All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
We want to be good at our craft, whether it's writing music or playing it live.
My only real hobby is playing music. I write a lot of music on guitar and keyboards and hope one day to make a record or maybe even write the score for a film.
When I was making the early stuff, I never expected it to be so big. I was in my own kind of bubble. I never wanted to tour; I just wanted to create music and make a diary I could put out into the world. And sometimes, I became the characters.
I'm writing constantly about all my crazy experiences across the world, so I have a lot of music I've already written.
I think I'm always writing, and I'm always working, and I'm always trying to be creative. It's just something that I do all the time. I watch TV, and I'll play guitar.
Everybody feels up sometimes, they feel down sometimes, sometimes they feel sideways, sometimes they feel weird. And the beauty of music is you can express all those different feelings in all the different songs you write. And hopefully, people can identify with those.
In order to write music, you need lots of Tabasco sauce.
I can write a song in about an hour if it's a simple country song.
I don't know how it is for people who write fiction or literature, but for me, when I'm writing music, especially with this album, I felt compelled to hold up my end of the conversation. I want people to connect deeper with it.
Howie Greenfield and I started writing music when I was 13 and he was 16. We lived in the same building.
After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
Sometimes I make up songs, and they're just strictly fiction. Other times, I draw on things that have happened in my life or friends, women, all sorts of things.
The guitar is my favorite and the one, I guess, I'm best at. But I play enough of the different instruments to be able to write with them and to, hopefully, to make myself look impressive on stage.
I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.
When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.
I'm constantly writing music and keeping myself busy somehow.
I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.
Stepping back into theatre, a childhood dream, I always felt like I would be onstage. I hadn't imagined myself in a composer role... I find it so satisfying to be behind the scenes and writing the music and watching it elevated and characterized by different voices than my own. It's so exciting.
I've been meaning to write about the Rolling Stones, but I am the furthest thing from a hipster rock journalist.
For me, I've written and produced for pop singers, but, like, female pop - I love that. I think it's putting me in the game that I love girl pop. All my writing is inspired by it.
When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.
When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.
There were musicians that influenced me, but they weren't all women. Teena Marie was a big influence because she wrote and produced her own music, which let me know that women could write and produce their own music, which was an empowering moment for me.
Being on 'Nashville' and working with some incredible people like T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller - so many wonderful, incredible musicians that I've been blessed to play with and observe - that has continued to shape the process of arranging music, writing music.
