Engineering and mixing are absolutely key. Once a song is done, for me personally, it's usually two or three days to get the mix down.
I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.
There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.
Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.
...I long to be known as an extravagant worshiper...that God would discover the song in my heart to be elaborate, overgenerous, and wasteful in my pursuit of Him.
I think some people found the production took away from the actual songs, which I can understand.
But when it came to jamming and writing songs like we used to, we realized Brandon was a huge spirit in the band. Who knew? It was just something we had to learn.
I may sing the same songs for over 40 years now but I always sing them in different ways in order to keep the excitement and passion alive.
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Every song is like a kid. How can you have that many kids and have a favorite? Which one do I like to hang most with?
Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't.
The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.
The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention.
As long as the songs are strong, I think you can express yourself in any style and have it be soulful and have it be your own voice.
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
I definitely get nervous about if I'm going to forget the words to the songs or something. And I don't enjoy being the center of attention for an hour straight - I think that's really stressful.
Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.
U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.
I learned to embrace my individuality, and if that meant writing a song on one chord over and over again, then that's what I do.
