People listen to the music and sense what it is about. Sometimes they know exactly what the songs are about, sometimes they interpret their own meaning to the music, and thats great when this happens because it shows its striking a chord.
If I don't already know a song's chord progression, I'll stop writing and try to figure it out. I can occasionally listen to unstructured, amelodic ambient music, but I prefer no music. I don't need silence - I can write just about anywhere - but music is a major distraction.
When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.
My aim is always catchy songs, or songs with meaning and I want to write music people can relate to, about things anyone could go through, just real, honest music... songs that mean something, songs that are inspired by true life events.
Music is completely not reality. There's nothing about music that has any meaning at all. A lot of people disagree with that, but it's basically true. You can listen to a piece of music, and fifteen people will give you fifteen answers of what it's about.
Music is for making people happy, lyrics tell them who they are. Everybody is free to interpret the music, as they want. The lyrics of my songs are about different things, but it's all about my issues.
That’s why I make music. When I listen to my favorite music made by other people, that’s what it does to me. So as a musician, I’m just trying to do the same thing with music I make. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when someone comes to me and says the music I’ve made has affected them emotionally, that’s the most gratifying part of my job.
Sometimes I make songs about girls, and I say 'he,' or I'll make songs about guys, and I say 'she,' or sometimes they're exactly what they're about. I feel like it just allows me to get a lot more perspective.
There's not one thing in particular that influences my music, but I write about what I know. It's based in personal experience. That's not to say all the songs are biographical, because sometimes it's what I've seen in others' lives.
People showed me this way of dealing with music, writing songs, thinking about music and shows and our community and the fact that it doesn't have to be about being popular or fashion or making money.
Sometimes you hate your music, sometimes you don't. Sometimes I listen to the record and it's really hard for me, and other times I listen to it and I give myself a pat on the back.
I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like 'Indian classical music' and 'ragas,' and all of that's new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating - one doesn't know where to begin sometimes.
Big productions, to me, are great - like, I love going to Vegas and seeing shows - but I think that sometimes it's distracting, especially when you are there to listen to the music.
I'm writing songs that connect to millions of people. And that happens for a reason. I don't really worry too much about people who aren't into it because that's the beauty of music. It's subjective. If every single person in the world loved our music, then that'd be weird.
I think that if people show up in jeans and chains, it's great that all parts of culture are interested in music. People forget sometimes that it's about the music, not how you act and dress.
That's the thing: pop music has sometimes had a bad reputation for being about a lot of other stuff than the music. And I am just a lover of pop music. I love pop. I love big choruses. Dramatic choruses - they're the best thing in the world. And I do this because I love making music and performing the songs.