The opportunity to record the song came when Phil Collins' record label, Atlantic, was doing a tribute album to him and they asked all these different artists to do renditions of his songs.
If Paul McCartney tells me that so-and-so song is his favorite song, what do I care? What do I care what anybody else says?
Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.
The album is a definite departure. I haven't written original material before, except for one song on my first album, but Elvis and I did six songs together on this one.
I definitely like the oddballs. There's a song called 'Little Thing,' which is the only song that I have recorded that has no words. And it's the one that I get past my critic inside me.
Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.
If you put all the songs together that I've written on band records, and put it up next to my solo record, there's definitely a different kind of feel than Billy's songs.
You can get too bogged down in technology and you can sort of forget what it is you were trying to do. And with the Pet Shop Boys it's primarily about the songs, it's about song writing.
When a song blows your mind the first time you hear it, you don't know where it's going. It's blowing your mind as it's unfolding. Then there's that sensation that you're actually going to remember the song.
Sometimes I get in writing moods and I want to write a song every couple of days. Then sometimes I may not write a song for three weeks. It's just according to how it's hitting me at the time.
I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.
You're not going to hear me do a rap song, you're not going to hear me do a jazz song. We have to be true to our roots, do what we do, and try to do it a little better each time.
I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.
I was brought up in many different cultures, moving around all the time, and I find my identity in my songs. I project the identity I want to have throughout the songs that I write.
When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.
I've written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.
Lines on screen: They say it's the last song. They don't know us, you see. It's only the last song if we let it be.
Selma: [singing] This isn't the last song, there's no violin, the choir is quiet, and no one takes a spin, this is the next to last song, and that's all...
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that's always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature.
I was clear that I wanted to do music and I wanted to write songs. But I wasn't clear about how I was going to make that happen. I wrote loads of songs but didn't want to show them to anyone.
