A Quote by Cody Johnson

I really think it's just the people you put around you. For instance, you mentioned "Kiss Goodbye," that was a song that was brought to me by Dan Couch and Dale Oliver. They had already started writing it without. They had put together this whole demo of music with no lyrics.
Without changing my style and who I am, they [Trent Willmon and Dan Couch and Dale Oliver ] know how to draw those things out of me. It was a really cool experience on this record, because I tried really hard on the writing to make sure that I wasn't just writing it just like I wanted to.
The truth is the music is really an incredible personal part of the movie. When I was drawing the storyboards for Watchmen, I had just gone to my iPod and was grabbing music. It took me about two weeks to really put my playlist together. But once I had it, I kinda just put my headsets on and drew for five months. But that music's the music that's in the movie.
The more I started going through my own things in life, my faith got put to the test, and I had to believe that God is real in my heart, my lord and savior Jesus Christ, and I can't run from that. I'll always put that in my music or it just wouldn't be right. People can take it or leave it, I really don't care, because it's for me to put it on records. And I will continue to put more of a spiritual nature in my music.
Every once in awhile, Allison Abbate would drop a note and say, "It's going really well!," and I was like, "Great!" So, I had not seen it in about two years. They went off and started shooting, and I saw it all put together with almost the final sound mix and it was remarkable. I was so, so happy and relieved, not in the sense that I thought something had gone wrong, but you just don't know what something is going to be like until you see it put together. Everyone stepped up and brought their A+ game.
One of the first places where I started to respond to song lyrics was in reggae music. A lot of what I was responding to were references to the Old Testament. It was not that I had to adapt the lyrics to the sound. Reggae and the Old Testament are bound up together. There wasn't anything that I had to do.
I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.
I was not a product of what happened to me, what I had been through, where I had come from. And when I began to realize who I really was, that God had created me, put my DNA, everything together was perfectly precisionly put together by God and that I was valuable, that's what "You're All That".
What really surprised me was that we had released the song 'Kondoram'... without any video and it still garnered so many views. The song had only lyrics and no visuals.
At first, I was using my sister Susan's lyrics, as I could not write myself, only the music. And then one day, she and I had a fight, and she threatened to take away the lyrics from all the songs that I put the lyrics to, so it was that day that I began writing my first lyric to the music.
For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demo-graphic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
I started listening to The-Dream a lot. That's when I really got into writing songs. I like the way he put lyrics and makes his songs. So I was like, 'All right,' and I just started writing. That's when I started wanting to be a songwriter.
Sometimes I'll have a whole song done without having a beat - I'll just rap on an instrumental tempo and recreate a whole new song just around the lyrics.
The hardest thing for me is getting started. If I'm writing a script, really 90 per cent of it would be just walking around, climbing the walls, just trying to put the idea together. Then the final 10 per cent would be writing it.
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.
Mercer was very clever. He knew the way Southerners spoke and put that into his lyrics. But in that whole era, you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic. Cole Porter was better than anybody, and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.
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