A Quote by Lizzy Plapinger
I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process.
Related Quotes
I approach song writing three different ways. One way is where I write the initial melody and lyrics first and then take it in to the producer to collaborate. Another way is where the producer sends me his initial musical track ideas and then I write the lyrics and melody over his track. The third way is where we just jam out in the studio and see what we come up with.
I'm sort of old-fashioned in the sense that I like to write something that I feel I could just perform alone, obviously, because I do that a lot in concert. So I try to make a song where there is as much that is as distinct as I can get it, just if I'm playing it or if I'm singing it. That makes me really do a lot of stuff in the guitar work when I sit and try to figure out how to indicate what sort of dynamic I'm aiming for. Where, rhythmically, I want to go. That's sort of what ties a lot of different records together, is that it's usually always based around me singing and playing a guitar.
On one occasion I got this really bizarre horoscope thing from someone. It was a full-on zodiac reading, charting and intersecting all this stuff. It was over 20 pages long and said we're destined to be together. That was totally bizarre. I don't really believe in that stuff anyway, although I do believe in Karma because it's already bitten me on the ass so many times.
And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.
I think when things get hard with your family, it's really easy to want to isolate yourself. The world is so harsh, so when stuff happens outside, you want to go to your family, but when stuff happens inside your family, you sort of start to feel like, 'I'm alone. There is no place I can go to where just nothing will happen to me.'
When I start a book, I write a minimum of five pages every day, except weekends. If I'm going on a ski trip, I take my computer with me, get up at six, do my five pages, and then go skiing.
I used to write on pads with a pen but had trouble reading the words the next day. Years later, Bob Dylan taught me to just write and write on a laptop computer. Then I'd print that out. When it was time to write a song, I'd go through the pages and sing melodies to words that moved me.
If [Sean] doesn't see me a few days or if I'm really, really busy, and I just sort of get a glimpse of him, or if I'm feeling depressed without him even seeing me, he sort of picks up on it. And he starts getting that way. So I can no longer afford to have artistic depressions. If I start wallowing in a depression, he'll start coming down with stuff, so I'm sort of obligated to keep up. And sometimes I can't, because something will make me depressed and sure as hell he'll get a cold or trap his finger in a door or something, and so now I have sort of more reason to stay healthy or bright.
There is a diverse meaning to the lyrics as well. A lot of the stuff I write is from a personal level but is not really anything that I care about if people get or not so I write alot of the stuff as metaphors based in Viking mythology and Viking History which is sort of my main interest in life and sort of my main atmosphere in life.
I write two pages - that's all I write. It takes me about an hour. I've learned that's all I'm capable of and to push myself beyond that is foolhardy. It's a very delicate thing, and I will not abuse it. So I write two pages, then I get up from the computer.
I could literally go on for pages upon pages about Mattis and how influential this man was to me and many others who fought alongside him.
It's bizarre: sometimes I go through periods where I really want to put a song up online, and sometimes I'm sort of busy with other things... It's very much a hobby, that kind of thing. I sort of post it more for maybe my mom's benefit, and suddenly she says, 'It's got 50,000 views.' And I think maybe I should've put it as private.
I've been a fan since I was a kid of that sort of bump-in-the-night stuff. I don't tend to go in too much for the slash-and-burn-'em or the walker kills on 'The Walking Dead.' That stuff's not necessarily the stuff that frightens me or gets me going. It's more the terror of waiting, the thriller aspects, that I find compelling.
What would you do if you were me? Tell me. Please tell me! But you're far from this. Your fingers turn the strangeness of these pages that somehow connect my life to yours. Your eyes are safe. The story is just another few hundred pages of your mind. For me, it's here. It's now. I have to go through with this, considering the cost at every turn. Nothing will be the same.
I feel like it's such an exercise in, like, several things to read a ton of 'Cosmo's or 'Glamour's or whatever, all at once. Because you start realizing how they're just talking about nothing for many pages, and they sort of lull you into this hypnotic state.
I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.
