I like stories with a collision of disparate tones. Look at 'Shameless' or 'House of Lies'. They go from big, silly, and comedic to very real dramatic moments in the wink of an eye.
With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.
I find sadness and strife to be so much more interesting with an upbeat melody.
Witty, brooding, contemplative, explosive: take your pick.
The trick of 'Up' was to balance the sad stuff with the silly stuff.
To go from 'Generation Kill,' which is a very real, dark, gritty series, to 'True Blood,' which is flamboyant, crazy, way out there... I couldn't ask for two better jobs.
When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.
I have two moods. One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs... Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it's out.
I write about heartbreak because I like writing about sad things, but I'm writing happy songs, too!
I'm not saying you have to be totally despondent or anything, but... in New York, it's cold sometimes; it rains sometimes; even if everything in your life is great, bad weather can set the mood. You can write songs in New York because it's not always perfect. To write a good song, things can't be perfect.
'Hill Street,' because of the wacky nature of many of our characters, really allowed us to indulge a kind of cheek-to-jowl juxtaposition of high drama with very low humor.
All through the 'Guttertown' record, there's happy, there's sad, there's strange - and I'm painting that picture.
I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
In 'Swimming Pool,' all the colors are very warm, sunny, the pool and all that. In 'Love Crime,' everything is so cold, and it's all inside skyscrapers.
Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.
You can look at 'Rumours' and say, 'Well, the album is bright, and it's clean, and it's sunny.' But everything underneath is so dark and murky. What was going on between us created a resonance that goes beyond the music itself.
There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.
Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.
Some nights, you want to be George Jetson, and other nights, you want to be sexy.
I like to keep the big dynamic changes between my songs, so that album songs feel radically different from each other.
Often when you're working on dark material, the atmosphere is fun.
There's always room to make stuff that is completely morose and downbeat, but we'd probably spiral into a state of complete despair if our music reflected the lyrics all the time. I think that's almost the fun game with some songs, is this complete tearing of two feelings at once.
Rather than a taste for the macabre, I like the full range of human emotion in a story, which means darkness and light. It means warmth, but it also potentially means scares.
Having a very serious thematic element in the lyrics and then juxtaposing with something really triumphant and just a big beat to dance to is a nice contrast to having a dark message.
I do like any kind of project that has both comedy and drama in it because in life you don't have one day where everything is funny then the next day everything is dramatic.
