On every album I've put out, I've put diverse Canadian songs on it. They're not provincial album; my albums are national albums. There'll be a song about Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Nova Scotia on there.
I'm sure that the meaning of the songs that I've written will change for me over the years, the same way that I can't even say what inspired some of the songs that I've been singing for a long time anymore.
Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.
I understand it's my role to realize people's dreams. I'm O.K. with that so long as my songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.
I like clever songs. I like songs that make people think and I try to have substance in all my records, even with 'Sweet Dreams' how it was a club record and it was up tempo, but it was melodic and it was, like, lyrical.
That's one of my problems is that there are so many songs to sing that I sort of get indecisive about what I want to do in a show - because there are so many possibilities! There are so many great songs out there.
I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we'd go for another two or three months and there weren't great songs.
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
Even Crazy Horses is a good song, by the Osmonds. I've known many bands who have covered that. It's just a great song. I bought it in a brown, paper bag because I didn't want anyone to know I had it.
I have definitely written a happy song about someone and then we ended up splitting up, but you have to put those kind of things to the back of your mind and tell yourself that it's a good song and it works on the album.
For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.
I don't just want to sing about simplistic things all the time. It's good to have a mix of songs that have a real depth, and that provoke and challenge people, and then songs that are fun and people can enjoy.
One of my side strange abilities is to hear a good song, no matter how it's being performed. Even if you get a bad performance, I can still hear that there's a good song.
I think I always had a musicality, and I think I could tell a good song from a bad song. And I would appreciate hearing something that was new to me.
I am never excited to play through a song all the way, because it can reveal more flaws that mean more work. For some reason, I always have an irrational fear that the song will never be finished.
It's so funny because I listen to songs that I recorded that I didn't really know anything about at the time. Later on I'm starting to feel the songs. Sing them first, feel them later.
I think people should be able to have at their behest, like, four hours of music, entertainment, visual knowledge, different pathways. That's what I'm trying to do with modern technology, not just another song and another song.
I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.
Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.
