A Quote by Graham Parker
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
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One day, it hit me that music is my calling. I just started playing and writing music. How, I don't know. I just started doing it, and then this big voice came out of my mouth. And it felt like I was releasing something.
The time came around where the label was like, "Well, if you want something to come out in early 2017, it's going to have to be done by, like, so-and-so." So I plucked some of the old songs and wrote some new ones. Everybody keeps asking me, "Is this your L.A. record?" I was doing songs in a bedroom in New York, I was doing it in a bedroom in L.A. The only difference is when I look out the window, there's palm trees instead of snow.
When I started off in music, I started with a real innocence, a real love for the instrument, the writing the songs, the playing the songs and the sharing and the recording and experimenting. It was exciting. Then, this thing called success came, and something happened at some point where I became disenchanted, and I lost the innocence.
The first person who showed me that I could be a maker of music was one of my best friends. It's like, you can't see yourself doing something until you see somebody else doing it. Other people were encouraging me singing, but this was the first time that I could see myself writing songs and playing guitar.
And the thing about me is, I have a lot of mellow songs, because they're the easiest for me to write. I wanted to try to make some more upbeat songs, so, I ended up gravitating toward writing songs with friends, which was a great learning process, and also we came up with great songs. Those are the songs that came out the most naturally.
I got real bored in '96. Wasn't nobody to fight. Nothing to look forward to. That's when I started playing basketball again. Had I not started playing basketball, my boxing career would have failed. But I went from a sport where nobody could touch me to another where I couldn't touch nobody.
When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people
When I was doing 'In the Heights,' I was the co-music supervisor for 'The Electric Company' on PBS, so I was writing songs all day, doing the show, staying up until 3 A. M. Writing more songs, recording demos in the intermission in my dressing room.
I remember, from aged six to nine, I was loud and abrasive and loved making noise and loved playing instruments and doing all those things. When I was about ten, I realised I could get attention by doing that, so when I was eleven, I started writing songs.
First, I started with music singing, writing songs, playing music. Later, I got into acting. I'm not a brilliant musician or a brilliant actor. But, to me, they're still great vehicles for expression.
He [Alan Lomax] started right off trying to find people who could introduce folk songs to city people. He found a young actor named Burl Ives and said, "Burl, you know a lot of great country songs learned from your grandmother, don't you know people would love to hear them?" He put on radio programs. He persuaded CBS to dedicate "The School of the Air" for one year to American folk music. He'd get some old sailor to sing an old sea shanty with a cracked voice. Then he'd get me to sing it with my banjo.
I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.
Actually, my first group was a folkloric group, an Argentine folkloric group when I was 10. By the time I was 11 or 12 I started writing songs in English. And then after a while of writing these songs in English it came to me that there was no reason for me to sing in English because I lived in Argentina and also there was something important [about Spanish], so I started writing in Spanish.
I don't know if it was related to the type of music that we were doing at that time or what, but Todd Cook actually just turned to me and was like, "You know what would be a great name for a metal band? Dead Child." We talked half-jokingly that we were going to do a band. I guess as time went on, I started writing songs that were more metal sounding, and it just evolved from there. It actually started with the name first, and then the songs came second.
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.
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