Song Transformation Quotes

So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.

It's just so obscure to take a folk song in a different language and be a pretty well-respected English-speaking rock band and totally take a song and twist it around and have fun with it.

The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.

[For Before the Dawn] it was in the hands of a fantastic drummer and percussionist and who drove it into another moment in time. It's such a poignant song and it was transformed into entirely different beast.

Playing a song changes a song. Every night a song becomes something else on stage.

In some ways, when you re-envision a song like that ["Never Be Mine"], there's a completely different energy to it each night.

A song stylist is, like, to take an old folk song like "Delia's Gone" and do a modern white man's version of it.

I had another version of 'We Dance' that was kind of glam-rock. It was a little 'Taking Care of Business' mixed with Simon and Garfunkel. But on the album, I did it in a down-and-out way, like the Frogs or David Bowie or something - a little torch song thing.

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

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.

The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.

Every time I do a cover, I completely... pick apart - I take apart the entire song and really reconstruct it. I try and make it my own.

A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.

My appeal to the composers, whoever touches an old classic, will only be this much: take it up only if you can express it your way, too; work hard with the writers; make them see your new vision for the song; change the lyrics, yet, keep the soul of the original song intact.

There are a lot of singers, but they weren't doing it the way I was, taking an Adele song and putting a hip hop beat behind it to make it a different song.

Our approach makes it so if you hear a said song of ours in 2003 and then you hear it again in 2009 it's probably evolved and changed a good bit, and hopefully for the better.

When we went to cover it I thought we would change it to a song of loving and longing instead of the sex machine song Kylie turned it into. I've met Kylie and told her we were covering her song and she was pleased.

I write all of my songs from scratch, so the one thing I love about EDM is the way a song transforms into a piece of art, and how the different sounds can change the feel of the record.

I have this idealistic and maybe naive thought that almost any song can be anything. If you record one song today, it would maybe be exciting and cool. But I could record the same song next week and it would be something completely different.

Sometimes videos make a bad song very tight.

When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.