My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.
As a singer-songwriter, a solo artist with a guitar, I can only write so many weepie little bedroom songs.
The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary.
I'm a singer-songwriter. So I play guitar, and I sing. Along the lines of, I guess you could call it, alternative rock.
A lot of what has pushed me forward is desire, and I have expressed that in my songwriting - perhaps because it's safer!
I never judge my own songwriting. It's just my heart. What's there to judge about your own heart?
One of the most frustrating parts about songwriting for me is production, but it makes me want to get better at it and ends up being one of the most rewarding parts of it.
I always did go against the singer-songwriter form. I think I've always had a lot of storytelling songs.
Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.
My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.
The guitar influence that affected my songwriting came from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively - and there were a lot of choices - writing songs was king.
Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers.
I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around.
As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!
As a songwriter or artist, there's only so many ways you can say, 'I love you' or 'I think you're beautiful.'
I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.
Someone like Katy Perry - I like her writing because I listen to music as a songwriter. I like a lot of her songs - like, 'Firework' is a song that I think I could write.
It's much easier to work on other people's music and play in other people's bands as a guitar player instead of being the main songwriter and singer. That's a really big job to do that.
My parents were both very musically inclined, they were both songwriters and musicians, so we grew up in the house singing music together, and R&B had a huge strong arm in the foundation of my career.
