Vocal Focus Quotes

I had been wanting to give guitar lessons to girls because I feel like women tend to use their voice as the starting point for a song and learn a few chords, and then it ends there because then they just use their voice to flesh out a song.

I've wanted to not play as much. I would like to just sing now. Even though I don't think I'm a great singer, I wouldn't mind just - not being a frontman, per se, but singing and not playing.

For 'The Anthem,' a lot of my fans were like 'Oh, man, he's getting lazy making just, like, a pop format tune that everyone's doing these days.' But on this album, I wanted to write songs with vocals that would get stuck in my head, not just movements of instrumentals.

With 'Torches,' I wanted to make a great pop record; I wanted every song to be exciting, not to have too much space, no long pieces of music without vocals. I kind of wanted to write the perfect pop album.

All the really good guitar players - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin - I love all those people. But I didn't start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mainly concentrated on my voice.

I'm making a record that's half stripped down acoustic which is the way I perform a lot and half of it is very produced. It's really hard to keep music simple but I was trying to keep it simple and focus on one or two instruments and vocals.

When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.

On 'Utopia,' I mix sick beats with ethereal elements while trying to keep the focus very much on the songwriting. If you strip any of these songs down to just the vocal and a piano, there's a real song in there.