A Quote by Glenn Tipton

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.
I started putting down my own pen and spending some time searching for the best songs out there possible. It doesn't matter if I wrote them or not.
I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.
I just do as many songs as I can and then I put it together when I get sort of in the middle, maybe 30 songs, that's when I start really thinking about the name of the cd and what direction all the songs are going, that kind of stuff. But I don't ever want to corner myself, I just want to be able to express whatever I can express in songs and just pick after that.
My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.
Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process.
Writin songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along. There are just some ideas that you get that are really hard to edit out; it's hard to stop thinking about some bad ideas. So you just finish it and you end up putting it on a record.
I love writing thank-you notes. There's something very nostalgic to me about the feel of a card and putting pen to paper. How many times in our lives are we required to put pen to paper anymore?
I also tried to focus on songs that Billie Holiday wrote, songs that she had a hand in shaping, like "Strange Fruit"; songs that were written for her or songs that she wrote herself, like "Fine and Mellow" or "God Bless The Child."
Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.
I started dealing with my emotional pain by writing. I always had been a writer, but just not songs. Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.
When I wrote for myself before as an artist, I probably wrote about 15, 20 songs a year. I thought that was a lot. Then, when I first started writing for the people, I wrote, like, 65 songs in a year for two years in a row.
I just started writing for my own amusement and occasionally singing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Then I wrote "The Rose," and through a series of divine things that I had no control over and had no idea were going to happen, it got in the movie, and that changed everything.
We started making independent records. We started in '94 until about 2000 when just kind of just did it ourselves... We'd write our own songs. No one cared... At some point, we decided to try and write our own original stuff and one of the last independent records is when we wrote the song 'I Can Only Imagine.'
And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.
Some songs started from a bass line, some started from having the full lyric and Jim, my drummer, who's also the first guy I've been in the studio with him since 16, sometimes he'd have an idea and I'd put a lyric to it and then the track evolves, there's no set way to write a song.
We got the goals early in the game and I thought we just got a little too comfortable with things. They started changing their defense, they started going from a zone defense to a man-to-man and doing different things. We got sloppy, and I give them credit for the way they played. We got sloppy and had some turnovers there. We did have some opportunities, one-on-one with the goalie in the second there, but we need to finish things. They found some momentum in their defense and were able to crawl back in.
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