A Quote by Gary Louris
I can't write from the subconscious actually, because a lot of the time when I co-write with other people, I'm writing for them as opposed to for myself. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to want to give them their voice, since it's most likely going to be on their record, or somebody else's record. And I find for more commerial-style music, people want simplicity, less vagueness, and less space to fill between the lines, so to speak. So I can't be quite as ethereal and mystical.
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I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record. Originally I was not writing songs for myself. ....And I can say this, most of the people who have recorded my songs are songwriters themselves. ... Even if I don't release it myself, somebody else might hear it and want to record it. When you write a song, it gives it that potential. When you write a song, a song has longevity. ... So I wanted to sing inspirational music, and that's exactly how I approached it-only the words have been changed to declare my relationship with God. Songwriting is my gift from God.
I want to do a stripped-down album. That style is actually where my heart is - storytelling and just letting the voice and the lyrics talk for themselves. I still want to write the perfect song and sing it in the most honest, undressed way. But I feel like I have to gather more experiences and more layers in my voice. I have to live more to be able to tell this tale. So I'm saving my folk record. I have a feeling nobody will understand it.
My philosophy on writing a song for myself is that I always, always, always want to write a song. I always want to write a song. I realize that as a record producer or a singer or whatever I might not, if I recorded on myself or someone else, the first time out I might not give it the right treatment, so that the world or many people will accept it and it'll be a public hit, or anything like that.
The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it's not good enough, write another one.
There's lots of bands where somebody will write lyrics and somebody else will sing them. It works for a lot of people, but that feels weird to me. I don't mean this in a bad way at all but it just feels fake.. I guess in my heart of hearts, whether the person has a good voice or not I want [the songs] to come from them. I don't know why.
When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.
What Grandfather Burton did for me was to write a sacred family record, the small plates of Burton, or, if you will, an inspirational family record. Much of what we now regard as scripture was not anything more or less than men writing of their own spiritual experiences for the benefit of their posterity. These scriptures are family records. Therefore, as a people we ought to write of our own lives and our own experiences to form a sacred record for our descendants. We must provide for them the same uplifting, faith-promoting strength that the ancient scriptures now give us.
I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.
I record stuff all the time, like little vocal things. I write random things down... Sometimes I just get things stuck in my head and I record them, and that actually becomes a song quite a lot of the time.
I set myself a rule before I actually write a tune to the lyrics, and the rule is that I've got to take the lyrics on to a level of understanding before I can actually write music to them. What I'm doing is interpretation. If I don't write the lyrics, therefore I must interpret them to the best of my ability. So my rule is that I must understand it, but I don't necessarily have to accept.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines - I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn't mean they're more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.
I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.
In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.
I never write a tune before the lyrics. I get the lyrics and then I write around them. Some people write music and the lyrics come along and they say, 'Oh yeah, I've got something to fit that.' If that's the way people write songs, I feel like you might as well just go to the supermarket.
I want my records to be the most magnificent and glorious-sounding records, but also want them to be the most intense and fragile. And I want that all in the same ten-second bit of music. And it just takes a while to get there, and I don't write the songs and then go and record them, I write in the studio. So it takes a while to kind of piece them together and know that that's what I want it to be like. And I constantly throw the bits up in the air and see how they land, and eventually they kind of keep landing in the same place and that's where it stays.
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