Song Quotes
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"Straight Edge" was a song about my life. There was no structure, no premise as if I was forming a club. There were no tenets. I mean I wrote a song called "Straight Edge," I'll take that, but the song was about my life the way I wanted to live it.
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I love a song that will usher in the very presence of God. Then there's no Andrae; there's no fabulous band, there's no greatness of ours. I've had hundreds of concerts like that, and that's what I try to achieve.
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As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge.
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I lost my virginity to a pumpkin when I was 23. Back then I was convinced I was actually a Vegetable, hell, that's what the song is about.
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Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.
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I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution.
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I really feel there's no limitation on what this band can do in the studio or on the stage. That's an empowering feeling - that we can bring a song to life.
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When I hear a great country song, I get chills and I want to cry. You feel something. And just sometimes that magic and the stars line up somehow or another, and it creates something that's really, really, really special.
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I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old, gospel music felt familiar, like I had heard it in the womb or something. A lot of those old gospel songs still give me that feeling, that it's older than time and there's actually music that can tap into a universal subconscious, or whatever word you want to put on it.
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I think when you're making an album, as the songs are piling up, one of the good things about it is that you will often write the song that you need.
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There should be a whole book written about that one word: country. What does that mean, country? It's such a huge umbrella. I would hope that what makes it country is that it all starts with a song. The story being told in three and a half minutes that is not being told on another station.
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I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.
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As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.
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I feel as a writer I’m growing and hopefully each song I write is a little more honest.
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I see everything as creative material. If I pick up a shell of a song that I wrote 10 years ago, all that matters is the reality of that material as it's living today.
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You have those songs that are very special to you that you don't want to get ruined by production. Something like 'Start Again' shouldn't be touched. It's a classic-sounding song on a piano and violins and harmonies, and I think those songs are perfect as they are.
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Jerusalem is a festival and a lamentation. Its song is a sigh across the ages, a delicate, robust, mournful psalm at the great junction of spiritual cultures.
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Song brings of itself a cheerfulness that wakes the heart of joy.
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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.
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'Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.' ... They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song.
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For my 23rd birthday, I received a nylon string guitar. I told myself that if I could play Eric Clapton's 'Tears In Heaven,' then I could play the guitar. I practised every chance I got, driving my housemates insane, until several weeks later I had a shaky version of the song down. I wrote my first song on the guitar a few weeks after that.
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I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people.
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Black people lived right by the railroad tracks and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.
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A lot of times, the choice of the right song will save a scene. Or there will be a scene that's a little flat and you put in the right song and somehow it just comes alive.
