There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion.
My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.
I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.
I will play around with an idea for a very long time until it's found it's feet and it's good enough to become a song.
Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I've already done. The more I've done, the more that's likely to happen. Then I just throw it away. I wait until I've got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace. But it's the only way I can really work.
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.
As an artist, you can always learn different ways to refine your look. I mean, you look at any one time in my career and you see all the hairstyles I went through. You make changes until something feels comfortable with you. And people vibe with it because they can see the difference.
I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.
'Deadpool' feels like it exploded out of nowhere, but it was a ten-year development process on that movie. I think it was honed over those ten years.
There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.
Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless
As an artist, the more experience, the better the creation. I'm a very positive person.
My only verse I remember really working on was 'Mixtape,' and I took 45 minutes on that because I wanted it to be tight.
I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.
I am not concerned with simply surviving. I am very concerned about improving. I start each day by examining yesterday's work and looking for areas where I can improve. I am always trying to draw the characters better, and trying to design each panel somewhat in the manner a painter would treat his canvas.
I think you can refine what you do, and become more consistent. And you write better songs that have a better shape and a better feeling. You evolve into and out of things, and go through stages, but, ultimately, you do improve.
I be on some, perfecting my craft, just making sure the music is all the way there.
Romantic art is always stylized: the better the art, the cleaner and more attractive and intelligent the stylization.
You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.
I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.
