Song Quotes
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'Night Shift' is the only breakup song I've ever written.
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'Bruce Lee' is the fastest film in my career. But the quality is also very high. The last song was shot continuously for 24 hours. We worked like robots for that song, but the quality is outstanding.
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There was a film called 'FM,' and we were asked to do the title song. And I said, 'Does it have to have any specific words?' And they said, 'No, it just has to be about FM radio.' It took a day or two to write.
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Does it bother me that some people are burning their own System CDs and taking money out of my pocket? Not really. This has always been about putting the best possible version of the song in the fans hands. It was like selling an artist's painting before he had finished it.
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I got a little bit lost in the writing process: like, that moment in the 'Fight Song' music video where I'm throwing the crumpled paper on the bed, that was really true life. I was filling journals with different possibilities of lyrics for the first verse. And none of them felt right.
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I was having a conversation with my father and he was talking about this thing - strangeness and charm. It's actually the name of the two smallest particles that there are when you split the atom, so I wrote a song around it. I even managed to fit the word 'hydrogen' in there. Isn't that a nice thing for scientists to call them though?
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I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.
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The only one I really like is a song called Saccharine.
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...And it was about four or five hours later that Alice - Remember Alice? It's a song about Alice.
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I'm a professional songwriter - personal attitudes have nothing to do with writing a song.
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If I write when I'm low, it will be a dark song, but I don't care. I want to be honest with myself at all times.
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All I've got on my iPod is every single Queen song and every single Judas Priest song. Queen were an incredible heavy metal band. I saw them on their first ever tour, at Birmingham Town Hall. They just blew me away.
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Words are charms. It's like a song you didn't even know you knew.
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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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If someone wants to say 'I love you' in a straight play, they say it, and then it's the other person's turn to talk. But in a song, you can sing about it for another three minutes. The musical form has that unique opportunity to express at length what joy really feels like.
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If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced.
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When I go into a room to write, it's like I'm not trying to say, 'I need to write a song that sounds like Eric Church or Jason Aldean.' I just try to get the best song that's in the room that day. Whatever style or sound that may be, I'm not afraid to attack it at that angle.
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We've gone further on this album, where we have a Big Band song, kind of a Sinatra-type song; we have a couple songs that have electronic music on them. We've got a couple rock songs, maybe a little heavier than what we've done. So the title 'Jekyll & Hyde' really covers the breadth of the record.
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The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album.
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'Fix' - definitely, when I first heard the demo of that song, it was kind of intimidating because of the high falsetto parts. It was one of those things. I got into the vocal booth and wasn't sure I could do it or how well I could do it. There was something about the song that I really took to.
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Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.
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I usually quite like women, but this advert makes me want to kill about 900 of them with my bare hands. It ends with the tiresome ladettes marching down a high street triumphantly singing the Here Come the Girls song out loud, like an invading squadron tormenting the natives with its war cry. Next year they'll probably be armed. Fear this.
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I could never be a country person, sitting around trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the middle of society, whether it's growing or crumbling.
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When I get all focused on songwriting, I get into all the marketing and promotion that we do to make it happen. Then the right song comes along and blows it all out of the water. The right song will do it for you every time.
