I probably spent more time listening to albums than writing songs. But I think that gave me all the tricks in terms of wordplay, from how I pronounced my words to the actual delivery.
Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.
You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.
We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent.
Writing songs for other people was never the goal for me.
I've been writing songs on little pieces of paper since I was a little kid, and it's just always been something I've done.
I feel like writing songs is cheating on acting. It's weird.
It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle.
I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there's a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.
I realized that I started writing songs to make people feel how I felt, rather than just making them feel something. That's not the way I should do things.
Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.
I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds.
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.
I don't want to be known for anything other than writing songs.
I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them.
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.
When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I'd write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I'd sit there writing songs with my guitar.
There's hundreds of different ways of writing songs.
I'm writing songs that connect to millions of people. And that happens for a reason. I don't really worry too much about people who aren't into it because that's the beauty of music. It's subjective. If every single person in the world loved our music, then that'd be weird.
Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.
I like writing songs. I like the camarderie of the and. I like touring. I love playing bass. And then there's free beer.
Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.
I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.
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