Quotes About Songwriting

We wrote and recorded the 'Bond' song on a tour bus in Texas.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I'd just write.

My dad was one of the reasons I kept Simply Red going so long. I was brought up to stick at things. I was the only songwriter in Simply Red, so I could have toured under my own banner. But I'd developed the name, so I stuck with it.

Money's really - you know, song writing, yes, there's money to be made and things like that. But really, when you talk about the real money, you talk about touring. No question.

When I'm not touring, I hardly ever leave my house. Part of it is I get to do what I'm most passionate about, which is work on music and make new songs.

We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.

When we try and blend the two together, the songwriting and the touring like we did before, it doesn't really work. We tend to become very focused on what we are doing. And we tend to be a little bit one-track-minded.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

Anyone who takes the craft of songwriting seriously I radiate towards. Spending time with Daryl Hall was a dream come true. I picked his brain a lot because Hall And Oats is timeless.

Being raised Christian and going to church in a small town, that has a lot to do with my makeup as a human being, and has a lot to do with my songwriting, too.

For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.

My personal favorite person we worked with in the U.K. is Cathy Dennis, who is absolutely incredible. She wrote 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' for Kylie Minogue and 'Toxic' for Britney Spears, so she's one of my absolute favorite pop writers.

I respect country music because I feel like it's more about the talent and the songwriting and I put on a big show and we have a lot of stuff, but I feel confident in myself enough as an artist and a singer that I can have all of those fun toys and know that we don't need all the bells and whistles either.

I'm a huge fan of 'Heart On My Sleeve' - I think it has a 'Take That' feel to it! John Shanks and James Morrison wrote the track, and we spoke to Sony and asked if we could reference a 'Greatest Day'/'Rule The World' sound to make that epic ballad. I think it does the job.

When I work with artists, I give them a general guideline of what my vision is. Then they're going to speak their minds on how they view it, too. The song that defines 'Neon Future' the best is the title track. I wrote that with Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun. It's through his words. We had an amazing songwriting session together, connecting.

'Despacito' started with a melody hook that I had with my guitar only. The beat for this track came after I wrote the lyrics, which I wrote as if I was writing a ballad.

A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.

The lyrics are always the last thing I do. I always have a recording of basic tracks and maybe some of the lead work. I'll sit back and listen to it, and I'll just concentrate on what kind of feeling it gives me. My goal writing the lyrics is to not disrupt that feeling.

I'm used to making songs; that's how I learned to make music. My structures will always be more like pop songs than dance tracks.

I feel like I kind of earned my stripes working with The Stereotypes. It was maybe my 6th songwriting session I've ever been to, and they just gave me and a writer I used to write with 3-4 tracks and kinda just let us come up with whatever.

Sure, some tracks are not as good as others, but we've written some really strong, classic stuff, like 'The Number of the Beast,' 'Hallowed Be Thy Name,' and 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'

On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

On the other hand when you are someone who records their own songs you are basically stuck writing for one voice and for one style that can stifle you a bit. It's a real trade off.