When the songs of your heart start singing, you should listen...for its harmony will bring you happiness and the melody is the voice of your true spirit.
Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry.
I never try and force-feed any song idea or lyrical message. It's really what's on my mind and what comes out of me. And a lot of these lyrics are metaphors for specific life situations that I've been through, and in most cases, the struggles. Something about human beings wearing sadness heavily on their sleeve inspires me to make something uplifting about the situation.
The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
It's hard to really articulate what the parameters are that make one song parody-able and another song not, but if I can come up with a good enough idea for it, I go for it, and if not, then I have to move on.
My own personal tastes don't really have an effect on whether song is a parody target or not. But having said that, I try to pick songs that I actually like because I realize that I have to live with these songs for a long time, from when I'm working on them in the studio to possibly playing them onstage for the rest of my life. So I try not to pick songs that I know would drive me crazy.
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 wouldn't want someone assuming that some negative song has some truth between me and my wife. There was a song that one of my buddies sent me, and it was an awesome song. It was about this woman who had fallen in love with a man that wasn't her husband, and I love everything about the song except for the fact that I personally cannot sing it. It would kill me if someone thought I was singing it about my wife.
I started writting songs when I was really little because there were things I could say through songs that I couldn't verbalize any other way. Writting was something I had to do.
Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.
Everybody knows we're big liberals and I was a very outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, and I still am. It's impossible for us to separate the songs we're writing from what's going on in the world.