On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.
Anytime you spend six months on a song (Born to Run), there's something not exactly going right. A song should take about three hours.
I like the songs to appear very simple and to flow by without any kind of hiccup, but there has to be this impression of other currents underneath. Like if the songs aren't, on some level, multidimensional, we lose interest in them.
Bohemian Rhapsody' is fantastic. I like to play it, it's beautiful.
I don't use simple words. I make games and puzzles with my songs.
I think some sing-songwriter music can just be very serious - after an hour and a half of it, you are exhausted - so I try and give it light and shade.
If there's a criticism of 'Cassadaga' that I agreed with, it's that we left things in the oven too long, that songs were overstuffed, with too many ideas competing for space.
I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple.
I almost gave up on 'Door' so many times. I couldn't crack it. It started out as a simple song with just a chorus-verse-chorus. I felt like it needed to transform more.
I'm the biggest Drake fan - my favorite is 'Tuscan Leather' because it's like three songs in one, and for somebody that's obsessed with keys, the outro has the best keys ever.
That's the thing: There are so many art songs in jazz. It's a much more rich experience for the singer than people think.
Our tunes aren't just sing-along tunes: they're very complex. After a few days of that, you gotta take a break.
When I wrote songs like 'Everyone I Love is Dead,' I never thought about how I was going to execute them live.
I would feel weird if I wasn't able to be longwinded, or have information-overload on our songs.
I don't think there are any easy Led Zeppelin songs.
Usually we're all comfortable playing the songs, but during the song there might be one part where you're like „oh, this part's coming up, I have to really focus", a lot of songs have those moments in them.
Depth on different levels is so important to me. You look at a band like The Beatles, all their material has so much depth to it. And I want people to be able to run away with my melodies and get lost in them and take the lyrics and be able to relate to them.
All Boston songs are fairly difficult to translate to the stage. None of them are especially easy to play or sing. A lot of them, of course, have very involved arrangements with lots of different sounds and sections that are difficult to play and sing. The prospect of doing any Boston song live is always an endeavor in itself.
For listeners, the song 'Kehne ko jashn-e-baharaa hai' looks a very easy number. In fact, it was a challenge to sing the song as I had to really suppress my voice and make it appear like a casual track.
I think a lot of tunes can suffer from being so simple, so either they get over-complicated or their simplicity means the simple way to lay them down becomes the difficulty.
Motley Crue recorded 'Tonight' and it's great fun to hear other people do my stuff. The only problem with it is it's so damn hard to play.
