I have a card catalogue in my brain of every lyric of every sappy love song ever written.
I just write a song, and it just comes out however it wants to. And some of them are catchy songs like 'Here Comes The Sun,' and some of them aren't, you know.
Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.
I love listening to the radio because there's something about that discovery, that platform, still being the main medium. And it is changing with streaming services, but I like to listen to what people are listening to and figure out why is this song so catchy.
I don't ever have the pressure of making a hit, because I've never had a hit song, per se. The closest thing to a hit song was 'Shiraz,' and it's not your prototypical hit song, with a catchy hook and all this other stuff.
I don't think a song should be put in a category.
That's all I ever do, just try and do the best I can and cater to the song, cater to the music.
Once you've been on tour six, seven years, you get an idea of what works and what doesn't work universally. There will be some crowds that we just can't play a song, but we've got 90% of a show that we know is going to be a hit with the Lupe Fiasco fan. I think the catering has already been done.
I don't like to feel like I'm in a club when I'm in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.
When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.
Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.
I don't sit down and write a song, and then slam down the phone like, 'We got another one!' and pop some champagne. It's like if someone's writing a novel: You write a series of drafts.
Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!
I was still on track to go UNC at Chapel Hill, I had no plans to be a musician. It wasn't even a goal of mine. Then I had this song that blew up and went viral and suddenly I found myself playing shows and having this music career.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
I am honored I have performed 'Quizas Quizas Quizas' with Jennifer Lopez, an eclectic artist who thanks to the charismatic power of her voice and to her soft sensuality, has managed to make this song particularly convincing.
We even have a music career. Our song ‘Hold On,' charted on Billboard. I mean, we don't have aspirations to tour with Justin Bieber but we have a lot of different interests and talents.
We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.
'Take Her Up to Monto' is a very satirical song. I don't really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn't. It's a bit cheeky calling it 'Take Her Up to Monto,' but the whole idea was to be very irreverent.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
