I write by myself and then deliver the song. Everybody knows, 'Leave Ester alone when she's in her zone.' Give me a studio and the tracks, and I'll call you when the doctor is done.
When I'm sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.
'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.
When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.
That song is a story that shows how easily you could get slipped into being labeled as the bad guy, even though what you really trying to do is tell the bad guy to leave you alone.
I have those songs as well. It depends on what I'm going through in my life but I'm a huge fan of Bjork. Sometimes I get so emotional because she's so amazing.
Dance music cannot compete with a really great rock n' roll song. There ain't no DJ that's gonna play something that can take 'Mr Brightside' or 'Don't Look Back In Anger.'
My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I've had. And now that I'm in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won't be half as much anger as there was.
I do like to write nasty songs. It's a useful weapon to have, and it's cathartic as well, because I create art out of anger, something positive out of something negative.
But then when he left, I realized that it was harder to write songs and feel spiritually connected to art and music as a band. When he came back I felt it again, instantaneously.
But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that.
I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'
I'd much rather be worrying about playing that note in tune, and picking out the best way to arrange the song, rather than thinking about pricing for the download. It's not art.
We can't forget what happened on May 4th, 1970, when four students gave up their lives because they had the American constitutional right of peaceful protest. They gave up their lives. And to sing that song in that spot on that anniversary was very e...
I heard a song I hate and I thought of her. Ah, such is love.
It was a little difficult to take him seriously when he sang along to a song about a woman taking another woman's man.
...and - holy shit was this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds.
I felt drunk on Chase and high on summertime. Why did that sound just like a country song?
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back." -Plato
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
