I don't like guitar solos that are like, 'Look at me, look at me!' I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.
You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.
I'd like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!
I've been writing songs since I was a little boy. You know, I think I wrote my first song when I was 11.
It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.
For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.
I've always been able to get inside a song really easily, and if it's my song, I can make it seem honest.
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.
When I turned 19 I kinda realized that I needed to write my own songs instead of singing songs written by other people.
Five or six songs leaked from the original version of 'Encore.' So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.
I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.
You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.
This is the bunch of songs I did first, and it's just the type of thing I do. I am a Carter Family girl, so the record is book-ended with Carter Family songs.
That's why these songs have lasted as long as they have because they're just about feelings that don't change. They are love songs, they are not specific, those kinds of feelings don't change.
When I go to a gig and I hear a song that I really like, a song that hits home to me or hits an emotional nerve, if I could ever recreate that for someone, that would be the ultimate goal.
Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.
This is my seventh decade... and every once in a while I get a hankering to re-visit these songs again... songs with which I have had a great relationship.
I grew up listening to all kinds of music, everything from country to rock, pop, R&B and even rap, so for me, music is music and a great song is a great song.
