You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.
I don't want to write the song that I wrote yesterday, and I don't want to write the song I'm going to write tomorrow; I only write the music I'm writing now.
When I realized I could write lyrics and let someone that I knew listen to them, but not know that the song was about them - say it was a girl. I could write this song about how I feel about this girl, I could play it to them. I just loved it, because all of the words would speak to them. I could see them slowly falling in love with me.
No matter what, if you write a song that's great that everyone expects to be a hit, then everyone's going to be expecting another one from you. If you write a song that no one notices, you're going to want to write one that someone will.
If anyone was going to write a song or, you know, or a book, or make a film about a girl like me, it was going to have to be a girl like me, and quite literally, me.
People can hear my songs are coming from something real. I mean what I say; I'm not just writing to impress critics or young girls, or older girls. The way I talk is the way I write a song.
I usually don't write songs by people calling me and saying, 'Write a song about this.' Usually I'm just going with what I want to write, so you never know.
You can write a song about a girl or you can write a song about walking down the shops, and it's fine. I just try and do something as meaningful as I can without trying to be a pretentious loser because it's genuinely just how I see things.
I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.
I wish I was a prolific writing wondrous boy genius - I wish I was Stevie Wonder - but I wasn't. I was me. I wrote terrible songs about girls I was head-over-heels about. As soon as a pretty girl looks at me, that's it - I'm in love, and I should probably write a song about it!
I might've set out to write a particular song about a particular girl, but my experience will run out after four lines, so instead of getting obsessed with the girl, I write about the clothes I'm wearing.
I can have a song with Ariana Grande that is going to be the song for all the kids and the teen girls, and then another song that could be for a different group of people who all love the song. I'm with whoever. Whatever type of people want to love the music and whatever they love about the music is fine with me.
I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists.
I can have a song with Ariana Grande that is going to be the song for all the kids and the teen girls, and then another song that could be for a different group of people who all love the song. Im with whoever. Whatever type of people want to love the music and whatever they love about the music is fine with me.
If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.
Believe it or not, people went so far as to suggest that I might not be able to write songs anymore because now I am married. I tried to explain again that there are other things to write about besides boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy breaks up with girl, girl is sad.