I got a call from my manager who told me Diplo was working on a country project. I put my vocal on the songwriting demo and my team sent the song to his team. Evidently they fell in love with it... and the rest is history.
I think the true test of a pop song, for me, and I've talked to a lot of other writers about this, is you take your demo, you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica, and that's the Hollywood car test.
I did a CD way back in 1989, but I never got it off the ground.
Later on, when I signed with Sony, we wanted to re-release 'Fade' as 'Faded' with a brand new mix and with vocals by Iselin Solheim. I think Iselin was the first person who sung demo vocals for 'Faded.' And it worked out great! The way I got in touch with Iselin was through a guy that I work with in the studio.
I had been writing songs for other people for a while, and I made a demo and I put it on my Myspace, which Perez Hilton found and blogged about on his site.
We always started these albums as making demos, that went right on until Scary Monsters.
I've written a lot of songs but I haven't had the opportunity to record a lot of them.
When I got my first email from a record label, I decided I didn't want to go in with just one song, so I sat down and kept on writing.
My first production job after M.I.A. was actually the xx, but they didn't like what I did, and at the end of the day, we used their demos.
Usually when we go in to cut demos, one of us will lay down some mumbling sort of stuff for the vocal melodies because the lyrics don't come until later.
Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, I was looking for work, and I happened to be invited to Ray's studio and sat in and played on a couple of his demos. I didn't charge him a dime for it. I was on cloud nine to be working in the same room as Ray Charles, one of my huge idols.
I knew I would always be an artist, but when you move to Nashville, this is a writer's town. I moved here to focus on that and started pitching demos and immediately was asked to be an artist.
'Fix' - definitely, when I first heard the demo of that song, it was kind of intimidating because of the high falsetto parts. It was one of those things. I got into the vocal booth and wasn't sure I could do it or how well I could do it. There was something about the song that I really took to.
I thought I was going to be a rapper as a kid and used to hop the train down to Jazzy Jeff's studio for, like, six months straight waiting outside of the studio for the big break, and one day we got in the studio and played our demo for Will and Jeff and quickly learned that we weren't that good.
It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.
We sent a guy called Terry Slater a couple of demos, using the last of our money. And then things turned. He landed us a deal with Warners and said just keep coming up with songs, because when success hits you, you won't even know your name.
I grew up doing musical theatre in Orlando, Florida. When I was 14, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time - a deliveryman heard me singing and offered to deliver my demo tape to Sony Music. I was just really lucky.
What happens with writing a song and demoing it, for me the demo always becomes the master.
I would love to make a bunch of country demos and write country songs for really great country singers.
When I write - I always write on my own - I demo those songs on a four-track.
It was 2002, we all got guitars for Christmas and started playing in my garage that summer, rehearsed there and in a warehouse for a bit for about a year. We did our first gig in June 2003 and we played a few gigs in and around Sheffield for a bit then started doing gigs outside of Sheffield about this time last year, recording demos while all this was going on.
When we first signed to Loud, we had a 20-song demo. So all of those songs we wanted to put on the album. But we started making new ones, and through process of elimination, we wanted all the new ones. We didn't like the old ones no more.
At that time, I was signed to Columbia Records as an Independent Producer. I spent many weeks forming, auditioning, rehearsing and recording demos for Kenny, who was finally signed to Columbia Records.
Our demo tape we got signed on was composed of three songs, 'Wham Rap,' half of 'Club Tropicana' and a verse and the chorus of 'Careless Whisper' and we thought that was good enough.
'Titanium' wasn't supposed to be me singing, but they put my demo vocal back on.
