I just cut songs I love and that represent what I want to say. And if it crosses over, that's very flattering. It's cool to know that with people listening to rock and rap, I'm sitting on their iPods along with that stuff.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.
I'm just trying to make my favorite music. That's how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I'm making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.
Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.
The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.
Main thing, really, is I write songs the way I wanna hear them and the way I think the people that come to our shows wanna hear them.
I'm just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.
If you say, 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it,' well, then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.
The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'
When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
I don't want to just go out and do song to song to song. I like to create things before the song actually kicks in, little things you do to excite the crowd.