There's a bit less elbow room and latitude to take it somewhere else, at least at festivals. In the club you can do whatever you want but at festivals, especially Ultra, nowadays the crowd wants to hear our songs.
My brother says that I was writing songs about fate while he was off playing soccer. Now I tell him he's 33 and being a professional while I'm playing soccer with my friends. Ha!
I start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits - and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones!
I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!
Typically I go in the studio and whatever I'm contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don't come in with lyrics... I just go in and let it happen.
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
Basically, I didn't want to sing anything for the sake of singing it. There were some songs where I really wailed, but because it's such an intimate space anything I chose to sing simply to make sound was going to come off an inauthentic. So I was really happy with where it landed - every song I sang, I loved for one reason or another. I didn't have to worry about selling a song.
Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a Lamb." So I piped with merry cheer; "Piper, pipe that song again." So I piped; he wept to hear.
I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear, but rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe.
I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.