A Quote by Zachary Cole Smith
I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.
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The lyrics just come out, and I don't know where from. I'm an incredible failure in relationships. I think there's a romantic ideal that I'm aspiring for. I don't know. The lyrics are always about unsuccessful relationships. They're not all about the love between a man and a woman. It's about friendship and family. Deep down there's a lot of talk about general existence.
Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.
Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.
Music is for making people happy, lyrics tell them who they are. Everybody is free to interpret the music, as they want. The lyrics of my songs are about different things, but it's all about my issues.
One thing about having mostly absent parents that I think was perhaps "good" for the development of my intellect/writing is that I was given almost total freedom to read/write/look at whatever I wanted. I wonder a lot about how my past experiences, particularly my negative childhood (home life and being severely bullied/ostracized throughout school) as formed my/my thoughts/my writing, though I should also note those things were far from the only thing that had an impact on me/my writing.
I always wanted to have a young female artist that would tell me the truth about life and not only talk about the good things or the things that were exciting or interesting but also talk about the things that people in general are skeptical to talk about- the bad things that do happen. A good 50% of our lives is things that are happening that we're not necessarily super thrilled about and I feel like that's missing from pop music a lot of the time so my main goal is to be truthful about everything and not just specific things.
I've always wanted my lyrics to say something meaningful and, you know, you always want to tell a message with your art. So yes, as I continue to write music, I will write about things that are real and things that I feel aren't written about a lot.
It's strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, 'What?' I'm really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It's cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted people to focus on the content.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
When you have a lot of time, when you're not working a full-time job, you have a lot of time to question things and think about things. Some of it's about romantic relationships, some of it's about drugs, about religion, about this mass of humanity traveling through life doing all this crazy stuff, not really knowing why or for what.
If I had something to say about my lyrics, I would say they were about different subjects concerning the darkness and the night.
I didn't even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.
There's a variety and depth to the song topics I get to write about in children's music and books: being able to write about things I wouldn't normally write about, like a disappointing pancake, or monsters or opposite day is really different than writing about heartbreak and relationships.
I've tended to write lyrics alone. The emotion of the melody comes first. But what stimulates us are usually these dreamy minor chords. We all feel we're an emotional band as far as writing, but the specific emotions tend to be of a melancholic, or of an almost sinister-yet-beautiful nature. I never think of our songs as being about boy-girl relationships or ultra-female. The music comes from a universal place.
Every song has a different genesis, or feeling. Usually the lyrics, I don't really know what it's all about, I just kinda do it. I mean, there's a combination of, like you're saying, that kind of lyrics about commitment or vaguely relationship lyrics mixed with jokey 90s Beck-style non-sequiturs and stuff.
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