I think it's very hard to write things about being joyful. I find that quite difficult. I think when you're happy, you don't want to write songs; you just want to enjoy being happy.
It's so easy to write songs about misery and hard times and sadness. It's much more difficult to write songs about happy and chirpy stuff.
Any negative review you write, they'll say, "Oh, you're being so mean." I think the problem with a lot of criticism is that too many critics either write just description or they write in a Mandarin jargon that only a handful of people can understand, or they write happy criticis - everything is good that they write about. I think that's really not good. I think it's damaged a lot of our critical voices.
Success for me is to feel happy - 80 percent of the time. That's been my goal in life. I think that comes from my father. He's a very optimistic, happy person. I'm not quite sure if I'll ever feel this, but I want to know how to be happy. I'm happy when I'm at work. I'm happy when I'm with my family or my dog. But there's always that feeling of, I'm not satisfied. I have that thing in my stomach where I just need to keep striving for things. In my mind, I want the fairy tale.
Sometimes I think we live in a world where, even when things are good, people always feel unsatisfied with wherever they are, so I think first I just want to enjoy being happy where I am now and not let my ambition take away from being in the moment.
You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive.
I want to be happy. We all want to be happy. I want to be treated like a normal human being, but I also want to be on stage in a fancy dress, so I'm trying to find a happy medium.
Well, I think some people are very happy in retirement. And in a year and a half I'm going to see how happy I feel in retirement. I'm just going to not work quite so hard, but I'll continue to write as long as God gives me breath.
I find it quite difficult to think that there's, you know, about 20 million people listening to my album that I wrote very selfishly to get over a breakup. I didn't write it being that it's going to be a hit.
One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.
I think I have to work to write a happy song. I write them carefully; they're simple and they're about when it's fun to walk down the street. You know? Because that's the best thing about when you're happy. It's just one little thing that makes you happy, and you're making friends. The kind of thing I can do is capture this moment.
Getting what you want doesn't make you happy, growth makes you happy, raising your level of consciousness. The problem with most people, they don't know what they want because they start at a very early age being programmed to think that they can't have what they want.
When I write songs I think about how it makes people feel, and I hope that when it goes into your ears you feel happy too. Not sexy happy but apple pie happy.
I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write.
There will be slow songs, sad songs, happy songs, songs about boys, and songs about being who you are. I'm making sure I'm happy with all of the songs, because if I am not happy with them, I can't expect anyone else to be, you know?
I don't write about anything I don't want to write about. I like to think I could write about anything pretty much that I chose to. I have been asked to write songs about specific things, and I've always been able to come up with the goods.
I think being married and in love and all of that changed how I write songs and what I want to sing about and the type of songs that I like.