A Quote by Robert Smith
When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.
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I started as a guitarist and couldn't find a decent singer, so I started providing my own vocals.
I'd like to have James Brown as my singer. I already have the best drummer, Tommy Clufetos. I've jammed a bunch with John Entwistle, and it was like a musical orgy. That guy is a living, breathing, grunting rhythm. For horns, let's go with the Stax/Volt guys, and I'm going to have Steve Cropper on standby just in case I want a rhythm guitarist.
I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.
When I wrote for myself before as an artist, I probably wrote about 15, 20 songs a year. I thought that was a lot. Then, when I first started writing for the people, I wrote, like, 65 songs in a year for two years in a row.
Very unique: I was a singer-songwriter-guitarist. Very unusual in the late Seventies to find a singer-songwriter, and on top of that, a guitarist.
I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn't an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn't do no melodic songs, none of that yet.
There are some singer-songwriters who start out as poets. So someone like Leonard Cohen wrote and published poetry in the early 60s, but then started writing songs. Bob Dylan's a poet in the sense of bard, aoidos or vates.
I wrote my songs despite the fact that I was a drunk, not because of it.
When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog-big as a donkey. ... I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio. ... I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere. ... Our repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues, sort of country rhythm and blues, Sonny Terry things.
Even before I wrote any songs, I had this idea of a triangle where the voice was at the top, some sort of guitar element on one side, and then some sort of really basic rhythm on the other side. That's where I started from in the recording process.
As I was not a good singer - I have started to sing. And because no one could write an appropriate song for me - I started to write songs by myself.
People started noticing my singing on YouTube, and then I came to L.A., and I lived on a studio couch. I wrote songs every single day with whoever I could write songs with.
I also tried to focus on songs that Billie Holiday wrote, songs that she had a hand in shaping, like "Strange Fruit"; songs that were written for her or songs that she wrote herself, like "Fine and Mellow" or "God Bless The Child."
My dad has a lot of foresight and decided that I would not do any shows in Mumbai till I became a singer and got to sing my own songs. He knew that if I started earning money from shows, I would not have the time and aggression to rough it out to become a singer.
One of the things that helped me to be confident is to be the kind of musician that I respect. I always liked musicians who wrote their own songs, and so I started writing my own songs.
I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.
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