I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.
I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.
Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.
I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.
I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.
The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don't have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all.
Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
I've always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging.
You write a scene, and it works or it doesn't. It's immediate.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.
Anything that I'm doing I'm writing specifically for a particular project.
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
Well, as anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There's a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.
The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.
I write songs in batches and then record them and then can't write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself - especially in those long and grim hours in the office - is to write stuff I find funny.
I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.
When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.
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