Song Quotes
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Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.
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For me, it's always been about a mix of hip-hop, acoustic singer/songwriters, and piano rock. I pull all those together. Each song may lean more heavily on one than the other, but they all have all three pieces.
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The theme song of 'Doug' was my ringtone once for literally a year.
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Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it.
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But we used to go to flea markets and things, and look for old 78 records that had silly song titles.
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A great pop song should be felt when you hear it.
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Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.
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There's a lot of instant spotlight and pressure when it comes to a Bond song.
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When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.
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Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling.
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There's a lot of rage you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.
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Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.
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Chad brings the bulk of the ideas to the table, and we all polish and rework the ideas he comes up with. He's such an accomplished songwriter. He wrote a song for ('American Idol' runner-up) Bo Bice, Enrique Iglesias - he's got that ear to be a musical chameleon and get into the zone of an artist. And he can't help but write a song you can hum along to. And that voice, you know it when you hear it.
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To be fair, I did come out of nowhere. 'Ghost' was the first song I ever did in a studio, my first time ever cutting a professional vocal.
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I think the song itself, 'Smoke and Fire,' is just a metaphor for the feelings that you feel in a relationship.
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I think I'm alright as a lyricist, you know? But then what will happen every couple of months or so is that I'll hear a song I've never heard before and feel I've gone right back to square one.
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My feeling is that, and I've been writing about my family over the years, although it might make them feel uncomfortable, people generally like to be written about. If I've written a song about the family, they enjoy being mentioned in the songs. Nobody's confronted me and said 'don't write any songs about me.
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I like people that can strap on a guitar and don't sweat the fact that you have to come up with a song in an hour. I want to work with someone who won't feel like they have to play along with Jason Molina. I want them to just have the confidence.
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I turned on 'One Tree Hill,' heard the opening song, and went, 'I got to know whose voice that is.'
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I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.
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When you step out and do a song in a musical, the easier thing to do is make it funny. But when those transitions become necessary, when they aren't camp, that, to me, is magic. I've done musical comedies and enjoyed them, but subject matter that's deeper and more realistic is always what's appealed to me most.
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But once you've made a song and you put it out there, you don't own it anymore. The public own it. It's their song. It might be their song that they wake up to, or their song they have a shower to, or their song that they drive home to or their song they cry to, scream to, have babies to, have weddings to - like, it isn't your song anymore.
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See, I'm not the type of writer that has 400 songs in a suitcase someplace on the shelf. I'm sort of a rise-to-the-occasion-type of writer, so when I know I'm going to record, I get in the mood to write.
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When a song comes to you, you can't run around it.
