A Quote by Graham Colton
The exciting part about sitting down and writing songs, playing shows, or being a musician in general is that you never know where those songs and that music is going to take you. There's such a cool feeling about that the phone could ring tomorrow and someone could say "he guess what? your song..." That really is cool.
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Song writing is about the male-female relationship. Yes, there are songs of, of brotherhood and politics but very rarely do we write about computers or, there are car songs, cars are cool. But even in the car songs, it's, ah, usually gets down to me and my baby and my car.
At the beginning of my career, I saw an opportunity to forge new ground and focus on songwriting. Not many people were doing that at the time. Pretty much nobody. I thought I could write some really cool songs that would rise above all these dozens of genres that exist within dance music. I'd make it more about the songs. For the last 20 years, I've been sharing stories of my life through music. I've been writing songs about my life.
Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, "I could sing that song. I've got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs; it is actually important to do songs they're familiar with. Also, I love those songs. In a way, I think I've changed people's perceptions of what a cabaret show like this could be.
People think it's not necessary to talk to another human being, and that's the part of it that I don't like. Some people will go up and want to talk to you about the music, which is cool; they're enthusiastic about the songs and know stuff about it, or, 'I really like your music. Nice to meet you.'
If I were doing a real rock show, slapping the phone book in time to the music, grooving with the songs, then it would matter to know how I felt about what I was playing. You can't fake it in that situation. But I'm just counting them down as they appear on the chart, 1 through 40. What really matters is what I say between the songs.
All those experiences were a chance to learn more about music. Playing with the Valley band is like such a "live" band. I mean, really, in many ways Bright Eyes is really a studio project. We form bands to tour, but it really is - you know, we take the songs and we figure out how to decorate them and it's all in the studio, we build the songs that way. Whereas Mystic Valley Band was the exact opposite, where everybody knows what they are gonna be playing on the song and there's sort of a general stylistic approach, and then it's just plug in and play.
If a song I'm lucky enough to be a part of comes on the radio, it's definitely really cool and exciting, but I can't focus on anything but the song. Same if one of my songs comes on in a restaurant. I can't just carry on a conversation.
That's what is so great about being able to record a 13-song album. You can do a very eclectic group of songs. You do have some almost pop songs in there, but you do have your traditional country, story songs. You have your ballads, your happy songs, your sad songs, your love songs, and your feisty songs.
For someone like me, music is all I've ever thought about - playing big shows, and then, when you take something that is based around your music and put it in a completely different medium, it's a really interesting and cool emotion to watch.
What's the coolest thing in the world is when you have fans that know the lyrics to your songs. That's amazing! Such a great feeling! When I go out there and am playing "Grinnin' In Your Face" and people are singing the lyrics to it, that's amazing to me. I'm actually taking a song where people wouldn't know it, and I'm bringing it back. It's a really cool feeling.
Female artists I love the most are Fiona Apple, Paramour and Regina Spektor - those girls that really write amazing songs themselves, and they're younger and cool. I'm not quite sure I could ever write songs like any of them, but if I could, I would.
I like playing... I don't know. I think that's what was really exciting about playing Knives, too, from the beginning was that you get to kind of do both of that. She's almost like two different people, but that's what's cool about it, because I get to show her growth and that's the thing that's really cool about Knives, you get to really see her grow up from being meek and innocent and naïve at the beginning to this powerful girl who is going for what she really believes in and what she really wants.
I've just really been into melody and lyrics and songwriting. Writing a rap, to me, is easy. I could write a rap like that. But writing songs and melodies and s**t that's hopefully going to stick around for 30, 40 years is f**king hard...If you have good songs and you're talented, people will eventually come to your shows, people will buy your music.
When you get in the middle of a career and you're successful, people come and offer you things. My biggest fear was that if you try to do something else and you're trying to build your music career, and then you say, "I'm going to go do a movie," and you're terrible, you can really hurt your music career because as a musician, the goal is to be cool. You're playing the guitar and you're in front of all these people and your vibe is to be as cool as you can possibly be.
I think if you sing a song for the first time to your mom and dad, or your friends, and they go, 'That's pretty cool'-if you're playing at the local bar somewhere, or the coffee shop, singing songs, or if you have a gig somewhere and you're singing your own songs, I think that's some version of making it. ... It's not just about having commercial success; it's about having a great life.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
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