Authentic Songwriting Quotes

One of the most important things to me as a songwriter is to make music that's young and fresh but also soulful and real. I want people to feel like they know me once they listen to my songs.

Too many times you come across lyrics that sound like you've heard them before or you can't really relate to them. And I think that I write songs that sound fresh and sensual in kind of a layered, lush way. But I also think that they are real, and that's why I wanted to call the record 'Inside Out.'

All those songs are totally timeless. They'll always stand up because they came from a real place. They weren't crafted songs. They were written from the heart.

Music is emotional. Your job is to make people feel something. The best way to do that is to sing and speak from something they've personally been through. That's where I write from.

I feel like people are now praying for some authenticity and some human touch to music. There's no simpler outlet to that than guitar and piano.

I think I have a vested interest in thinking that the lyrics are important, but I think for us it's important that we all write things that mean something to us, and I think we're not really in the business of writing la-la-love-you chart pop songs. It needs to have a personal pulling in the gut for me, to want to write anything about it.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"

I love music that has good catchy choruses and fits into many different genres. ... I like real artists, that write their own material and are great performers.