A Quote by Johnny Rivers
Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.
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There's always gonna be guys who are just wonderful singers and probably shouldn't be writing songs. Then there's always gonna be guys who move up the ranks writing. I don't know what's healthier or what's the best thing - probably whatever yields the best songs.
I remember hanging out at Starbucks. There were these older guys who would sit around and play Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. I was just so in love with music. I would just go hang out with them, and I would try to sing and harmonize with them. I didn't even know the songs.
I wrote songs with the guys from Air Supply for their record... So I was just writing songs.
We used to rehearse and that's where the roots of Dream Theater formed. Y'know, we used to play cover songs and jam to [Iron] Maiden and stuff but we were writing songs and it was this metal, loud style and we'd constantly get knocks on our door, because the rehearsal rooms were right next door to each other, and these jazz guys would be like, "Can you guys turn it down a little?"
I started writing songs at eight. Heartbreak songs - don't ask me why. It was the stuff I used to hear, so I imitated it. I used to write songs about guys cheating. Could you imagine!
I'm talking about the '60s really. People go interview these guys and ask them, "Do you still think music can change the world?" I mean, go talk to Graham Nash about that. What's he going to tell you? Ask David Crosby. These guys are still out there. They're playing their hits at Staples Center and those are really valuable songs. I'm talking about a couple of the guys who got knee-deep into really believing music had a great service beyond radio. I believe it did. And I think a lot of those songs are great.
I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.
There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.
When I was younger it was a lot of quantity over quality. Just writing, writing, writing. Hundreds of songs. Now it's fewer songs. If I write 10 songs I believe 80 percent of them are good and gonna be used.
My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
Bob Dylan and John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, these are soul guys. Bruce Springsteen might not sing like Otis Redding, but he sings with white soul. He's singing and he's writing songs from the bottom of his gut.
I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.
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.
I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.
When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.
I always been writing songs since I was, like, six. I was listening to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Frankie Laine and people like that. I was just in the backyard writing songs.
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