Relatable themes Quotes

I always try to relate a song to something what is going on, the working man, the times, how life goes.

I grew up in some suburb, I'd come out with a song about potholes in my lawn.

With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.

I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to.

I have ventured out and written about real-life experiences that I haven't gone through myself, but I've known people to go through them. In the past, I've always written about my experiences and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through.

I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that's helped me in my writing because I'm writing about ordinary things.

That's why I've always loved country music. Whether it's sad, pumps you up, or it's breakup songs, it's all real-life things.

The area of teenage life is not necessarily rarefied; we've all gone through that period. It's not as rarefied as a western or a space adventure or a gangster film, but it has its own dynamic.

I feel like the albums I grew up listening to - for example, Eminem, Lauryn Hill, Christina Aguilera - they all spoke about real stuff that was happening in their life and everyone else's life.

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

I want to express the feelings that everyone has felt at least once in music so i think people will feel/understand my song.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

I'm inspired by day to day life, things that people go through, things that make people tick. Everybody has a story, so you try to put stories into songs and try to make it as entertaining as possible.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

You don't buy into huge car chases or sensates or interstellar warfare, but you can buy into a loving relationship or a father-son relationship, and you can buy into the small humor. If you want to make your fiction universal, go small. That's the best way to do it.

A good country song takes a page out of somebody's life and puts it to music.

I want my music to be able to tell a story about what I've experienced and what I think my fans will be able to understand also.

I tell people this: It's hard to write about walking in the park, but it's easy to write about a breakup.

When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.

'Empire' deals with the black experience, the human experience, sibling rivalry, what it feels like to be ignored or doted upon by a parent, illness, death. There are so many things that I think the audience can identify with.

I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.