When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.
Sometimes I would write something that was so private, people would say, 'Make it more universal.' I never liked that idea. I always thought the more personal a song was, the more people would want to hear it.
On the other hand when you are someone who records their own songs you are basically stuck writing for one voice and for one style that can stifle you a bit. It's a real trade off.
I record stuff all the time, like little vocal things. I write random things down... Sometimes I just get things stuck in my head and I record them, and that actually becomes a song quite a lot of the time.
I have been around for a long, long time. I didn't make it 'til I was older. I went through the period when women were not getting signed, particularly if you were writing songs that were lyrically propelled.
Christian: Then I'll write a song and we'll put it in the show and whenever you sing it or hear it. Or whistle or hum it then you'll know. It'll mean that we love one another.
It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.
I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.
Everyone in Tool is interested in how we present our music. We write a group of songs that have a vibe, energy and feeling, and then we try to pick an image to capture that and communicate a feeling. We want something that adds to the connection with...
When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.
Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.
I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is ...
The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts ha...
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.
It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.
Yeah, I came in at the end of the Notorious album, played on about five tracks and then we went on a tour. Then we did another album, Big Thing, and then we started writing songs together in 1989.
Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that.
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.
Singing didn't really come naturally to me, I don't think. I had to really work at it. I just kept singing. I never was really worried about it, though, because I was writing songs, and that was the most important thing to me.
But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.
