of style it is.
A song is anything that can walk by itself.
Thus mating of females was strictly along the lines of paternal song.
You can cage the singer but not the song.
I think the biggest way of connecting with people is through your music and kind of saying what you want to say as an artist. And hopefully, you’re making something that someone’s going to be like, ‘This is my favorite song.’ That’s always your goal, I think, anybody in any genre.
I always say my role in Metallica is to support the song and to support my team, and whatever that means, I’m there for it.
I feel like ‘Beware’ is a heartfelt song – it’s something that is definitely a story, something that I cultivated from personal stories, some from just other stories in just wanting to make a good song.
I must have listened to at least 10 covers of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ – Jeff Buckley’s cover is usually my go-to song.
When I hear myself singing, I hear Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix. There’s a conversational thing going on. I suppose it depends on which The Pretenders song you’re listening to.
I don’t have to be working on an album to record a song.
The original version of ‘Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang’ was made to a Boz Scaggs song; I can’t remember the name of the song.
I honestly think that with every song you release you have to keep winning your own fans over again.
Country fans and country listeners deserve to have something better… a song that really has something to say, something that makes you feel something.
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?
There was this song I was working on called ‘Swing.’ It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information – this little tweet – came to the forefront of my mind.
My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I’d look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.
I don’t need to hear Bill to go through a song. I need to hear Keith to go through a song. I know Bill will be playing what I’m playing anyway. I need to hear Keith because it’s all there: the time, the chord changes, and all the licks you have to follow.
I can’t just make a song people can dance in a club to… it still has to be real.
I always like a good song: puts me in a good mood.
When I make a song, I’m really happy. It’s an indescribable feeling.
‘9 to 5,’ that little song, that little story, just won’t ever end. Just like ‘I Will Always Love You,’ it just keeps comin’ back, popping up its head in one way or another.
I love pop music. It’s not easy to write a good pop song.
My work is music. That’s why I could set to tune a song such as ‘Kathirunnu Kathirunnu.’
Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don’t see them on the covers of magazines. I’d heard ‘Silver Machine’ but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called ‘Master Of The Universe’ and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.
That’s the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso, but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It’s a living thing.
With good music, yes, we can bring people together because a good song will touch your soul no matter what and where it is coming from.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
If we were to put out a song in English, we would have to put in lots and lots of effort.
No matter where you are or what you’re doing, it’s always great if you don’t have to get up and physically change the song that plays next.
I don’t have a family that grew up singing and playing all the time. I didn’t really have anything to judge my abilities against until I got out into the professional world and met other professional musicians. All I had was my own way of arriving at a song. That was it.
Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don’t forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It’s like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain’t right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.
