Jules Shear Quotes
Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.
Quotes to Explore
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Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
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I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
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When all your stuff gets smashed, everybody gives you new stuff. And when you've been playing the same guitar since you were like 12, that's a lot like dancing with somebody else's wife.
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I really believed that my songs were good enough for the whole world to listen to. I had fans from America or the U.K. who would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your music'.
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I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.
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I will say that a lot of songs that I've written are from my own personal experiences which are special to me.
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The biggest influence? I've had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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My drummer, bass player, and guitar player sing backgrounds. They play and sing. I can sing all the harmonies, but I can't do it alone.
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A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.
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I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know.
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It wasn't until I was 18, when I was graduating high school, that I went and bought a guitar on a whim.
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A guitar is a very personal extension of the person playing it. You have to be emotionally and spiritually connected to your instrument. I'm very brutal on my instruments, but not all the time.
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I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.
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When I was 15, I begged my grandfather to give me this guitar he'd always had in the back of his closet. I promised him I'd learn to play it, but I never did. Then my grandfather died, and I felt so guilty. So I started playing.
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I went to my friend's house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I'm in love.
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I consider the guitar a tool for the most part. I do pick up the acoustic now and then, I certainly don't have any routine. Usually the only time I practice is when the band gets together. Hendrix has always been one of my favorite players, but I was a sucker for Nugent in the late 1970's.
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We've written something like 900 songs in all.
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My vocation is more in composition really than anything else - building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.
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I did a lot of songs that I sold, but then they never came out and I never got paid for it. You learn real fast that the music industry, in the beginning, you're not going to get paid for a while, and then you start getting the accolades.
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It's a misconception that all singers need to portray a messed up, dirty look to prove their identity.
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If I claim I'm the opposite of my characters, then it'll just sound awful. But I tend to write the sort of things I'd never say because I'm not a very forceful person.
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Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.
