Song Evolution Quotes

It was just the next logical step from making succinct pop songs. What do you do after that? You make pop songs that are longer and more epic, that push the envelope. Imagine your favourite song, or something that you play over and over in the car, except that you don't have to start it over as much.

The reality is not exactly what the song started out to be, but it's not a bad song.

It's funny when you write a song - it's easy for me now - but there's almost a second stage where you take control of the song. You start writing it, and if you're not careful, it just finishes itself and it might not be what you wanted. It's very strange, it takes over itself. It has its own life.

Each Desaparecidos's song has a seed that it came from. We're trying to take that and broaden it out and make it resonate with people.

My favorite songwriting trick is writing something like 'XO.' In my brain, I thought, 'This is probably going to be a love song. How can I change that and find ways to twist that.' As a songwriter, it's your job for the song to take twists and turns that people don't expect.

You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.

'Superunknown,' maybe more than most albums, didn't reveal itself to be what it was until the very end - literally until we were three quarters of the way through mixing it.

My, oh my, how 'Sometimes When We Touch' has travelled since I solemnly wrote my first version at the age of 19.

Songs are really interesting in that way. Sometimes, they grow with you. Sometimes, you outgrow them.

Joyous Sound evolved from a gospel influence. Actually it evolved out of sitting at a piano and just picking out a riff, a gospel type riff. It just seemed to come joyously-something about the song, about living in another place of joyous sounds. I'm not quite sure-that's one I'm trying to analyze. It just came out.

There's a point with every record we've made that the album starts to assert its identity, and I think that's kind of what happened with 'The Wolf.'

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

To kill the misconception, I don’t think the songs we wrote before ‘Danger Days’ are bad songs by any means. In fact, I kinda think some of them are among my favorites we have ever written. A lot of them are kinda f—ing rad… they just so happened to have been created in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and we as their parents were not ready to raise them just yet… and so they sat and waited.

I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song.

To me, the songs that I'm most thankful to have been a part of creating are the songs that are able to adapt and change over the years and that mean different things to you at different periods of time in your life.

The first song that I wrote that I was proud of was probably 'Hunter' from the first record. But I listen that now and I don't know. I mean, it's got a good hook, but still. I'm proud of it. I'm as proud as I can be of all the ideas, but I think 'Party' showed a maturity that I don't think I had on 'Aldous Harding.'

I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.

The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.

When an audience takes to a song and it becomes older, in a way it changes it entirely. And then the journey just begins.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.

It's hard to write new stuff when the songs you have written before are still changing and evolving. It would be like building something when the foundations there are not really solid.

I have been blessed with some incredible compositions to record and perform and all of my songs have had the ability to grow as I and those who have supported this career of mine for these 50 years have.

A lot of the carols were not as you hear them now.

You sing songs hundreds of times over and over, but certain ones just morph and naturally, as you age and get life experience, take on a different form as well. When I was looking at songs for the album, I thought, "Which are the ones that connect with me the most? What do I think would work in album form?" Almost all of them I've done in shows.