Lee DeWyze Quotes

I don't like working with hitmakers. I don't want hits! You're not even allowed to say that word around me.

They're hit writers. They're gonna write me a hit whether I wanted it or not you know? I could have put out a single a year ago with the Neptunes and maybe been writing now on top but that was not the path that I chose.

I live in L.A., and whenever I get together with anybody to write, everybody is obsessed and fearful and wants to write a hit for everyone else. They wanna write a hit for Rihanna; they wanna write a hit for Katy Perry.

We call 'Ain't No Mountain' the golden egg that landed us at Motown.

The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.

I never really think so much about commercial success; I usually just think about records that move me, and 'Baby Got Back' was one that moved me.

Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist.

Obviously, with your first album, you want to make sure you are really happy with it.

I realized there are so many steps from getting a deal to having a hit.

Our first album sold a million copies. Because we had such a big hit on the first album, it's always like, 'You can't top the first album.'

I had written or cowritten eight of the ten songs on 'Beauty and the Beat,' and I had written our biggest hit, 'We Got the Beat.' How was I going to top all of that?

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.

What my whole object was is not to really sell records. I was trying to sell songs.

I want every song on it to be a hit.

The end game is always a hit song.

I remember when we were mixing our record and our manager was in there going, 'You guys need to sing more, so it can be on the radio.' And we were like 'What? We're never going to get played on the radio. Who cares? What are you talking about?'

If you can write a catchy melody and a song that captures people around the world, what better thing to do? Other than 'Let Her Go,' I haven't managed to do that. And that's fine by me.

You might be like, 'I want really big hits.' But when you get really big hits, and your label is making $150 million, they are people who are now interested in what you do. They are going to begin to tell you what to do, and so you become important. So your creative freedom - you're not going to have that again.

I've always been such an album-driven artist that I never really stopped to think about how cool it would be to just have one really big song.

For years, I wrote songs to try to get cuts or try to have hits or try to appease a label or to be famous. I was learning a lot of valuable tools about structure and how to articulate. I was getting really good at that.

The second we were done on 'The Sing-Off,' we were like, 'All right, now we're competing with Rihanna and Taylor Swift.' We've always set the bar high. We want a hit.

I don't make music for the radio. And when I was being played on the radio a lot, I didn't.

I want to be able to take singles, serve them up to radio on a silver platter and just have them smoke - just obvious great-sounding, great-feeling radio singles.

People started recording my songs. Later, I was offered songwriter contracts. And then, finally, I could take the time to work on my own project. I worked hard for this all by myself.

I'm not interested in being the producer of somebody else's song.