It's such a weird process, songwriting, because you just have to feel it. There's no right or wrong melody or lyric.
Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.
I have been working and composing music since 1986. Over the years, I have seen our music industry go through all kinds of transformation.
I don't think I'm a good-enough songwriter.
I've never loved composing, because I feel like other people do it better.
I get my most creative sort of energy after a show. So I love to go back to the hotel and compose new material. Generally in a rush, exactly. I have to get it out somehow, otherwise I can't sleep, you know.
If I write for myself, I write a song and I bring in the musicians that are best suited to play it. There's a freedom there.
Writing 'Monitor Mix' was a very edifying and inspiring few years.
For me, it's always an organic process. I don't personally reach out to artists without the music being created first.
When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.
I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.
It takes a lot of emotional high and struggles to write songs.
Songwriting isn't a choice. You're either called upon to bear the burden, or you're not. It's not all fun and games.
I've always had something turning in my brain. And it got to a point where I felt it was stupid to let some of the tunes die. So I began putting them down on paper.
The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.
I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.
I feel, as a songwriter, it's one of the hardest things to do - to sit down and say how you feel.
Composing is just another exciting thing. It's as exciting as being in a band. It's kind of like joining a new band for three months.
The model of a composer.
But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics.
Certainly in the case of having to answer questions about where a song comes from, it's a hell of a lot easier when you say, 'I've removed myself from it.' But they start from quite a personal place. They always do.
A lot of times when I'm performing a song, it tends to take me back to where I was psychologically as the lyric was being written.
Ever since Two Daughters I've been composing my own music.
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
I can't play an instrument to save my life. But when I'm creating, and when I'm making music, I feel like I'm the head of the orchestra, and I'm just waving my wand, and something is created.
