Song Quotes
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One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.
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Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.
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I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking "Uptown Girl!" I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called "Ragdoll," which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.
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In fact, many musicians are the happiest when the artist and audience re-interpret or re-imagine the content of the songs.
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Everything needs to be catchy because a listener is either going to stay with the song or lose interest in the first five seconds. But people also like those songs they can relate to and say, 'Yeah, I went through that.'
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One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.
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I have wished a bird would fly away, And not sing by my house all day; Have clapped my hands at him from the door When it seemed as if I could bear no more. The fault must partly have been in me. The bird was not to blame for his key. And of course there must be something wrong In wanting to silence any song.
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Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.
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The Madiba song may have ended, but its melody lingers on.
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Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.
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It was a very bizarre experience for me, to get the songs together, go in there, and try to deliver them as I would perhaps in a live setting. But I realized that I couldn't take on that coffeehouse style that I came from and go in there and burn it up.
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Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process.
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In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.
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It takes me, like, half an hour to write the lyrics for a song. They just come out.
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Whether it was a song, a person, or a story, there was a lot you couldn’t know from just an excerpt, a glance, or part of a chorus.
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...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.
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Yeah, sci-fi is definitely a big influence on Fear Factory. I've had people tell me we always sing about the same thing but it's like well, if we were a black metal band we'd sing about Satan, you know? What if we were a Christian metal band? All the songs would be about how much we loved Jesus.
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A song like 'Shooting Star' - the thought process behind writing that song was that I looked around and thought, 'Wow, there's a lot of people dying at that time in the music business.'
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Sure, I've thought about retiring, but in my mind, if you can't sing the song anymore, change the song and sing a different one!
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It's just weird that for some people, art is a luxury. My parents had no artistic outlet. Some people pass down music to their kids, but I couldn't tell you what my mom's or dad's favorite song is. So when I started going out into the world, I was drawn to people who knew about movies, art, even fashion.
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When I realized I could write lyrics and let someone that I knew listen to them, but not know that the song was about them - say it was a girl. I could write this song about how I feel about this girl, I could play it to them. I just loved it, because all of the words would speak to them. I could see them slowly falling in love with me.
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I know when I've written a good song when I can imagine the video. If I can't imagine the video straight away, I'm not gonna put it on my album.
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My favorite song is 'Cybele's Reverie' by Stereolab.
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I would prefer that, rather than sitting down and giving someone advice, I would way rather write a song about what I was going through. I think that's a pure, organic process of learning from someone else's mistakes.
