A Quote by James Taylor
The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.
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There is something about me that is collaborative, that wants to get the best performance out of somebody else or to hear something that somebody else has done that's good and to try and make it great.
It's so interesting how you can take a bad situation and make a great song out of it that somebody else can listen to and have a completely different perspective of the song and have their own meaning. That's what's great about it.
I think any great song is difficult to write, in some aspect. It's just difficult to make somebody feel something. That is the main goal. How do you make somebody want to get up and dance? How do you make somebody feel okay after their breakup?
I do hear snippets on the radio. I do hear a little bit of me, sometimes great chunks of me. But I have to take that as a compliment; there's no way you can get sour grapes about that. But if somebody starts taking your whole new thing lock, stock, and barrel, and do their own version of it before you do it, that's not on.
Whenever I hear somebody cover a song, I don't like to hear it stray too far from the original. I like to hear some of the new energy that a band will put into it, but you kind of want to hear some of the basic parts of the song. I mean, that's what makes it the song that you like.
I feel like, when you turn on the radio and you hear a great song, you know it's a great song, and you sing along. We all know what a great song sounds like, so we all have that instinct, it's just being able to accept your own instincts when you write that song.
You do the best job you can. You take it step by step. It's hard enough to make a movie. If it works, that's great. If it means something beyond the moment to somebody, they can take it and it lasts through the years, we'll see.
The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.
Every day somebody comes up to me and says, 'That song really helped me through a difficult time,' or 'That's me and my wife's song' or 'This song means something to me because of... ' It's humbling to hear that. You're something special in someone's life, even if it is for three minutes.
Songs are your best teachers. I try to learn something from every song I hear
I am a firm believer in playing the type of music that compliments the song the best. If it's a folk song make it sound like one. If it's a rock song make it sound like one, if it's a rap song take it off the record.
<> It's nice of you to say I'm your best friend. <> You are my best friend, dummy. <> Really? You are my best friend. But I always assumed that somebody else was your best friend, and I was totally okay with that. You don't have to say that I'm your best friend just to make me feel good. <> You're so lame. <> That's why I figured somebody else was your best friend.
The older I get, the more I think it's this listening. You listen for it, and you have a bit of patience. And it'll come until it sounds - to me, the best songs I've written, I think, are ones that I can't hear anything - any of myself in it. It sounds like a cover song, like somebody else's song - really something you've stolen wholesale off a radio that you've listened to in someone else's flat.
In music, if somebody makes a good song, you want to be in that category and make the good songs too. It may not even be a competition thing, it's just a thing to keep your skills up type of thing.
If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.
When I heard 'Jesus, Take the Wheel,' I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you're a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.
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