A Quote by Richie Sambora

Throughout my career as a songwriter, I've had a knack for writing songs that were about me and my life experiences and observations. — © Richie Sambora
Throughout my career as a songwriter, I've had a knack for writing songs that were about me and my life experiences and observations.
When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.
I built a reputation as a songwriter in the industry before my own hits. People were used to coming to me for songs. There were songs like 'Clown' and 'Mountains' that were my songs that I wanted to keep. But the record labels saw me as a songwriter. It was hard to get people to believe in me as an artist.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
One thing about having mostly absent parents that I think was perhaps "good" for the development of my intellect/writing is that I was given almost total freedom to read/write/look at whatever I wanted. I wonder a lot about how my past experiences, particularly my negative childhood (home life and being severely bullied/ostracized throughout school) as formed my/my thoughts/my writing, though I should also note those things were far from the only thing that had an impact on me/my writing.
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.
I've always been a singer-songwriter - it started off with me and the guitar, just writing songs, they were very simple. When I got in the studio it took me probably three years to get where I am now - being open to experimenting with new songs, being comfortable with where the songs were headed. I'm happy with where they are because they feel very genuine and authentically who I am.
Now I'm not going to go, "Oh my God, what are people saying about me?" I had a choice to be a student and not become a model, and becoming a doctor was another one of my dreams. I had a choice between not becoming a singer or becoming a songwriter and writing behind the scenes; nobody would have seen me writing songs for other people. I had the choice of not marrying my man; we could have just been hidden lovers, but I couldn't cope with it. I had these choices to do all these things, so I'm not going to cry over a life which has been really lucky.
Throughout all of the changes that have happened in my life, one of the priorities I've had is to never change the way I write songs and the reasons I write songs. I write songs to help me understand life a little more. I write songs to get past things that cause me pain. And I write songs because sometimes life makes more sense to me when it's being sung in a chorus, and when I can write it in a verse.
I wanted to sing about things that moved me and experiences I had collected throughout life.
With pretty much everything that I've done, in terms of going from being a songwriter and producer for other artists to doing my stuff, all the songs that I've kept to myself have always been me writing about my life.
At the beginning of my career, I saw an opportunity to forge new ground and focus on songwriting. Not many people were doing that at the time. Pretty much nobody. I thought I could write some really cool songs that would rise above all these dozens of genres that exist within dance music. I'd make it more about the songs. For the last 20 years, I've been sharing stories of my life through music. I've been writing songs about my life.
Joy' to me is a reflection of the life experiences that I've had throughout the first record and kind of having some time and a hiatus. It's just like all of those experiences that I had during that period - that growing up period.
I have a knack for writing tribute songs for people who will never know about them.
Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.
I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.
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.
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