A Quote by Dean Lewis
I'm not trying to get across some sort of message or statement. I'm just literally trying to write the best songs I can write. It's all that matters.
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I was never trying to write a hit. I was just trying to write good songs and get a message out, and it was my great good fortune to be popular.
When I see an entire community disenfranchised, it disturbs me. Not that I'm a message guy, per se. I write about people. I like to write about human beings, not crap political rhetoric. I've tried to avoid that all my life. When I wrote about soldiers in Vietnam, I wasn't trying to make a political statement. I was trying to write about how screwed things were for soldiers, and how they still are.
I'm always trying to challenge everyone to raise the game on the artistic level. We are supposed to be the best. Make sure we don't get complacent or comfortable, and always trying to push the limit on trying to write great songs. At the end of the day it's why we do what we do.
I love writing Christmas music. It's some of the easiest songs to write... You draw from your own memories - it's kind of a wellspring of inspiration, in a way. With other songs, you know, you spend six months just trying to figure out what to write about.
Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.
Sometimes I write music, sometimes I don't. I think I'm just writing more what's close to my heart, and musical stuff is close to my heart, and it's fun to write, and when something's fun to write you don't think about what statement you're trying to make or what genre you're trying to hone in on.
I like albums where all the songs are written in one go. If you're trying to create the number-one album with the best songs ever, I get why you'd want to write for three years and pick the best ones, but for me, I'd rather hear a group of songs that are all expressing a state, or time of your life. I think it's more that.
We're always trying to outdo ourselves, trying to do better, trying to write better songs. I think we want to inspire other people as well, so that's what we'll try to do through future songs.
Sometimes I'm trying to communicate a feeling. Sometimes I can't piece it together into any kind of coherant thesis. I'm just trying to evoke some kind of mood, and put some kind of idea in somebody's head. If Marshall McLuhan or Harold Innis were looking at it, they would tell you that the genre of rock music isn't the best way to deliver a political message because it distorts it, it makes it into entertainment. Perhaps the best political message is just to speak it to somebody. I think that's something I'm always writing about in songs, just how to mediate, how to present something.
When I have a lot of emotion going on, I'll write. I write letters to my family, my boyfriend, anyone I'm trying to get my point across to. It's easier for me to express myself.
I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.
The truth is, that's what we moved to Nashville to do - to learn how to write hit songs. We weren't necessarily trying to get on college radio. We're trying for mass appeal.
I don't really premeditate what I write my songs about; you know, they just kind of happen, and I can't start writing songs to please a certain group of people or propagate a certain message all the time. That's just not how my songwriting works - it just sort of comes out, and the songs are what they are.
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.
Throughout all of the changes that have happened in my life, one of the priorities I've had is to never change the way I write songs and the reasons I write songs. I write songs to help me understand life a little more. I write songs to get past things that cause me pain. And I write songs because sometimes life makes more sense to me when it's being sung in a chorus, and when I can write it in a verse.
I had my whole life to write a bunch of crappy songs and then play them in front of people and think, 'All right, that one out of these seven is really good; it's a keeper.' But on this second album, to be honest, I probably wrote about 50 songs where I was just trying to write a hit.
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