Song Quotes
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'MMMBop' took about a year to actually get completed. The chorus idea had really been around for a long time, and then we built the song around it.
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This is what I wanted to do from the very beginning: write songs and make records and tour them with a good live band.
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Most Radiohead songs are actually REM songs, I just have a mentally ill child read the lyrics aloud and then I change the melodies a bit.
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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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Image is everything, and the voice or the idea or the song is hardly anything at all. Half the time the person isn't even doing the singing. I'm a bit cynical about this [music] business.
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I love playing the new songs live. I hate playing a new song and then having to play an old song again, it feels really boring.
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I think the simple message of that song is what attracted me to 'Every Day.' It's one of those simple yet profound lyrics.
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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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The fact that I have a lot of songs written doesn't keep me from wanting to write new ones, or new ones from coming.
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I love countermelodies, I love hooks and melodies that stick in your head. If I could put 20 melodies in a song and they would all work together, I would.
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There's no such thing as standing still and just singing a song. I love jumping into the crowd. I love to dance.
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My mother had a great vinyl collection, and she was constantly playing female singer-songwriters. I first learned about classic song structures by listening to them, and Laura Nyro particularly stood out. Her voice was outside what you'd usually hear on the radio; that really appealed to me.
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I don't concentrate on technical things like where a microphone is placed and things like that. As a producer, I try to keep the initial feeling from when I first heard a song and make sure we do what were initially aiming for.
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The people who talk on the edgier 'Song Exploder' have often made their entire record on their desktop. It's never been easier to compete, but it's never been harder to win, either.
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I guess I don't really know any other way to do it, it just feels like the natural way to do things for me. Like - if I'm writing a song - it has to have some sort of value. Or it only has some kind of value to me, if it's something really personal. It has to mean something to me. I guess it is a little uncomfortable, or it's a little embarrassing sometimes, to know that stuff that honest is out there. But, when I hand off the thing, when it's totally done and mastered and sent, I kinda feel like it doesn't belong to me anymore.
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My own personal favorite Cher song is the unforgettable Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.
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I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party.
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I feel like I have some stuff that matches 'Fight Song,' not in necessarily the message exactly but in the emotion and honesty.
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I wanted to try to make songs that worked as songs, not just as productions. People wanted me to do a solo acoustic session, they were like "Can you play song on the piano?" and I was like "Not really. It doesn't really work." I wanted to write songs that would work in a variation of instrumentation.
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The song is based on a lot of observation and a lot of speculation. But in sort of a pointed way its kind of about Madonna...I think it was a particular time where I was being bombarded with her image on TV and in magazines and her whole schtick kind of speaks to me in that way...like she's going through some sort of problem. It seems she's getting a bit desperate.
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I was married at the time when I first joined the band and my wife said: 'Why don't you write a song about me ?' So I wrote 'She's got balls'. Then she divorced me.
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The successful artists are completely narcissistic and self-referential. Every song is about them. They talk about themselves. They talk about what they have. They talk about what they're going to do to somebody else. They talk about what they're going to get.
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I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.
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When you are writing a song for something else, if you are doing something for money, I always think that's bad luck.
