Gabrielle Aplin Quotes

The joy of songwriting only gets messed up if you are trying to follow up a big success, or you are trying to create a hit single, or if you have conscious thoughts of a particular outcome for the music.

Tears for Fears was always very personal, but at the same time, it was always big business, a lot of pressure.

If I write songs trying to top other songs, it's a lot of pressure.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

It was a lot easier to write songs before I had a record deal, because the record labels and the industry doesn't mean to put pressure on you, but they do. They don't realize that they are, but you end up having a pressure there that you feel. At times I feel myself wanting to say, 'Just let me do what I do.'

Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't, we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger, and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.

There was an enormous amount of pressure when my first album took off, and I struggled with the speed of everything and the exhaustion from the constant touring.

You want to sell records, but if you want to call yourself an artist, your job is how you express yourself.

In my music career, I never was interested in working and writing and creating songs based on what kind of rewards I could receive in return - a hit song, per se, is what most contemporary artists have to deal with when they deal with a label.

When you're doing so much, there's so much on your mind. The bigger the artist you become, you have to think a lot more. I'm trying not to overthink everything!

The good thing about having a hit record is you don't need too many people. Because now your record is on fire, and I already have a great team around me, so why run to the labels?

When I got to the second album, there was an expectation, because we'd sold nearly seven million albums on the first record, that this would do eight or nine.

I had all these singles come out within a two-month period, and then nothing for almost two years. You start to feel a little irrelevant. You realize how many people there are trying to be songwriters and how competitive it is and how political things can be.

Any song that does well, we're happy with. All we can do is keep writing great songs and hope that one catches on.

To reach the highest level you have to not just have a dream and focus but you also have to make sure you are writing great songs, and if you feel they're what you want to represent you, that is key. But getting out on the road is key. And get your music out there. Maybe something catches, maybe it gets picked up and used on television, you just never know.

What's the point if you make something that's not you, and you're successful? You have to perform it the rest of your life.

People are always coming up to me, thinking I've got some magic wand that can make them a star and I want to tell them that no one can do that. Making hit records is not that easy. But it took me time to realize that myself.

So there was a way for you to get promoted and survive as an artist without worrying about AM radio hits.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

I was never trying to write a hit. I was just trying to write good songs and get a message out, and it was my great good fortune to be popular.

Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.

We try and stay out of the corporate side of it. The band has never compromised. At some point in our career we could have made a certain type of record and sold millions of units, as they are called.

We had a huge audience, we sold truckloads of albums. If we do something that's cool, people will listen to it. If we don't, we would be selling people short.

We're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves for this second album and so we want to make it as great as we possibly can.

You're only as good as your last collection, which is an enormous pressure.