Song Refinement Quotes

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.

A lot of times, somebody will say something and it will give you a good title. So you carry a pencil with you and jot that down. You don't just write a song right quick, though. You fool around and work with it. You have to keep going over and over it and see if you can't write a song that means something.

You're not going to hit it every single time, and that's why, when I record an album, I do probably close to 50 songs. Each song I record has to get better. If it's not better than the last song that I made, it'll usually linger for a couple of months, and then it'll be put on the backburner, and then there'll be another song that I do, and then it often doesn't make it on the album.

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.

Sometimes, if a song is written, in essence, to be that stripped down, it's very touchy when you start adding things, because even the smallest thing can have a huge impact. Somebody has to make the decision that there's a better song in there if there's less.

I like to come up with lots of different sounds. So the final version of a song might have been 10 completely different songs before we finally got it right.

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back.

Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

If you take a little time, let's say three weeks off, after recording a song, and you listen to it every other day, you're just going to know eventually.