I wrote 'Actor' all on the computer. I didn't touch any instruments until I was in the studio. So while I had all these ornate arrangements, I didn't have any songs.
A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.
I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band.
My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between.
In life, you will find two things. The quiet beauty of Darkness, and the bright songs of Light. The choice is yours to decide which will be you, and which will be your shadow.
Singing and being truthful to a song... I've developed that skill, and I know how to do that real instinctively, that's all I've been doing for the last 25 years.
I base my track-listing and what songs I pick by what my fans expect from me and what they want and what I think they want.
It's hard to write new stuff when the songs you have written before are still changing and evolving. It would be like building something when the foundations there are not really solid.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
With anything I do, it's hard to categorize it. With any project, I just go in and blindly start writing songs and then find out which way we want to go with it.
I think I subconsciously put myself in these situations where the girlfriend isn't pleased with me. I'm useless as a boyfriend. That's how I managed to write all these songs.
One Long Year was just a song here and there, and it was meant to reflect the mood that I was in but unfortunately it also reflected too little of any particular thing rather than hanging together as a whole album.
I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
I think the reason I was 23 before I ever wrote a song was that I was afraid of testing myself. What would I do if I discovered I didn't have anything to say?
I can say I'd honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I've written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.
I get so excited when a song I wrote that's very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.
Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.
Okay, so he wasn't dreaming anymore, but did this fall into same song second verse? He would just have to play this out and see what happened.
People weren't even aware that I wrote my own songs. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist.
Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.
