Non-Traditional Songwriting Quotes

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.

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.

Yeah, I've always wondered what it would be like to make music that's not nostalgic at all, and it's really, really hard for me to imagine.

I knew that collaborating on songwriting would be difficult for a lot of people, because I was known very much, for my independence and the fact that I wrote these quirky songs that were not typical structure, not typical sound - you know, really original stuff.

Writing 'February' made me realize that breaking form is a way of letting the song be human.

Soundgarden are kind of the masters of writing songs that aren't pop cliches.

We were very deliberately not playing 12-bar structures, blues structures, which rock musicians turned into such a cliche. We tried to... listen to the rhythms within ourselves and take the normal words we used every day in our normal thoughts, which girls hadn't written about before.

Music doesn't have to sit within the confines of pop structure, you can really make stuff that's more visual.