A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
I've liked country music for as long as I can remember, especially the songs of Dolly Parton. Her lyrics are similar to mine: simple, expressive, from the heart. Our voices are in the same kind of register, too.
'You Are So Beautiful,' I think, is probably the, you know, the strongest tune I ever did in just the simplicity in it.
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.
A whole bunch of 'ayes' and a whole bunch of 'yeahs.' That's it. That's all I do. I say yeah. I tell myself that I'm not gon' go over 80. I say, like, 79 yeahs, and it works. We what you call mumble rappers. So you say 'yeah' after everything and make it rhyme no matter what it is.
Some songs take months to get right, but 'Let Her Go' was so easy. I was no more pleased with it than any other song I'd written.
A song just doesn't have verse-chorus-verse. It could just be one line. There are Chinese love songs that you have to learn one melody for a three-minute thing, and nothing ever repeats. I like that.
Soft words, with nothing in them, make a song.
The Avalanches was a great dance track, I thought, but I always feel a little bit let down when there are just two lines repeated constantly. Over and over. Forever.
There are many people writing songs. That is absolutely wonderful. Who knows, there may be some kid in diapers and he or she might succeed in capturing in a few dozen words what great writers have spent years trying to say. Just the right word in the right place with the right melody behind it and the right rhythm. It might get around the world inch by inch, and people realize that this world is in danger, that we're in danger. That's the way "This Land Is Your Land" got to be so well known.
Imagery is the most important to me when singing stories. I try to paint pictures with the words and decorate with little to no singing....let the song do the work.
Basically, country is my kind of music - the simple melody, the simple lyrics.
What makes that song, I think, is how stark it is.
Today's records, even though they may be lyrically repetitive and not saying anything particularly heavy, they have energy.
What I love about lyrics is that they don't have to be very complicated. A good sentence over a great chord with a good melody - all you need is that one moment.
Even a song like 'Give Love,' in my head, there's a question as I'm writing it, going, 'Is this cheesy? Is it too on the nose to say 'give love?''
