Everyone writes in whatever way feels comfortable to them. People write songs because maybe they don't feel so comfortable talking about whatever matters.
Some people might go to the gym and swim laps, but I write songs. Every single day, I write something new and record it.
The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.
You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'
When I write songs, I like to write lyrics first, and I think that's different from a lot of singer-songwriters. But I heard Sammy Cahn was asked what comes first, the lyrics or the music, and he said, 'The paycheck.'
Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.
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.
I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.
I always think that you should be striving to write your best song.
I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.
Sometimes, but the year I lived in France I started to write songs.
There is nothing else to do in Nashville except for write songs.
I'm enjoying writing songs that are more stripped back.
I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.
I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.
Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction...
A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape rec...
Because my musical background is so diverse, it lends me to have very much my own style and it helps me to relate to the music as I'm going to play it. I just write. And if it comes out country, it's a country song. The funny thing is, I write all ac...
When I was first writing, I was writing mostly about sporting events, which was really what my assignments were. I was working on the Tour de France bike race and the Barcelona Olympic Games, and those songs tend to be very big, very bombastic-type m...
I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and ever...
