A Quote by Billy Bragg

There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them.
Whether you are aware of them or not, whether you recognize them as spiritual or not, you probably have had the experiences of silence, or transcendence, or the Divine-a few seconds, a few minutes that seem out of time; a moment when the ordinary looks beautiful, glowing; a deep sense of being at peace, feeling happy for no reason. When these experiences come...believe in them. They reflect your true nature.
Singing is my form of expression; it's what I've always done and I hope that in some capacity I'll always have that outlet. In the next few weeks I'm getting together with many varied kinds of songwriters. I'd really like to explore a few things and see what I can come out with.
I can make films. And some of them come out good, and some of them come out better, and some of them come out worse. But I've been very lucky over the years to be able to sustain the length of career that I've had.
Sometimes I'm just a little bit too honest. There was some things that were going on behind the scenes that I didn't like because it's not what hip-hop is about. Hip-hop is about honesty and it's about being real to the people, and I kinda felt like there's some instances where some artists aren't 100% honest with the people. Their integrity is lacking sometimes. And sometimes it comes out.
The Control movie is not about suicide, it's not about epilepsy, it's not about everything else, but it's about an individual who was thinking out of the box and took his own passion and created music. His negativity and whatever else, he bottled them up and spilled them out onto his world of music. I think a sense of hope comes from the end of the movie, in my mind. Some people come out of the movie and think, 'That's the saddest thing I've ever seen,' and others come out and think, 'God, there's optimism.'
I don't want everybody to try to sound like something; I think that God has given us each unique talents and passions. The things that come out of me will be different than my neighbor, because I have a totally different set of relationships, totally different set influences and personality traits.
The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
It's just about being honest. I listen to a lot of stuff that's out there, some of which I wrote, and I'm like, 'Where is that? Where's the honesty?' So that's what I want to get to in my music now.
I would just be constantly writing all these zingers - like, 'Burn. That would really get her.' And I know people are going to obsess over who it's about, because they think they have all my relationships mapped out. But there's a reason there are not any overt call-outs in that song. My intent was not to create some gossip-fest. I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives.
I don't really know what emotions are going to come out in songs when I'm writing them until I step back and listen to them as a whole.
The time came around where the label was like, "Well, if you want something to come out in early 2017, it's going to have to be done by, like, so-and-so." So I plucked some of the old songs and wrote some new ones. Everybody keeps asking me, "Is this your L.A. record?" I was doing songs in a bedroom in New York, I was doing it in a bedroom in L.A. The only difference is when I look out the window, there's palm trees instead of snow.
I write about people who are usually damaged or neglected by society finding each other and forming relationships that are quite extraordinary and in some cases life-saving. I've had a few of those relationships, which I value highly.
It turns out that with Twitter data alone, we can go quite some way into figuring out someone's personality.
Understand that writing is like an athletic activity. To play tennis well, you expect to keep practicing, but for some reason with writing, you think you should come out fresh the first time.
As soon as me and Willow started releasing music, that's one thing that the whole world took away is, okay, they unlocked another step of honesty. If these guys can be honest about everything, then we can be more honest.
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