A Quote by Eddie Vedder
It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave.
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As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job.
Songs like 'One Love' by Bob Marley - they stand the test of time - it doesn't matter - so anytime I write music, I try to write in tune with an emotion, and I hope there are more times like that for everyone.
The one good thing about a movie and music and stuff like that: Sometimes it's a counterpoint between the movie and the music itself, the difference and the tension they build together. I think that could be something that helped with me, because when I write songs now, I write lyrics a bit like that. I try to make the music be an interesting twist on the lyrics and help tell the story in a - I don't tell crazy stories, you know? So a lot of times, the twist is in the subtleties. The twist is in the way the story's told.
I never write a tune before the lyrics. I get the lyrics and then I write around them. Some people write music and the lyrics come along and they say, 'Oh yeah, I've got something to fit that.' If that's the way people write songs, I feel like you might as well just go to the supermarket.
I think going away and disappearing for a couple of years - or a few years, or whatever - definitely changed the way I look at songwriting. It made me feel more free, it made me feel more like I could just write what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write more observational songs.
I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.
I wanted to make mini features. And there was a wonderful creative freedom; not necessarily copying the lyrics, but just trying to create emotion. Like the songs, you know? Just like how the song creates an emotion, I wanted the video to create an emotion.
So what if Brian made me feel like fireworks were going off inside me. He could also make me feel like a big fat clod of heartsick dirt. It was like he could take any emotion I had and make it ten times stronger. Which is great when it's happiness but pretty darn awful if it's anything sad.
Sometimes you might get inspired by something, write about it, then later that lyrics sounds better on another beat. That's happened a few times. Like 'Dance Wiv Me' - those lyrics didn't start on that beat.
I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook.
Every one of those old songs like "What's My Age Again?" and "All the Small Things" is like a tattoo or a scrapbook or an old photograph. There are just songs that define certain moments in your life. Everyone has a song that got them through a bad breakup or they put on and it made them feel like they wanted to go out and kick the world's ass with their friends on a weekend. Those songs still feel like that to me.
The times when I feel not alive is when I feel stifled, when I feel like the emotion that's in me is not coming out. I'm too busy, too hectic. I'm serving my iPhone more than my spirit. Those are the times I feel bad.
I try to take elements from all kinds of music. Even if I'm listening to anything off the wall, like Britney Spears, there might be a certain way someone did something, that I can feel, in some hip-hop flavor.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music...I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.
I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.
Those situations were just taking over my entire life. It was fun to write in a way, because it helped me take a really bad situation and a really sad situation and make beautiful songs out of them. When I got half of the song written it was like, "Oh, this is great." It was like the one thing that was making me happy again.
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