A Quote by Michael Franti
I always know when a song is good or close to finished. When I sing it, it makes me feel the emotion. My tears will start flowing or I'll start laughing. I'll start feeling whatever intensity or emotion was the seed of that song.
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I always start with emotion. That's where I start all of my improvisations, on the piano. I always start with the mood or the feel of where I am in that moment.
When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.
Whether it be a reggae song, rock song, a love song, the main thing was just to, whatever I was feeling, to try to capture that emotion.
Whether it's an inspiring song or whether it's an entertaining song - whatever it might be about it - I just want people to feel the emotion that I put into it because I think emotion... is everything.
I've always wanted to sing. I don't think I have a great voice, but I just think that I get the emotion. It's very authentic. Whatever emotion I'm feeling, I can sing it, and you can feel it.
If you are blessed with good vocals then it doesn't mean you start picking up anyone's song and start singing it. You should sing less but with quality.
I love rock ballads, and I'm kind of in emotional turmoil, being ill and high, so I start to sing to the song, I turn it up and start to sing.
When your feeling down, do you know you can change it, like that. Put on a beautiful piece of music, start singing, that will change your emotion - or think of something beautiful, think of a baby, maybe one you love, really keep that thought in your mind, block out everything but that thought. I guarantee you'll start to feel good.
I never start a song at the beginning; I always start in the middle, working with the original concept. That might be a loop or a vocal hook. A weird noise or a string sample. Once that's at the heart of the song, I work concertina-fashion, expanding the song forwards to the end and backwards to the beginning.
It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.
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.
Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting.
I never have used any other artist as a model for a sound or a song. It always has to come from an emotion, and capturing the essence of that emotion in a song.
When I first start writing a song, I usually write the title first, then the song, and I'll sing the song in my head and think of a visual of the song. If I can't think of a visual behind the song, I'll throw the song away.
You may not hear much bluegrass on the surface of my music, but I feel the emotion I put in a song comes from bluegrass. Bluegrass taught me to interpret a song, not just sing it.
An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.
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