A Quote by Benji Madden

I feel like, if you're writing the same songs you were writing when you were 17 in your 30s, something's wrong. As a grown man, you're more confident, and you have less to prove.
I have this theory about us. When we started writing our own songs, we were 17 years old. When you're 17, you write songs for other 17-year-olds. We stopped growing musically when we were 17. We still write songs for 17-year-olds.
When I wrote for Jordan Knight, I was 17 or 18, they were pretty much the only songs I was writing. By the time people like Christina or Usher came around, I was able to know that I was writing for different points of view and people that might not want to say certain things. So you have to be considerate of whichever artist you're writing for.
Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.
The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.
My best mates when I was 19 were all in their 30s. I used to go to all their house parties, and they were crazier than the guys who were 17, 18. They were so much more liberated than the people who were apparently shackle-free.
I think that if you listen to the same exact genre of music that you play, it is so easy to be influenced by it. There will be times where we are writing a song, and then realize that it songs like something we just heard on the radio. There was a while when we were writing, that I didn't listen to music because I didn't want to be influenced.
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
Lolita' was written at a time when we were heavily listening to more dance, electronic, and trance, and then on the flip side we were writing country-pop songs like 'Born Bob Dylan' or our acoustic songs, or trip-hop.
Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.
Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.
Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.
I feel like I've grown up a bit. I'm a bit more confident, and I've been reading more, and I've had a little more time to myself. I went on this writing trip to gather my thoughts about where and who I am in this world, and why we're all here.
When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.
I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.
I think as a woman, the more you embrace who you are, and your own opinions, and how you feel, and the body you have been given- I think the more confident you are and the more beautiful you look. I definitely feel that my confidence has grown as I've entered my 30s. I have my own opinion - it's very valid - and that shows on the outside as well.
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