A Quote by Marissa Nadler

For the first records I really never thought about anything other than the song itself. I thought that this was what the job of a songwriter was. I was really approaching music from a very different standpoint. To me when I was younger the song was just the melody. I think as I've gotten older and have been recording myself I've become aware of just how many layers can exist within a song besides just the main vocal.
Once you really get into a song, other than just listening to it, it forces you to go 'oh, they did this. I never would have thought of doing that,' when you deconstruct it. It's something you really can't do sometimes when you're just listening to a song. You have to really get into it.
What's really cool about 'This is Me' is that our friends loved the song. Older punk rock fans don't know 'The Greatest Showman,' haven't seen the movie. And they hear that song and they're like, 'This just sounds like an awesome New Found Glory song. This is a really good song.'
'Something More' is a song that I wrote not necessarily about country radio, more so about a lot of songs that were being pitched to me. I wrote that after song after song after song was just the same song, just a different melody, so I was just looking for something more to put on the record.
When I've produced a song, I try to record a vocal over it, and sometimes it becomes really hard. Sometimes I've already said a lot that I want to say within the production. The vocal is just adding to it, rather than it being a song.
I think the emotion that song carries makes it good. Because you have to produce around something - an emotional attachment and a feeling. The melody itself has a feeling in it. The keys, the tones, frequency, sonics, all of those have feelings in it. Like, it's the ghost within, the music itself. That's what makes the song even have a possibility of being great. The emotional connection. Because if you don't have that, I don't think you really have a song.
We haven't really changed, we've just gotten better at executing what we've always been trying to do. We're not really a band that has undergone huge stylistic decisions to change, we're just trying to follow the song. More and more, we let the song lead us - we don't try and put the song into a structure of our taste or our fashion.
There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.
It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.
Like anyone who records music or writes a song, I thought, 'Wouldn't that be cool if someday I were able to do this for a living?' But it was such a fluke, and it really all took me by surprise and I just held on for dear life. I really wasn't prepared. I really went into it naively with no experience.
My first song was called 'Portrait.' It would just be poetry, and I really never understood how to write the structure of writing a song. I just knew the feeling, and I knew it was supposed to break and change at the same part, so that's how I write music.
When I first started, I wasn't really aware of anything in the industry or aware of who I really was. I just put my music out there and tried to get as many people to hear it as possible. I hadn't really thought about the kind of music I wanted to make.
It's important for me to be respected and to be thought of as authentic and true to myself. So even if country music won't play my music, I'm not gonna go and record a party song or a truck song just to try to get spins. I have to be authentic to myself.
I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.
You don't realize how beautiful an idea is until you do it with other people. There's this really shimmery, awesome thing when you start finishing a song - where the song just starts writing itself.
The first song I learned on the guitar was a Kenny Chesney song called 'What I Need to Do'; it was just an easy song to play... and it was really cool to see that come full-circle a few years later and have him record a song that I was part of.
The first time I wrote a song, I couldn't really believe - 'Can you just do that? You're just allowed?' I never thought about songs on the radio and who wrote them.
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