Priscilla Ahn Quotes

I'd probably be a super wealthy guy if I had sat around writing songs and getting them placed like everyone else I know. But I write songs about people or after I meet them and they're somewhat biographical - they're fiction but also non-fiction.

A lot of people in Nashville think that the best song is the catchiest or the one that sells the most copies. They're editing songs in a way that make them seem more consumable, I guess. I'm trying to edit them in a way that makes them more honest.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.

I would never put my songs in a commercial.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

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.

The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.

I don't think it's so hard to be commercial and interesting. Look at Prince, or Neil Young.

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.

Maybe this is wrong, but I feel like I craft my songs carefully enough that I still find that fifteen years after having written one, it still works for me - I'm not cringing.

It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is.

If I'd just been interested in record sales, I would have taken one of the deals I was offered after 'Soapstar Superstar,' made a quick covers album and probably had some success for five minutes. I decided that wasn't for me.

I really like the thing I did with Martina McBride. I had that song sitting around for a long time.

When I get all focused on songwriting, I get into all the marketing and promotion that we do to make it happen. Then the right song comes along and blows it all out of the water. The right song will do it for you every time.

Most of all I want to make pop music that has something real behind it.

I had a long, long time to make 'Rubberband,' and I originally thought that that record would last two years. Once I got over realizing that that's not gonna happen, and sort of got my perspective back, I realized, 'Man I'm really fortunate. I get to write music, make music for a living.'

There's definitely been some songs in the past that we've put out, and it was purely us going, 'Okay, we think radio will play this. We think this will be a hit. This will be big for the show,' and all this stuff. But it's like, do you really believe in it?

I find that when I get on stage now, I don't want to perform a lot of my songs because they don't feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I wrote 'Don't Stop' just like I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' - I didn't try to make either a hit. I just wanted to write a song I liked.

I've done bits of writing for other people but when I'm writing music as Years & Years, I'm using my life and my stories and my experiences. I want it to be authentic and real but also to work as a pop song - I never want to just put in a cheesy line.

I think that's what makes my music different from other artists in my lane is that I write every word that's on my album, and every word comes from a real experience or a real feeling that I've either experienced or felt. And I'm very particular about that, and I take a lot of pride in it, so you know if I say something on a song, I mean it.

We cut songs that touch us because if they don't touch us first, there's no way in the world we're going to be able to sell those songs to somebody else.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it...I always believed that I have something important to say and I said it. That's why I survived because I still believe I've got something to say. ... I don't like overdubs, never liked them. ... The music business doesn't interest me anymore...Don't the people you're around shape the music, is that what you're saying? Everything does. ... I'm not joking around when I've said occasionally, trying to learn how to play a D chord properly has been a very big thing for me.