Music Adaptation Quotes

So the Madonna thing, I wrote a song with Diplo, she liked it, tweaked it and then made it her own and it became 'Hold Tight.'

A lot of people are coming down on people taking old rock 'n' roll songs and making commercials out of them, but from a songwriter's standpoint, I don't mind because it helps pay my rent.

When I was at Capitol - and this was not Capitol's fault - I was aiming, you know. I would listen to country radio and go, 'What version of me does radio want?'

I called the album 'The Chemo' because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.

When I was in top 40 bands, I always had to learn new material and new styles.

I really like the challenge of working with different kinds of music. I feel like my role is really like a coach, so I feel like I can do my job for different kinds of music that may not necessarily be what I listen to.

Beautiful film music can be made relevant to any period.

The world of music is changing so dramatically every day, the way people hear music. It's different. It's a new day and requires new thinking.

It's just so obscure to take a folk song in a different language and be a pretty well-respected English-speaking rock band and totally take a song and twist it around and have fun with it.

The music is going to die if you don't tap into something that people today can relate to.

Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.

I don't sing the way I used to, so I'm doing everything I can to put the word out that they shouldn't expect that.

If you're in pop music, you've got to deal with the changing of the guard every few years. By the time the '70s arrived, I was well aware of the cyclical nature of the game. Pop music is a creature of the moment; it thrives on the mood of its time. Either you hook into that or you're not going to be part of it.

I can take the steel guitars and fiddles off, we can make it a little more pop, cover ideas that are a little less cowboy. But you got to look at yourself in the mirror and ask, whose flag you are under? For Garth Brooks, I'm steel, fiddles, red, white and blue.

I even done a doo-wop version of the Mickey Mouse march.

I treat every album as a new beginning, so I'm asking myself, 'What is pop music now? What are people consuming?' and I take these things into effect.

We write the song, then it gets played for the artist, and they somehow fall in love with it and go back in and make it their own.

Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.

It's complicated for my music to be accepted, even in Lebanon and the Arabic world - I sing in Arabic, but there's no lute, no classical instruments. Maybe with the Internet opening things up, things will change.

You have to grow with the music.

When you're DJing, there are songs I love to play, but I know people are going to walk off. It doesn't matter what I like. You have to be able to play the popular song and slip in one of yours, in such a way that they don't notice it. You've got them in such a roll that you get them back into what they think they like.

When I lived in the U.K., I recorded a lot of ska and rock-steady styles of Jamaican music. But people there weren't accepting it. So I began using a faster reggae beat.

One of the songs we recorded for 'The Long Run' was called 'You're Really High, Aren't You?' Which never really made it onto a record, but later on, it became 'Heavy Metal.' I took that track that wasn't used, and when I was invited to write a song for that movie, I took that track and recorded that song for that movie.

I wrote 'Torches' before experiencing touring as a band. I really had no idea what they would sound like live, and that was something we had to figure out along the way.

R&B is never going to be dead, it's just going to evolve.