Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.
The meaning of the words in my songs are very important to me. But what's most important to me is that the music works.
The word matters in country music, and it always has. And everybody had lived those words in country songs.
The best of my songs are more than just a joke. There's something else going on - a character, or it's not just a plain joke.
I'm quite certain that the audience that I've got for my stuff don't listen to the lyrics.
For me, singing was always about the lyrics. I'm hopeless at singing songs that don't have a core.
People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.
I think the difference between a good song and a great song is... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid track and everything is there but then the lyric is just okay, then you've got a good song.
It's important to me that people feel connected to the band through the music, you know? I don't want it to be wallpaper. I don't want it to be background music. I want it to be clear: This is the song. These are the words. If you feel the same way as I do, sing it as loud as you can.
Lyrics are back, maybe. It seems like there was a bit of an attitude that lyrics are not important.
The most important thing to me as a songwriter is the breath. The most important thing I could say to somebody is, 'Sometimes I just breathe you in.'
I like music that not only has a pop melody to it but is also deeply about something.
The lyrics are the essential part in our songs.
For your songs to connect with people, they've got to mean something to you.
It's very hard for me to think about my songs and attribute some significance to them.
Music actually meant something when I started doing it. Too bad I wasn't mature enough to write anything that meant anything.
You have to learn how to act a pop song. You have to find the balance of the pop from the pop song and the lyrical significance of the scene you are in.
I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words.
If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. Or, you have to be singing in a vocabulary that has tremendous appeal or else people are not going to want to sit there for eighty or ninety minutes hearing this stuff.
