I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.
I was about seven or eight years old when I first heard West Side Story, and it had a huge impact on me. If you look at the elements of that record, it contains many of the things I enjoy doing today.
The juices never stop flowing. I still write songs.
Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.
I filled the margins of my schoolbooks with lyrics.
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 read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.
It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
I try to transmit emotion and soul in my voice, but my true passion has always been writing. I feel more like a writer than anything else.
When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.
Songs do write themselves through you; I know people find it hard to believe, but it's true.
Whenever I get an idea for a song, even before jotting down the notes, I can hear it in the orchestra, I can smell it in the scenery, I can see the kind of actor who will sing it, and I am aware of an audience listening to it.
I wasn't born with a natural talent for songwriting.
You can only follow what's on your mind. In fact, a song is something you write because you can't sleep unless you write it.
I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.
I will always have my songs and I don't think I will ever dry-up.
Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.
I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.
There's no set way to do anything. Sometimes you have to go outside the box; sometimes you can do things the standard way. Like, you don't have to have a beat to write a song: sometimes you can write lyrics without the music.
That's the nice thing about songwriting: You don't have to punch a clock or be in a specific place to do it. There's really a lot of freedom to it.
I started writing lyrics out of desperation. I was broke and wondering where my next job, my next meal was coming from, although I had had several successful revue songs on Broadway.
A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
A song kind of comes out of anywhere. A song will come out of the sky, or an idea, or walking around, or playing with other guys.
