Tom Odell Quotes

I had no desire to become a singer until I heard Billie Holiday. The first time I heard her on a record, it was a revelation. She sounded like a woman singing about herself.

I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.

I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.

I got a guitar when I was six and, instead of learning other people's songs, started to try to write my own, even at that young age.

I can perform easily; I don't mind getting up in front of people at all. I've always sung and felt confident about that, and guitar playing isn't a stretch, but songwriting is. We all have our challenges in what we do, and that's mine.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

I think there'll always be a kid with a guitar with a song in his heart that's going to turn me on - that's as far as I can see. Whether lots of people agree with that, I'm not sure.

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.

I have been fighting writing songs for a long time. People keep telling me I should write, and other writers have offered to write with me, and to be honest, it's not something I've ever really had a passion for - plus I wasn't sure I had the talent to do it!

For 'Regulate,' I was at home, and I came up with it. I was listening to Michael McDonald's 'I Keep Forgettin'.' It was a record that I always loved, from being a kid and my parents playing it when they had their company of friends over. It was a record that just stuck in my head, and it just felt good.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.

The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier. And they set that bar for us where we're always striving to do something better than the last time, whether it's the next song or just the next line.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

All the really good guitar players - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin - I love all those people. But I didn't start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mainly concentrated on my voice.

I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Finding fresh song topics can sometimes be quite difficult.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I've been a list maker for years, even before I was a musician. I was always writing things down and kept long lists of things that would make good album titles and things like that. I'm constantly thinking in terms of songwriting.

Sometimes when it comes to the iconic kind of moments, when I read the script for the first time, you get little goose bumps or something because it really is kind of exciting.