Quotes About Songwriting

I was approached by the writers of 'The Bridge,' and they were looking for a song that would go along with the theme of the show. They actually gave me a copy of the script, and gave me a little background info on it, and I started to work on the song from there.

One of the benefits of success with new songs is that some of the other songs will get a chance to see the light of day whereas they wouldn't have before.

There are about five or six songs that were written in full or in part while I was in Iraq, and that was definitely a life-changing experience. There was no shortage of inspiration.

I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through.

When I was younger it was a lot of quantity over quality. Just writing, writing, writing. Hundreds of songs. Now it's fewer songs. If I write 10 songs I believe 80 percent of them are good and gonna be used.

'Something/Anything?' was kind of a different record, since I'm playing everything myself. A lot of the songs on there have a particular kind of instrumentation that is much like a guitar quartet, and in some ways, it's an exceptional song on that record because so much of the writing on 'Something/Anything?' is piano-oriented.

I was writing songs from when I was 12. My songs always came from questions that I need answers for.

I don't think I ever write songs involving politics, because they get dated way too quick. Any view you have can usually be made into something more general, and that can stand throughout time.

My process is really about little bits of inspiration. I just record them really quick on the guitar or something. I have a huge folder full of them. But if I start a song, I finish it.

Sometimes it's really quick, and sometimes it's really long. There's no formula for writing songs.

I wrote a song for Icona Pop which boosted my confidence quite a lot.

I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.

The thing I ran up against was everybody wanted a song so fast. It took me two years to finish 'Touch Me in the Morning.'

When I write songs, it's very random. I get influenced by the most random things! Sometimes it just comes to me in my sleep or just hanging out in a restaurant or something. Music just comes to me, and I'll start writing from there.

The funny thing is the songs that people think are about me probably aren't. And the songs that are probably are the ones they wouldn't think... so that's where it kind of is funny.

We record in the spirit of the Berry Gordy camp and Gamble & Huff, where people were writing up to a dozen quality songs within a day because the competition was that hard.

I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.

I've always written pop songs. I tend to take inspiration from more experimental genres, like ambient music, but at the root of the song, it's verse-chorus-verse.

If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.

For people who write songs, it's a gift you're given. You become good at the craft, but you're given the gift.

It's a gift that I have and I became good at it. When I heard my first song I didn't even know that I could write songs.

I didn't really gig my way in. I was just in my bedroom writing songs for so long.

I write songs when I need to. That's how I write songs: when there's something that's bugging me. If something's troubling me, and I don't really know how to articulate it to people directly - my friends, my family, or my girlfriend - then I'll write a song about it because I know I can articulate it that way.

I don't set goals for myself too much, but I'm always trying to write that one great song.