Song Quotes
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In Hungary all native music, in its origin, is divided naturally into melody destined for song or melody for the dance.
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There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It's like the song "Amazing Grace": I was blind and now I see.
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An important meeting point for me was realizing the similarity between a DJ set and a Grateful Dead set: I grew up listening to how the Dead would take a song and just jam on it, and then transition into another song.
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All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.
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People don't always realize that as a performer, you've got to relive those moments. Memories crash through your brains, and you've got to think about your past and the reason why you wrote the song. All that emotion comes back.
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There's just a few people that call themselves stars can actually sit down with a guitar and sing you a song.
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I was in a movie with Angelina Jolie called 'Life Or Something Like It' where I played her fiance, and I have a song in there.
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Most of my inspiration comes from mistakes, so every time I make a massive mistake, that usually affects me so much that I have to process that via song.
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I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking "Uptown Girl!" I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called "Ragdoll," which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.
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Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.
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Not a lot of people know I wrote the lyrics for the Arsenal club song, 'Good Old Arsenal'. We had a competition on ITV for it, and none of the entries were any good, so I approached their manager, Bertie Mee, and asked him if he would let me have a stab. He did, and within a few weeks they were singing it at Wembley on the way to the 1971 double.
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Sometimes the teacher would tell me that if you're singing a love song and you just don't feel it with a person or something you've experienced, just think of a dog or cat that you love.
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I never try and force-feed any song idea or lyrical message. It's really what's on my mind and what comes out of me. And a lot of these lyrics are metaphors for specific life situations that I've been through, and in most cases, the struggles. Something about human beings wearing sadness heavily on their sleeve inspires me to make something uplifting about the situation.
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I'll be, like, grocery shopping or doing something totally mundane, and once a day, you'll hear a Cyndi Lauper song on the radio. It is astounding what an icon she is, not just in popular music but in popular culture.
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Both this song ['Black Skinhead'], 'I Am a God' and this song were made after Hedi Slimane didn't let me into his first Saint Laurent show.
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No one who likes a song lacks congeniality.
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It's pretty cool that artists like Flo Rida and Bingo Players can be inspired to interpret a song like 'Piano in the Dark' in completely new genres. As an artist and writer, it's the highest compliment we can be paid.
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'Storm' was the first song I did as a member of YG. The record gave me a lot of pressure. I didn't think I was prepared at the time.
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Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution.
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There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - 'Swan Song' is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.
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That song didn't just happen. It grew out of my experiences. 'American Pie' was part of my process of self-awakening: a mystical trip into my past.
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If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.
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Records are one thing, and obviously, without hit songs, you don't have the opportunity to do your shows. But my live show has always been my selling tool.
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The older I get, the more I think it's this listening. You listen for it, and you have a bit of patience. And it'll come until it sounds - to me, the best songs I've written, I think, are ones that I can't hear anything - any of myself in it. It sounds like a cover song, like somebody else's song - really something you've stolen wholesale off a radio that you've listened to in someone else's flat.
