Song Quotes
-
Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.
-
I write some country music. There's a song called 'I Hope You Dance.' Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.
-
Whenever you give someone a present or sing a holiday song, you're helping Santa Claus. To me, that's what Christmas is all about. Helping Santa Claus!
-
I might be eating something, and the bag opens in a cool way, and I'm like, 'I wanna put that in the song.'
-
Living here in southern California, I'll miss hearing Rocky Top for an entire week at the end of December. I was actually looking forward to it. Tennessee has a better fight song than Nebraska.
-
To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.
-
There's an interesting story around that ["Heaven Without a Gun"], because the girl I was dating at the time got into a bike accident and couldn't make it into the studio, and the gentleman Dave Hamlin who worked on this record along with Ohad sort of took it, rearranged it. Dave went and sonically changed it and changed the keys so that Andy could sing it better. All these pieces came together that suddenly displayed that the song was meant for Andy [Kim] to sing. And he always said, "I'll never understand it, but I'll sing it with all my heart."
-
When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.
-
I've felt love from certain songs that I've wanted to experience from other people - where I know that love may never happen - and I want to give that to someone else.
-
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
-
You never know until a song comes out and becomes what it becomes, obviously you can't predict how the masses will react.
-
Sometimes something becomes a lot better. It's like a puzzle . You can't force a round brick into a square. It's a delicate thing. You need to let the song decide.
Nanna Øland Fabricius -
Vine is where 'Don't' started popping off. A lot of famous Viners used the song, and that was crazy because I had never been a part of something like that. I drank champagne for the first time when it got 100,000 plays.
-
I still do one song by myself onstage. it gives people the extremely personal thing where it's just me on guitar. But, I think the songs are better as a band. I think with all of the extra little hooks and backing vocals, it just adds to what my initial idea was.
-
I started crying, because there's nothing like hearing that the artist who originally did the song likes your version.
-
Songs are like my children, from the concept phase, to writing, to recording, then editing and all of the work that went into it and the millions of listens. Then you move away from it and you never see it again.
-
I had never really written songs for anyone before. With [Broken] Social Scene, you're writing songs for others and your passing them around and exchanging things, but for a man who has the history that Andy Kim had, and has lived the life that he's had, you see such a youthful aspect of how he just wanted to create something again.
-
I needed to be sexier. I needed to be more hip. I needed to be more edgy and this and that. 'No, don't write that kind of song, write this type of song. No, don't work with that producer, work with this producer. No, don't wear those clothes, wear these clothes.' And I didn't want to be a puppet, you know?
-
Normally you'll have a structure to a song. You'll have an intro to a verse to a pre-chorus to a chorus, kinda repeat that, maybe there's a bridge, then you'll go out on a chorus - that's the quintessential song structure - sometimes you might do a fake-out, re-do a pre-chorus but the chorus doesn't come until later, but for the most part you follow these tried and true structures.
-
You can keep rummaging around until you find a song you like, but you can't predict whether it'll hit or not.
-
There's such a huge difference between a great arrangement of riffs and a song. Sometimes the two can be the same. But the difference is a song doesn't necessarily need a riff, whereas a riff doesn't necessarily mean you've got a good song on your hands.
-
I'm a songwriter first, have always been, and probably always will be. Making the demo is a natural product of writing a song; after that, I'm happy to hear other people do it in other ways.
-
I feel that recording a song already compromises the magical music one can create in the mind, so the fewer people watering down this process the better.
-
I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon. Part of the reason I work on stuff for so long is just because I love working on it. It's not that I'm haunted by some ghost sound. I just have nothing else to do with my life. Some people like to obsessively shop online. I like to obsessively rack up studio bills.
