Jain Quotes

Being a songwriter, my job is just to write songs for people. I'm not attached to them.

A few years ago my goal was to try and get the goddamned album made, which put me in a real bad frame of mind.

There's always gonna be guys who are just wonderful singers and probably shouldn't be writing songs. Then there's always gonna be guys who move up the ranks writing. I don't know what's healthier or what's the best thing - probably whatever yields the best songs.

I've always been around musicians and always been the songwriter who doesn't end up playing the music.

Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest.

I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs.

When I'm sick of myself, and when I don't know what to say as a solo artist, I can write a song for a movie. When I don't know where to turn musically, being in a band - Rilo Kiley or Jenny & Johnny - the collaborative nature is really exciting.

There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.

I'm in the studio for hours in that tiny little box, and really, the performing part is what I'm most excited about.

It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.

It's unfortunate we've never been just songwriters.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

It's hard to make out the difference between insults and bad advice.

I think that what I'm interested with is the creative side of music-making, rather than all the travelling.

Songs are not on a conveyor belt. I'm not chopping them up and putting them out.

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

I just love the thrill of performing on stage. I believe that singing is something I was put here to do.

You'll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.

We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.

Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records.

If you get anything done, you will be criticized

I had my whole life to write a bunch of crappy songs and then play them in front of people and think, 'All right, that one out of these seven is really good; it's a keeper.' But on this second album, to be honest, I probably wrote about 50 songs where I was just trying to write a hit.

To me, I don't care if I co-write or if I write alone. If it's a great song and it makes it to the record, then that's what is supposed to come, you know what I mean.

Sometimes people stop me on the street and they say 'when are you going to make the next 'Zanaka' and it's what I really didn't want to do.

I know when I've written a good song when I can imagine the video. If I can't imagine the video straight away, I'm not gonna put it on my album.