I used to not be really honest with girls and then I dropped a song called 'Starry Room' and then I started turning over a new leaf.
If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.
Because you've been exposed to Western tonal music, you know after a certain chord sequence what the next possibilities are. Your brain has compiled a statistical map of which ones are most likely and least likely. If the song keeps hitting the most likely notes, you'll get bored, and if it's always the least likely ones, you'll get irritated.
Music's staying power is a function of how timeless the lyrics, song and production are.
Even if you have a big tune, live crowds can get sick of it. It's not just about the song but also the staying power and if people have connected with it in a certain way. I know that the tracks I put more emotion and depth into are the ones that have the staying power in clubs.
Could a person really make a social contribution through music consciously? I mean, beyond making a person happy to hear the song and more making a social contribution consciously through your music? For me, Stevie Wonder is the paragon of that. And I didn't want to be Stevie Wonder, but I did want to do what he does.
I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.
If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.
When I was in fourth grade, I made a song about the part in Stockholm where we come from.
I always wished I had a song like that George Strait song, 'The Chair', 'cause it's basically just a guy trying to pick up a girl at a bar.
It don't matter if you put 'The Dance' out, or any old George Strait song. Someone is going to think that it's awful. You gotta be able to just sit back and kind of laugh it off and know you're doing exactly what you wanna do, and if people don't like it, then it's not really my place to tell them they have to like it.
I love that on country radio, you can hear a George Strait song, and the next is Sam Hunt. I love that there's such a variety.
You hear ten seconds of a song, and you know it's OutKast. There's a strangeness about it because it's catchy, but it's not just pop for the sake of pop. They're pushing the envelope.
'Company' attracted a certain strata that acknowledged me as a good actor. But in terms of popularity, I owe everything I have to 'Road' because of the song, 'Raste raste, toofan sa.'
If you get 100 million streams on a song and you're only being paid on 20 percent, the check's not going to look good. The money's not going to look fair.
With any cover, I like to choose songs that affected me strongly already. So it's tough sometimes to take a song that you love so much and put your own spin on it because you get such a strong feeling from the original.
I feel like no matter what I write about, I try to end up being the stronger person in the situation. Even in heartbreak, I feel like I'm a much stronger person because of that. I don't want to just write a sad song and still feel sad after that. I want to feel stronger and better.
There's nothing stupider than bursting into song for seven seconds and then falling silent again.
My two favorite parts of what I do are definitely writing the music and then writing and directing the videos to support each song. As well as doing my own makeup and styling for the videos.
Vocally and stylistically, we'd have different kinds of songs come on the radio, and people didn't realize it was the same band. A lot of the time, a casual fan would come see us and go, 'I didn't know that you guys did that song. I didn't know that was you!' That was us!
