Shura Quotes

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

I'm never going to be a flat-line guy. My heart is going to be on my sleeve with every shot.

Even a song like 'Give Love,' in my head, there's a question as I'm writing it, going, 'Is this cheesy? Is it too on the nose to say 'give love?''

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

I love to write honest songs that name real people, then get up onstage and live out those emotions in front of 15,000 people.

It would get really alienating, to have my face be the face of a cause. So much just comes down to the songs. I just want to give us the opportunity to write great songs. Even our work in Haiti is limited by how good our songs are. We just need to get rid of as much of the bullshit as possible, so we can have a life, so we have something to write about.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

But I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

The songs that you start to write that you are a little scared of can be the ones that you have to tell.

When I open my mouth and sing, the truth comes out. When I write, the truth comes out. I can't lie. That, I think, is one of the strongest elements of my music. When people talk about my writing as though I'm doing it from an accountant's perspective, it really pisses me off.

Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

If I found out some gal was trying to steal my guy, I'd want to give her a black eye! Instead, I wrote this song. At the time I was writing each song [on this album], you could figure out the frame of mind I was in by listening closely. With every song I've ever recorded, I'm in it. I wouldn't write about it if I wasn't in it.

There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs.

I write songs about my own experiences. You can't lie to yourself. You can't pose to yourself.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

I write my miserable songs. I write songs about disgust and self-pity. We’re all going to have bummer moments. That’s not the stuff I choose to share.

You do try to write songs that you feel like people can relate to and you try to be as honest as you can so that people hear your records and they feel like, "Oh, my god. This is exactly how I feel. I went through this."

What's the point of a song if you can't be honest?

I write songs from the heart, and I don't hold back.

As far as the creative process goes, I always make sure that anything that gets discussed or talked about in the record is true to form. I make it a point not to sing anything that I haven't felt or gone through.

I feel what I sing, and I sing what I feel. Really, that's all I can do.

I've found that in now having experienced what it's like to make records and just through growing up in general that you should be expressive about what's affecting you instead of trying to sing about a subject just for the sake of other people getting something from it.