Nick Lowe
I don’t actually like rock music. I like rock ’n’ roll music. I know it’s a debate that isn’t exactly original, but the “roll” part of rock ’n’ roll is the interesting part. Any dimwit can play rock music, but the roll part of it is altogether more difficult. It’s subtle, and it’s rare to [...]
Nancy Wilson
Thirty years after Dreamboat you’re not the same person, because you’ve gone through a few lifetimes in between. When you hear the album, Ann sounds like a 12-year-old compared to the more soulful way she sings now. No less range, just more experience. I could relate to the person I was when I co-wrote those [...]
Chuck D.
My news source for songwriter is everything. It has to be. It’s not just anything—it’s everything. I can’t ignore what people are saying in the world or in the streets. I hate that term now, “the streets,” because it’s so commercial. You have to use the world. Your head has to be open. I was [...]
Dr. John
Everybody in my neighborhood in the ’40s, they played pianos. That’s how people partied. They didn’t try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I’ve been around a lot of piano all my life. When [...]
Jimmy Webb
When I was 19, I wrote a musical called Dancing Girl, and I wanted to play it for [singer] Tony Martin, who starred in a lot of MGM pictures. He was appearing at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, so I got the money together and flew up there with my script. I’m not sure [...]
Melissa Etheridge
When you enter into something like cancer, especially in the Midwest—my father died of cancer, my grandmother, my aunt—you don’t talk about it. When I got it, I was like, “OK now, wait a minute … ” There’s a lot of things that we put up as fear around us. We’re not going to talk [...]
Herbie Hancock
Usually anyone is put into a pigeonhole according to the first thing they do that sticks. Whether it’s a dentist or a plumber or a painter, you get pigeonholed for particular things. There’s a tendency to stay in the comfort zone, because that’s where you’ve already been accepted. But my training from having worked with [...]
Pete Seeger
I never liked the commercial world. It was a bunch of hypocrisy. I don’t drink or smoke. I don’t like nightclubs and never went to them. Around 1953, I got a letter from some students at Oberlin College asking if I could come there and sing. They said they couldn’t pay much, but they had [...]
Emmylou Harris
I think learning to sing in the arena of country music was behind [my vocal restraint]. It was Gram Parsons who got me into country music, and harmonizing with him, which required even more restraint. Basically, you’re just learning to trust the melody and the lyric. We’re all just servants to the music. It’s not [...]
will.i.am
By today’s standards of people’s perceptions of what is hip-hop, yeah, Black Eyed Peas are pretty different. But we are more or less preservers of that form of hip-hop that we grew up listening to, like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Digable Planets. You know, hip-hop was always melodic and there have [...]
NIkki Sixx
I’ll never know how heroin addiction affected my songwriting. I know I write better music when I’m sober. A lot of my friends have told me they don’t know how to write when sober. For me, the addiction had to do with running from my past and not living in the present. When you’re writing [...]
Michelle Shocked
It’s one thing to negotiate a contract in which you achieve certain rights. But when you’re in a contract with someone who has so much more power and resources than you do to—I’d say in some cases finds loopholes—but who, in my case, blatantly disregarded the contract they had signed. Basically, it’s like we always [...]
Pete Townshend
On defending the accusation that he’s sold out by allowing the Who’s music to be used in TV commercials: Defend myself against whom? The rock ’n’ roll thought police? I sell out every time I drag my weary old ass out on the road to play classic rock to beer-drinking saps who should know better. [...]
Suzanne Vega
The weird thing is that the songs that take the longest are sometimes the quickest ones to write, because you can spend months thinking about an idea and then when you sit down to write it, it’ll take an hour or two. “The Queen and the Soldier,” even though it took months of thinking about [...]
Donald Fagen
Preventing our songs from becoming novelty songs were something Walter and I discussed, relative to Steely Dan albums. Essentially the question is, “How funny do you want to be?” We try not to let the songs become too much of a pastiche or parody. We don’t want to turn into Weird Al, or even Frank [...]
Seal
If you want to make yourself available for songs to flow through you, you have to keep playing stuff, keep writing, even if you aren’t writing stuff to your satisfaction. I think you have to keep on doing it and then it’s almost when your defenses are down, when you’re least expecting it, that something [...]
Lesley Gore
Quincy Jones and I finished our recording session about 5 o’clock the afternoon of March 30, 1963, and Quincy had to be at Carnegie Hall that night to host a party for Charles Aznavour, who was on the Mercury label. So Quincy was outside Carnegie Hall, and Phil Spector arrived at the concert and came [...]
Steve Cropper
I play those Stax-era songs today pretty close to the way I did 40 years ago. I would say that I’ve improved by habit. Playing them through the years, you develop different things. Something might work a bit better than it did on the original session. It might be a little cleaner, a little more [...]
John Mellencamp
I was on the fence about having my song used in the Chevrolet ad, because I had always said no to any commercial things. At the same time Chevrolet was talking to me about using “Our Country,” Tom Petty had just put out a new record [“Saving Grace”]. It was a really nice song, and I [...]
Isaac Hayes
When I was a kid in Memphis, we used to do little Tom Thumb weddings, little stage plays and all that. But music can help you relate to the public, help you to come out of your shell. I remember my first performance as an artist was on the Dick Clark show, American Bandstand. I [...]
KT Tunstall
It was a definite decision with the first album to write an autobiography, to put together songs that were very real. I was very inspired by Tapestry by Carole King for the feel of the first album. I thought a good way of introducing myself was just to say, “This is my take on me [...]
Duncan Sheik
Within the music circles I appreciate, “Top 40 Radio” is a very bad phrase. It’s not respected, and it’s seen as over-marketed, throwaway crap. I grew up buying things like 4AD import records—the most obscure kinds of art-rock I could find—and suddenly people were calling me a pop singer. That caused a lot of cognitive [...]
Jerry Lee Lewis
“No, I didn’t push a piano in a river. It was an ocean (laughs). The Atlantic. I pushed this old piano out the back door of this theater in Florida and right down down the sidewalk and off into the water. Son, that was one bad piano. It floated pretty good, though.” From Performing Songwriter [...]
Carly Simon
Co-writing can happen in so many different ways. In the case of “You Belong to Me,” the Doobie Brothers were doing the song for their album and using Ted Templeman as a producer, as they always did. There was a melody that Michael McDonald had written, and Teddy suggested that Michael call me and ask [...]
