Song 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.'

Widespread Panic discovered a couple of my songs and started doin' 'em on the gigs. They'd take a song and expand it and everybody plays a long time and people really like that. But I made my living as a songwriter so I try to get to singin' and get it over with.

'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.

It's fun to take songs from a completely different context and reframe them. We did two mixtape albums called 'Other People's Heartache' and 'Other People's Heartache Pt. 2,' which were full of those kind of covers and mash-ups, mixed with film music and film quotes.

Let's say music is needed for only 43 seconds of film. You have to score it so it is an entity, so it won't bother anyone when it ends so quickly. Or if a song runs 2 minutes and 45 seconds, but the titles run a minute longer, you have to arrange that song so it doesn't get repetitious.

I suppose in some ways doing some of the songs in the show felt a bit like I was doing cover versions. I was covering myself. Not that they didn't feel like my songs, but the way I was approaching them was from a place so outside where they were written. The fact that these songs were in the context of a live show was a new thing.

So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.

Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.

I wrote a song called 'Four Times A Lady' for Destiny's Child, and it was perfect. But then I had to spin it back and change all the lyrics to a guy's point of view cos I thought the track was too good to give away, heh heh. It's Craig David now.

Tinashe doing 'I Wanna Get Better' - it's a really personal song, and it was hard for me to imagine anyone else doing it, but stylistically her and I are so incredibly different that I was fascinated to hear what she'd do with it, and I completely loved it. It just felt like the different expression of a song that, to me, was so stamped in one way.

When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!

Once I'd chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it's a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions.

It is hard work composing a song for a film and showing it to makers: 50% of the tune remains the same, and the remaining 50% is changed to suit the script.

You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't.

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 wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

Music has fed me a lot of ideas... The film BLUE VELVET came out of Bobby Vinton's version of the song BLUE VELVET.

We listened to 'Beverly Hills.' I wanted to maybe even do a real 'Africa'-type version of that, I was thinking about for a minute.

As 'Dilbar' has become a huge hit internationally, including Middle East, we have taken the song and re-composed it, written Arabic and Moroccan lyrics, and we recorded, with me singing with Fnaire.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

I'm not like other writers. I'm not hung up on using my own songs. In fact, my sister Bunny always tells me I sing other people's songs better than my own. She says I loosen up and give the songs a different feel.

I just didn't expect an acoustic version of Rock'n'Roll All Nite.

To the U.S. and the world, I'm just known as some funny song and some funny music, some funny video guy. But in Korea I'm doing one of the biggest concerts; it's not a dance music concert. I'm playing with the band, so I change my every song to a rock song.

I get a lot of joy out of covering other people's songs, and, at my best, I think I bring something a little new to a lot of them.

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.