Song Modification Quotes

So the Madonna thing, I wrote a song with Diplo, she liked it, tweaked it and then made it her own and it became 'Hold Tight.'

'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.

I just didn't expect an acoustic version of Rock'n'Roll All Nite.

I can think of only two or three songs out of hundreds I've recorded that I performed as originally written. I like to become intimate with the material and change it to suit me.

I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."

I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.

'Titanium' wasn't supposed to be me singing, but they put my demo vocal back on.

In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.

A person like Carole King could make up something, change it, and actually improve it.

I hear my songs being sung by females before I change them and make them into my voice.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.