Song Quotes
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You can't fool yourself anymore that your art is your art. When you're not getting paid for that song that's being traded back and forth among millions of people on the Internet, you have to think like a businessperson.
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You can't explain the feeling of singing hit songs to an audience - it's like being a genuine sports star at the peak of their powers.
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Factoring in millions of people when I'm writing a song is not a good idea. I don't ever do it.
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I'm not afraid to use my personal experiences and put them into a song. I think that's when you get the best stuff anyway, when it's real emotion.
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I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song.
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I don't wanna get into that space where a lot of guys now, their solo album is like eight or 10 songs with other people, you don't get an idea of who this guy is. I just wasn't interested in that.
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I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.
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The 'Downward Spiral' album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then 'Hurt' was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.
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My hope is that 'Blk Girl Soldier' is a freedom song for black women today who are fighting the macro- and microaggressions of daily life in our city/country/world.
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'Despacito' was a song that, from the time I started writing it, I felt that its hook was really catchy and powerful but at the same time very simple.
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I'm not that type of musician where I can sit down at the piano and work out a song; I actually really enjoy that process of sitting with somebody and having nothing and then suddenly something starts appearing. You struggle with it, and then suddenly a song starts to appear. Then, you've got to try and muscle it - there's that word again - into something and you do. You tussle with it and play with it and roll around with it and suddenly, magically, something appears.
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For me, a perfect pop song is something like 'This Year,' by the Mountain Goats.
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I definitely like the oddballs. There's a song called 'Little Thing,' which is the only song that I have recorded that has no words. And it's the one that I get past my critic inside me.
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Love Me Do, the first song we recorded, John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead because they wanted John to play harmonica.
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I don't know if a song is going to be a hit or it's going to flop. I never know. I just do the music and if people like it, they like it.
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I’ve protected it the Nirvana catalogue from everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials to movies about board games. We’ve been offered $6 million for 18 seconds of one Nirvana song and I turned it down.
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Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.
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There are so many things that can go wrong while performing. I've had violin strings break; I've had pants that were slowly falling down, and I'd have to pull them up in between every song; my hairpiece was falling out, so a big chunk of hair was just flapping around as I danced, and I've completely fallen on my butt.
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I use writing as a counselling session - recently I've written a song for Paloma Faith, so after being a singer, I'm happy to keep writing for other people.
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It wasn't until I wrote 'Hideaway' that I found the song I related to as an artist.
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I'd write songs like 'One Big Holiday,' and we'd play it and say, 'It's too heavy for 'At Dawn.' Let's save it for the next one.' We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half.
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I'm definitely not a song-and-dance guy, and if you've ever heard me sing, you would understand that, 'No, maybe that's not your thing.'
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I just want to unify people. A crowd full of people singing one song... that doesn't derive from anything dishonest... It's someone's truth.
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Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!
