I usually enter the studio with a mix of songs that I've been listening to that are relevant to the sound I want to achieve.
When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself.
Even if I don't release it myself, somebody else might hear it and want to record it. When you write a song, it gives it that potential.
After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes.
I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it.
As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.
It always disappoints me when I go to a concert and they don't play my favorite song, or at least one of their biggest hits.
Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.
You can keep rummaging around until you find a song you like, but you can't predict whether it'll hit or not.
Surprise, surprise! I have a band! I'm really excited that we have a song on the soundtrack of 'American Reunion' for that very reason.
They can sonically sound like me, but nobody's ever gonna be able to write songs like T-Pain. There's only one of those.
It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.
Every single one of the guys that I've written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans.
I wish I was more of a song-and-dance girl. I sang in a show once. I wish I could be in 'Hair.'
These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable.
I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.
At first, being a storyteller, it was fun to dress up and fun to sing songs and pretend to be very dramatic - all of that stuff was just fun early on.
I started crying, because there's nothing like hearing that the artist who originally did the song likes your version.
Out of all the R&B artists that have come out, I think my name has been used most in hip-hop songs.
