Song Quotes
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I feel like in every song I write, I always write a little darker bit.
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I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?
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I sang the 'Sunday Night Football' theme song two years in a row - my first part in American culture, although I still don't know anything about American football.
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Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
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I love Florida Georgia Line. I love 'Round Here.' So if a fan wants to listen to that, and if a fan that wasn't listening to country music before is listening to 'Cruise' on Pandora, and after that a song by George Jones comes on, they may have never heard George Jones before. I think it's a good thing for the genre.
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All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.
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These are very difficult times for new artists. Back in the day, a hit song could really seep into a person's DNA with radio and MTV. A hit today is not the same as a hit twenty years ago. Now there is so much competition, it is very hard to reach the people. The music scene is so overly saturated. There are no gatekeepers like there used to be.
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I'm a born entertainer. When I open the fridge door and the light goes on, I burst into song.
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Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It's not gonna work. Everything that's good is really instant.
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I'm quite a particular singer, and I need to feel like I can bite into the song, in a way, to make it my own. You want the challenge of the songs having some attitude.
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When I graduated from college in early 2010, I decided that I needed to create a calling card, some kind of business card that people can link to my name and face. So I did this 'Mad Men Theme Song... With a Twist' music video. I released it just as I moved to L.A.
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The main song I listened to with the 'Firebird' books was 'Breath of Life' by Florence + the Machine.
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When I'm writing a song, things are always popping into my head, it's not so direct. It feels more like I'm in a room and there's this whole big jumble of clothes on the floor and it's like choosing what to wear. There are a lot of different things in there and you kind of pull something out and think, "No, that's not right," or you're like, "Yes I'll put this on with this."
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care so long as they sang without dissonance.
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We've played it [Milquetoast] a million times. When you play a song that much you sort of become disconnected with the lyrics. It's just another song essentially about people's opinions and being told how to live your life even though they may have less life experience than you have.
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I don't feel any obligation to make my intentions for a song accessible to a listener or an audience. I'm not interested in conveying anything to them so much as what's best for me.
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Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'
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Usually I just let my songs do the talking. As a matter of fact I have long had an aversion to celebrities endorsing politics, and in some cases even other causes. I wonder about their motives. And I have to admit when celebrities get involved in political campaigns I tend to get a little bit sarcastic about it.
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People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.
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When you're a writer, your song has to resonate with the person you're writing for in order for them to want to sing it. But if you're an artist, you can sing whatever you want.
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I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I'd play bass on one song, we'd switch on the next song; I'd play piano... we'd play mandolin.
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One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.'
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Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.
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I don't cuss in songs. It's too easy.
