I wear my musical heart on my sleeve and show all my influences off. I'm happy for someone to point out that my song sounds like someone else's.
I feel like, paying homage to an artist, it's better to do something that's inspired by them - a new work that's inspired by them - versus another person saying they redid your song.
I've always loved War's Low Rider and Sly Stone's Thank You, and I just wanted to put my take on them.
If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.
Doing a remake of an iconic song is always nerve-racking because you never know if you can actually do justice to it.
You know, it's absolutely connected to The Mollusk in that, it's what we're writing after The Mollusk. A lot of this stuff reminds me of things on The Mollusk.
I thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba.
On the musical side, I always wanted to kind of carry on Pink Floyd's sound. You know, Pink Floyd always had such an original, creative and masterful sound, but there are no new albums. My thought was that there's a way to keep their sound alive.
The song still remains which names the land over which it sings.
I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
Everybody's just emulated us and now everybody just kinda takes our sound as their foundations.
I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.
It's easy for a singer to sometimes pick up on another singer's sound, but that's just copying.
I wanted to completely honor The REV and pay tribute to him and carry on the legacy that he intended with this record.
I know there's bands that might write something that sounds like The Smiths, and they'll go, 'Oh, it sounds like The Smiths, we've got to make it sound not like The Smiths.'
In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.
I came upon Diana Krall's jazz arrangement of "A Case of You" several years back. I've always wanted to pay homage to both her version and Joni's, and by proxy, my mom. She's the one that introduced me to that music.
It's like, whenever I do any kind of cover, if it's a jazz piece or pop cover, I want to honor the original and make sure that the bulk and the juice of what makes that so great is there, but take it to a different place.
I will say that I know Nirvana did a show and played a few chords from 'More Than a Feeling' before they did 'Teen Spirit,' and it wasn't very good. But in all seriousness, 'Teen Spirit' was a great song. If subconsciously or somehow I had any influence on that, I'll take that as a compliment.
That's why I don't necessarily enjoy it when bands cover other songs. You'll never recreate what has been done, especially if it's something that's legendary and classic.
A lot of songs are derivative of each other.
It seemed like an impossible task to do full justice to all Luther classics. And yet these landmark artists have done just that. Memorable performances of wonderful songs that ensure Luther's legacy will live on forever.
It's a different kind of satisfaction, different kind of enjoyment than making your own songs, to remake someone else's song that you really like.
We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.
Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.
