The songs were really complicated. I used to meet people in bar bands who were trying to play our songs and they were really struggling with it. Technically it was really difficult stuff.
Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.
The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.
Once I'd chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it's a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions.
If I'm focusing on playing and enjoying the song, then it always goes well. I get lost in the song, and the performance is so much better. If the focus becomes not making a mistake, then it just feels rigid to me.
Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records.
On every album I've put out, I've put diverse Canadian songs on it. They're not provincial album; my albums are national albums. There'll be a song about Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Nova Scotia on there.
There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.
I've learned this, that haters wanna hate. You could sing a song perfectly, you could write the songs perfectly, and some people are absolutely going to hate you.
I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.
I'm sure that the meaning of the songs that I've written will change for me over the years, the same way that I can't even say what inspired some of the songs that I've been singing for a long time anymore.
Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
I understand it's my role to realize people's dreams. I'm O.K. with that so long as my songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.
I like clever songs. I like songs that make people think and I try to have substance in all my records, even with 'Sweet Dreams' how it was a club record and it was up tempo, but it was melodic and it was, like, lyrical.
That's one of my problems is that there are so many songs to sing that I sort of get indecisive about what I want to do in a show - because there are so many possibilities! There are so many great songs out there.
I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we'd go for another two or three months and there weren't great songs.
It's great when you can write a meaningful song that touches people, but sometimes you just wanna have fun and sing a silly song that doesn't reflect on you as a person.
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.
If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful.
