A Quote by Estelle
The most personal track would have to be 'Love The Way We Used To.' It's one of the songs that I listen to outside of all the records that I wrote.
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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.
Most of the songs I wrote are personal.
I loved music. Music was a big thing and so I started collecting records. I had a large collection of jazz records and that was something else I used to listen to. At night, there was a - what the heck was his name? There was a famous - Jazzbo Collins, I used to listen to at night, and some other guys.
I think if you listen to our records, they come at different points in your life. When people say to me that Stars records have themes, I think what they mean is we write songs - or try to write songs - that are timeless. We try to write songs that catch you at the right time in your life, and that you can hold on to. We write kitchen sink songs. If you're doing the dishes or you're driving to your mom's funeral, or if you're getting over having done MDMA and you feel sad, you can listen to Stars because we're not going to demand of you that you be cool.
There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probaby, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.
There's no way anyone's going to understand my own personal experiences, where the songs came from, because they're mine. But I was very conscious of leaving loads of space in the songs so that people could interpret them with their own memories, feelings, and emotions. I love the process of taking stuff away so that people could finish the songs themselves. I was hoping it'd end up being as universal as possible, even though it comes from the most personal place.
I'm extremely happy, but I don't do love songs for the most part. It feels weird; that's such a personal thing to me. I'd rather live that in my real life and play a different character outside of that.
I care about the records I make and I love writing songs and some songs are really dear to me and they mean something. But the memory of making the records and the activities surrounding the records, the people involved in them is actually a bigger thing to me.
Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.
Most companies that are successful listen to people and see what they want and they make that. So when I used to make songs, I'd make mixtapes. The public would tell me what they like and then I would make songs based on what they like. That's how I knew 'Ridin' Dirty' was going to be big - they told me they liked this kind of music.
If you think of the way Howlin' Wolf made records, you get the feeling there wasn't a production manager onsite, or a publicist having his say on how he should sing the songs. When you listen to his records, you feel like you're tapping into his voice.
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.
We used to have a nanny who was obsessed with Take That. She was in love with Mark Owen and her room in our house would be plastered with Take That posters. Whenever I used to walk in the door she would be playing Take That songs to Harley, my daughter. That's when I fell in love with the song 'A Million Love Songs,' that song means a lot to me.
When I listen to my songs, they seem like pieces of music or art, like a painting that you look at. The reality is that, yes, when I wrote the songs upstairs or wherever, I was writing very specifically about my life or a specific subject matter that's very personal. I've never shied away from that. The vocals and the performance that come after the record, I don't think of that as confessional, but the core of the music is completely. It makes sense that people would see that as being the main thing. I guess not everyone is able to speak so candidly.
I do have a collection of mid-century, small-press science fiction and fantasy hardcovers that is my most focused and dedicated collection. Everything else I tend more to acquire or amass than collect. I have vinyl records I listen to all the time when I work. But I don’t collect records. I just buy records where the price seems right and it’s music I actually listen to.
When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work, my mother was the master, or the mistress. There were three or four songs she wrote about my father - songs about failed love.
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