'Tis easy enough to be pleasant, When life flows along like a song; But the man worth while is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong.
With 'Sherry,' we were looking for a sound. We wanted to make the kind of mark that, if the radio was playing one of our songs, you knew who it was immediately. But I didn't want to sing like that my whole life.
My grand plan is that I can master having a better life by making sure I have a regular flow of songs. Then I can give myself time to tour or celebrate or write a film score.
You have moments of grief in life, and if you can put pen to paper and capture that, that's something wonderful. I can revisit actual songs about past deaths, and I know that emotion is as true now as it was then.
You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.
Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.
In the course of my life, I've made some happy songs but it's the more sort of like pathos-laden, emotional, melancholic music that either I make or that other people make that really resonates with me.
But at this phase of my life, I want to write and not have to think about whether a song is going to be a hit. I want to explore the music that inspires me, and I don't want to ape myself.
For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.
For me, the most difficult thing is that I am learning melodies on guitar from some songs whose melodies were not meant to be played on guitar. Ever. They were intended mostly for keyboards or melodic percussion.
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, 'cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else's songs.
My songs are always about overcoming things, whether it's breaking up with a guy or just trying to be happy. They're always about being better.
There's a bootleg album that was recorded when I was 14 or 15, a compilation of things live at different clubs. Songs like Girl from Ipanema and Cry Me A River. I don't know what the title of it is.
There were songs I would write about breaking up with somebody before I broke up with them, months and months before I broke up with them.
When I go to shows, I'm really looking forward to hearing the songs I know. I don't like it when a band tries to expose me to new stuff.
Every time I listen to this song, its like I regain my soul. its a hurtful joy far deep in my heart.
Ozzy wanted to get us back together. It's been 20 years. We did a couple of songs during his farewell in 1992 and that got the ball rolling.
The hits always wind up being the songs with big, high choruses. They're the ones too high to sing every night - not that you'll ever, ever hear me complain about having to try.
But I still feel like a normal person... I've walked the streets and I know what it feels like. I speak with humility, and apparently those songs connect with people.
