I connect emotionally to these songs. I mean what I say when I say it, and that allows your audience to connect. That's the number-one reason why any music is successful, because you make people feel something.
I'm someone that examines culture and tries to break down why things are the way that they are whether its hip-hop music, sex, race, or consumerism. I try to examine it and scrutinize it to the point where I can write a song.
I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.
When I write songs, it's very random. I get influenced by the most random things! Sometimes it just comes to me in my sleep or just hanging out in a restaurant or something. Music just comes to me, and I'll start writing from there.
My talent is definitely a gift. I don't understand where it comes from. I don't play an instrument, and I never went to school for music production, but I know exactly how a song should sound and how to give an artist direction.
Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming... So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it.
I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.
What I don't like to hear in music is something has not been thought through: that a sound is just there randomly. I want to make sure that every single little noise that's in my song is there because it's supposed to be there.
I remember those days right after I graduated from college. All I had to do was wake up in the morning and think about writing songs. It's not like that anymore, needless to say.
There's a whole lot of songs that men just can't do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.
It wouldn't be a Carrie Underwood album without a revenge song on it. People really like when I do that. I don't mean to. I don't hate men that much. But it turns out so well!
I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.
I met the Colonel when Elvis was recording some song I'd written for one of his movies. Elvis was just having fun with the gang and all the Memphis boys and Colonel Parker was sitting over here in like a theater seat.
I loved old black and white movies, especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them - the songs, the music, the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world.
I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.
For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.
Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.
It's a big flash of all these things and whatever you take out of that statement's one statement, one mind, one statement, one act, one show, and all the songs are one.
I wouldn't be able to write a song like 'Someone Like You' and get someone else to sing it because it's so personal. It's like giving away your heart.
If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.
I want to make an album my grandma and my fans are going to like. I want to make my grandma understand a drop and make club fans understand a song.
