A Quote by Benmont Tench
In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.
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Making a record? You've got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it's the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you're already 90% there. I always tell young people it's all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs.
I wrote songs with the guys from Air Supply for their record... So I was just writing songs.
Obviously when you write songs you've got to record them, but just writing the songs is one of my favorite things to do.
I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.
I had this contract to write songs for people when I was about 18. I don't think any of them were taken up; I was a complete failure at it! But I've kept doing it, writing little songs for myself.
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.
You want songs to sound cohesive with the other songs on the record but when you first start writing you just want to write to tell the truth.
I love good momentum. It makes everybody happy and in this time that we're living in, especially musically speaking, if you can make a record that has more than 4 or 5 songs deep and it has a good variety of songs. You don't frontload it with those first couple of songs. You continue the record taking the listener on a journey, musically speaking. I think you've really got something there.
Every song that we wrote for the first album made it. We didn't think about writing a bunch of songs and picking the best ones. We had to just make the best songs we ever wrote.
I'd always wanted to do an R&B and soul record; a friend with a studio asked to come by and record a couple of songs, maybe just make a 45. Then the songs started to pour out, and pretty soon we had eight or 10 songs down.
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
When I was younger it was a lot of quantity over quality. Just writing, writing, writing. Hundreds of songs. Now it's fewer songs. If I write 10 songs I believe 80 percent of them are good and gonna be used.
I used to write songs that mimicked other songs that I would hear as a kid, cos I was 12 years old when I was writing those, right. And you hear a radio so all I'd write about was [sings] "hey girl, look at you", you know what I mean. I think that even doing that made it easier for me to write non-personal songs because, from a kid, I never wrote personal songs, they were always like mimicking. And now I'm just trying to understand my writing and where it's coming from.
You know, when you're making a record, you come up with 15, 20 songs. Then they start to fall by the wayside as your interest wanes. It's kind of like a process of elimination to determine which songs wind up on the record.
I've always thought that whether I'm writing or not, I've gotta pick the best songs, whether or not they're mine. I'm not gonna sing them just because I wrote them. I've gotta find the best songs to make the best record I can.
When I was writing some of songs for the record in Galapagos it was the feeling of being there I wanted to evoke more than anything. I remember hearing all the parts of the songs in my mind when I was walking around over the lava fields.
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