A Quote by Ben Hopkins
Rather than writing about my experiences with other people, 'Ugly Cherries' is the first song I've ever written about myself. It's a confrontation: an attempt to unpack my own queerness with humor and self care.
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I have ventured out and written about real-life experiences that I haven't gone through myself, but I've known people to go through them. In the past, I've always written about my experiences and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through.
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.
I thank God that I became addicted to pain pills, because the process of going through rehab taught me more about myself than I had ever known. I wish I would have learned what I learned about myself I learned in rehab, going through life. You know, we're all raised to be loved. We care about what other people think of us, and sometimes to our detriment we let feedback and the opinions of others shape our own self-image. I was guilty of that, too. But in my professional life, I had mastered it. I didn't care what the critics said.
When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.
I never really focus on writing for other people, to be honest. Every song I've ever written was for me to sing. Maybe if I'm writing for a rapper, but I'd still write it as though it was for myself and then sometimes I'm actually asked to do the part.
My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.
That's about 90 percent of my theological life - radical self-care. Put your own oxygen mask on first. I watch the self-talk that goes through my mind, and if I am being critical with myself, I shake myself out of it.
That's what I love about songwriting - that you can write something about your own experiences and think it's completely specific to you, and then people can take away a completely different meaning for themselves. I really love that. I think you've been successful at writing a song when it has a larger life than yourself.
In the past, I've always written about my experiences, and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through. I'm still keeping it young and edgy, but I'm definitely putting more of a mainstream twist to it.
If I have experienced something in my life, it's probably going to be written about, and I don't particularly care if the person I'm writing about wants to be written about.
Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.
That's one thing brands are understanding is, I'm the blogger who's not writing about fashion. I'm not writing about beauty. I'm not writing about gossip. I'm not writing about politics. I'm writing about all of that. I'm the person they can come to if they just want to reach people who care and have their fingers on pop culture.
My feeling is that, and I've been writing about my family over the years, although it might make them feel uncomfortable, people generally like to be written about. If I've written a song about the family, they enjoy being mentioned in the songs. Nobody's confronted me and said 'don't write any songs about me.
Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.
I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.
I sometimes suffer from insomnia and one of the first times it ever happened I was like, "I don't know what to do with myself," so I started writing a song and by morning it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.
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