By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
We've always been quite clear about how we want the songs to sound. If we can imagine the song being played at a party, and it gets people tapping their feet, then it's in.
My favorite Taylor Swift song is between ‘Blank Space' and ‘Wildest Dreams.'
I'm a big Taylor Swift fan. I really like her song 'Mean.'
I always take a teapot with me on tour. I suppose it's only natural that I've just written a song called 'Where Would We Be Without Tea?'
Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing.
I don't concentrate on technical things like where a microphone is placed and things like that. As a producer, I try to keep the initial feeling from when I first heard a song and make sure we do what were initially aiming for.
If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you're sort of writing the same song over and over again.
I'm not a studio rat. I do find sitting around playing the same song 12 times kind of tedious. I like to get in and get out.
It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.
I've always had a teenage thread running through my music. On my first album, I had a song called 'Confessions of a Teenage Girl.' It's about using your feminine wealth to get what you want.
I had a vague idea of the song's impact in the '60s, but that was tempered by the hate mail and threats I was receiving. It was only about ten years ago, when I finally put it back in my show because so many people were asking for it, that I understood 'Society's Child' real impact.
But there's actually a lot of punk bands out there that go out of the norm, use odd time signatures, or a lot of different tempo changes in a song.
I don't use a Beatmap; I don't use any click track. Any time I count off, it's just in my heart. Sometimes I'll go off the feel of a crowd, like if they way they're bouncing is a little quicker than the song, I might kick up the tempo a little bit. I see where the crowd is at. It's nothing drastic, but all the tempos are from my internal clock.
I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.
I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.'
They would wake me up when I was sleeping, and say sing a song for our friends. I had a sweet voice, I had a nice little tenor voice. God knows what I sang, but my whole family would admire me.
I was really scared to make this album and to make this song. Because I didn't want to talk about it. For me, it's even deeper than just '1-800.' 'Everybody' as a whole... I was terrified.
It's such a hard thing to write a song for your fans without sounding naff and thanking them for spending money on you.
You could have written the biggest hit song, and all eyes are looking to you to write another one. It's not a thankless job; it's just an endless job.
