I write my songs many times to chord progressions on a piano. Unfortunately, I can't keep playing the piano, so I just record it into the software.
I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing.
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
If it can affect me, if it has meaning to me, if I feel I can do it well, I will do it and record it and thats why I recorded these songs.
Producers like to record all the drums first, then they do the bass, then all the guitars, so you're constantly moving from one song to another.
Nobody can tell you you're wrong for writing a song about how you feel - even if you don't really feel that way.
I had been writing songs for other people for a while, and I made a demo and I put it on my Myspace, which Perez Hilton found and blogged about on his site.
You never know until a song comes out and becomes what it becomes, obviously you can't predict how the masses will react.
I cannot give up chasing after happiness simply because there might be pain down the road.
Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.
I kind of feel like I didn't have much choice. The songs... the playing... those were the only things that ever really kept my attention.
Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.
The problem is I'm a perfectionist, so the producer might say he's happy with my vocal take but I'll say, 'No, it can be better.' I'll do it again and again until I feel I've got the truth out of a song.
You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.
You know when a song has a melody or some kind of element that affects you, and that is what I am trying to go for.
Obviously the biggest change is that it's me by myself. When you don't have another band interpreting your songs or playing them the way that they have, it's bound to sound different.
Basically, any time you have a real life experience, that can be a song. Because no matter how crazy or weird you are, somebody's had an experience just like you, somewhere.
I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.
In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.
We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.
I've been writing a lot about my encounter with love. Which is the white stag as far as songwriting is concerned because love songs are so banal, and my experience with love is anything but that.
