A Quote by Lights

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.
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 was writing a lot of true love songs-true love almost gone wrong but saved at the last moment...Many of the best songs get written in a state of abject misery. I prefer to write fewer songs and have less cataclysmic events in my life...Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good.
Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.
It's really hard to write personal songs. I'm not good at writing ditties because as far as writing hit songs that you pitch to the national artist, I just don't write that way.
I've written a lot of songs in the last couple years, but writing a lot of songs doesn't always mean writing good songs.
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!
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.
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.
Songwriting is a craft. Writing good songs on a a consistent basis doesn not happen spontaneously. In fact, most of our best songwriters learned to write good songs by writing a lot of not so good ones. Education matters in songwriting, just as it matters for physicists, chemists, doctors, lawyers and MBAs. Education lays the foundataion on which to build experience.
Even writing verses from my first album, there were songs that I didn't use because I just felt that they weren't really for me. But I think that happens naturally when you write songs. You're in a different mood in every session. There's so many songs out there that could potentially be used by other artists.
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
Obviously when you write songs you've got to record them, but just writing the songs is one of my favorite things to do.
I'm more of a songwriter. I love writing songs. I love writing my songs. It's always been writing for me, and it makes it different when you're writing for yourself.
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.
If prolific is writing a lot of songs, I'm that. If it's writing a lot of good songs, I'm something else.
I started writing songs so late and I had so many day jobs - jobs just to pay the bills. So, when I started doing this, I said, "I'm never gonna do anything to corrupt this. Never try to "sell it." Never gonna do anything to make this a job." I can go five months without writing a song. Then something will happen and I'll write six songs in a week.
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