A Quote by Kano
Lyrics came quite easy early on in my career. But I always wanted to push it further and stand out a bit more. We were coming from the garage era when lyrics were simplified, purposefully, to work in the club environment. They were about hyping up a crowd or bigging up a DJ. Moving into grime, our lyrics became more in-depth.
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Initially we were spitting lyrics over garage beats, in that eight-bar gap where there wasn't a vocal. But we were rebellious towards garage because they were rebellious towards us; a lot of their gatekeepers said grime was too violent.
The lyrics came out of necessity. When we started writing the record, we started in a more fusion environment and that got boring really quick and that wasn't what we were about on an organic level.
[Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.
There were times in my career I went a little further than I wanted because of expectations. Doing certain things onstage when children were in the audience, wearing certain clothes, singing certain lyrics.
But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.
I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.
I wanted to write some lyrics that had some meaning to them, lyrics that were meaningful to me and hopefully people can take something from that.
I was just thinking of Rush. I went to see Rush a few years ago, because my record label guy in the States really wanted to go. We had crazy good seats. It was fascinating watching the crowd - mostly men - who were so moved by these really esoteric lyrics. I don't know Neil Peart's lyrics super well, but they're not that straightforward to me.
I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.
Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?
I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.
Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.
I don't know why, but there's a certain element of panic in writing lyrics that I'm not sure I enjoy. I don't write lyrics first, ever. I've never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought - it's music first.
We treat the lyrics like the woman any man wants to impress the most. We give the lyrics all the attention we can. I'm not sure other formats are remembering that the lyrics are what it's all about.
All my early lyrics were about confidence.
When I first started writing lyrics and stuff, I was writing it to garage, and obviously garage kind of progressed to grime.
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