The beauty of the collage technique is that you're using sounds that have never met and were never supposed to meet. You introduce them to each other, at first they're a bit shy, clumsy, staring at their shoes. But you can sense there's something there. So you cut and paste a little bit and by the end of the song you can spot them in the corner, holding hands.
I hate when songwriters refer to their songs as babies.
I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.
I was trying to actively get away from music, I guess. But I recorded a whole bunch of instrumental piano songs.
I kind of like polishing the songs that I'm working on. I'm really working hard on some specific songs.
When I performed the songs in front of an audience at the end of each project and I knew the storytellers were in the crowd listening, that was hard.
I had so many songs that were actually sort of finished. And I deleted them. I wrote on my website that I'd put them on the shelf, but that wasn't true. I actually deleted them from my computer. I got sort of trigger-happy and I think I deleted about 200 songs from my computer.
The fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing.
Actually, I caught myself thinking that I was hoping for someone to break into my apartment and steal my computer, or a big fire would take place in my apartment, or thinking of uninstalling my firewall so someone could hack into my computer. I just had all these dreams and eventually realized what I needed to do was delete the songs because I really wasn't happy with them. I needed a fresh beginning.
I could've written songs about, for example, the Paris attacks as they happened and have the song out the day after, but doing this project and following the news made me realize how much I miss deeper nuances in the news reporting. There's already so many quick opinions and angles being thrown in your face, so I avoided writing about things like that and tried focusing on the smaller, more seemingly insignificant things. The things you would find in the back of the newspaper or the back of your mind.
Vocal arrangements are something I'm working a lot with for the new songs.
I make a living from storytelling - if you're a public person and you sing songs about getting married to get a visa, and you are actually doing that, you're gonna end up in trouble.
I started playing bass in my friend's band for some reason. It was just something I did because, well, he asked me if I wanted to play bass and he played me this song - Nirvana's version of "Molly's Lips", the Vaselines song - and he said, "You can do this! This is not hard!" and it's like a two-note song. I learned that and then I thought I was a genius.
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