The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.
Some of those songs, you really have to bite them. You challenge yourself, you challenge the audience, you do something different. People weren't expecting it.
To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn't have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.
My upbringing has always been quite equal in terms of cultural influences. But it's unlikely that anything could prepare you for a job that involves belting out Proclaimers songs on camera, in Edinburgh and in public.
There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage.
I was doing theater in my high school, and I started writing sort of silly songs on the piano backstage in summer theater. I eventually put them online and started getting this little following.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy.
We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.
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.
Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.
I'm not going to be rockin' n' rollin' when I'm 50 years old. But you can be in your prime on television, compose songs, or write a Broadway play when you're 50.
We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think.
Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.
We toyed with the idea of making it a double album, but I think that would only have confused everybody even more, so we decided to stick with the songs we picked.
Girls always want a reason to get crazy. I get the feeling that girls are crazy anyway, so they just want a reason to really get wild. Why not let it be to a Tyga song?
I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.
Snow is diamonds for a faery's feet; Blithely and bonnily she trips along, Her lips a-carol with a merry song, And in her eyes the meaning... Life is sweet!
When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.
I hate being manipulated by song. Don't tell me what I should be feeling. I don't want cellos or violins to be telling me that I should be bawling right now.
I met PJ Harvey when I was in England, and the first thing I want to do when I meet a songwriter I admire is to ask them how do they receive songs.
If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.
