Song Quotes
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Before I can finish one song, another is knocking on my door in my head.
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I'm scared of karaoke. I think if I did have a go to karaoke song, it would be 'Whatta Man' by Salt-n-Pepa.
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Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with.
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I know of some guitar-based rock bands that refuse to record anything that they can't play live. But some of the best stuff I come up with are studio-based performances - bringing out whatever accident I had in the studio and building a song around that.
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Being an artist doesn't just mean you have a song. That doesn't make you an artist. The word 'artist' means so many different things, and I feel like to be a real one, you really have to do it all. The people that I think of as artists - Tyler the Creator, Childish Gambino, Kanye West - are doing the most.
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I was a B.I.G. fan. I like all of his stuff. I don't really have a favorite song. They all are good, and each brings different memories to me. And you can still listen to it to this day and it means something.
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I also just accept that I might never want to write a song again.
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I wouldn't have made it past the first round of American Idol auditions. It was months before our first song was recorded. The guys were like, 'Just seeng!' And I was like, 'I don't know how to seeng! Can't I just play the triangle?'
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As long as each song makes somebody feel something, I think that's the point of it all. I don't want it to just be background music, you know?
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I made a point when I made the Ugly Casanova record to not write a song and then say, 'This is a Modest Mouse song' or 'This is an Ugly Casanova song.' The people who were open to it not being a Modest Mouse record liked it.
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I don't do every song that comes my way; I'm very choosy.
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Writing 'February' made me realize that breaking form is a way of letting the song be human.
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The song of canariesNever varies,And when they're moultingThey're pretty revolting.
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I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
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I think Katy B encapsulates young London in a way I never could. She reps London harder than anyone song-wise since Lily Allen.
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When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.
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All those songs reflect all the people that live within me.
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You want to reach people, but you also want to reach them in the most authentic way. You now have a mass market and an audience that's listening, but they're in love with a song that means absolutely nothing to you.
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Music is like a lifeblood - it changes the way I move; it changes the way I feel about myself. The way I walk into the room is different depending on the song I was just listening to.
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It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
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I'm the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that's horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.
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When I'm working on a Slipknot song, it's like a switch flips in my head. I can go there easily - it doesn't take a lot of soul searching - and it's a dark, almost sinister place. Stone Sour is more the way I've always written. It's a different tone.
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I like to tell the artist what the song or album means to me, in detail. Then I let the artist run with it and create in an unrestrained manner. Once the artist gets back to me with a few ideas, I like to do the little changes to make it perfectly speak to the audience.
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I've always felt I struck out with Doris Day. Her son, Terry Melcher, was a producer I worked for at Columbia, and one day, he asked me to go to her house to play piano on a song she was doing. So I get there, and she has about 30 dogs running around the place - turns out she's a dog rescuer.
