If I'm anything, I'm not a singer but I'm a song stylist.
Sometimes, writing songs is like waiting in for deliveries. They give you a window, and your washing machine is going to show up, whether the window is the album or something you're thinking, like, 'This thing is going to come to me.'
It was a very bizarre experience for me, to get the songs together, go in there, and try to deliver them as I would perhaps in a live setting. But I realized that I couldn't take on that coffeehouse style that I came from and go in there and burn it up.
My fans like a certain quality and a certain level of music. Once I give it to them, they seem pretty happy.
There's a wide spectrum of possibilities in how to deliver a song.
I'm not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don't get "Iggy Sings." I am also a style of music, an approach.
My advice to singers is always the same: 'Don't sing the song, sing the lyric.'
I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don't think is quite the same as singing it.
There is an actor's responsibility in presenting the emotional content of the lyrics to an audience. But whether you do that in a straightforward fashion or an ironic fashion or a blase fashion is all about opportunities, and singers are missing opportunities as artists if they don't pay attention to the lyric.
In some ways, I've always approached singing as acting, and the voice is just like a way of carrying the song.
