We've always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we're not a band with big songs.
Sometimes I'm trying to communicate a feeling. Sometimes I can't piece it together into any kind of coherant thesis. I'm just trying to evoke some kind of mood, and put some kind of idea in somebody's head. If Marshall McLuhan or Harold Innis were looking at it, they would tell you that the genre of rock music isn't the best way to deliver a political message because it distorts it, it makes it into entertainment. Perhaps the best political message is just to speak it to somebody. I think that's something I'm always writing about in songs, just how to mediate, how to present something.
I doubt I'll be singing forever, because at some point people aren't going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I'll still get the opportunity to write songs.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.
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.
It's funny because if you ever ask anyone in England to try and do a Beatles accent, no one knows what they really sound like. If you ask anyone in America, they would try and give it a go. English people just know their songs.
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.
Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.
I think the most important thing about dance music is the connection. If you put 80,000 people together, no one knows each other, and once the music starts, everyone loves each other. That doesn't happen with a lot of genres. If you go to a hip-hop club, it's not like when one songs comes on that everyone suddenly loves each other.