When I started out, all I wanted to do was write some songs, make some money and get some girls — not necessarily in that order, which was not unlike the majority of the guys in my neighborhood. Most of my early songs were written on some kind of truth of my own situation.
Writers - Writing Quotes
Writing is something I’ve never particularly liked doing, but I’m better than I used to be.
I have a favorite made-up statistic that of every thousand people who set out to write, only one will become a professional writer. The others will fall out along the way in the face of constant rejection, constant rebuff, the psychic put-down that the rejection slip consistently represents or as it is interpreted.
My decision to be a writer was largely shaped by my family upbringing. I grew up in a family that had a distinct sense of history. It permeated our entire family structure. Moreover, my parents were teachers, and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books.
My work is very personal. It represents the time and place from which I came and expresses who I was. I grew up in a not-very-enlightened, lower-middle-class world. Today we see racism wherever we look. It’s a path we take in order to heal ourselves eventually of racism, but now America is so extreme. It […]
In the last 10 years I’ve really learned to get out of my way creatively, because I used to go to those terrible songwriting sessions and sit bumcheeks clenched as I tried to write a song. Now I just write what I feel.
For me, I want to chase after a feeling, something that just feels good. And from there, lyrically, the music just sort of sets the template for the words. The feeling directs all creativity. The beat comes first. My job is just to listen to it, and let it tell me what should be fed […]
Collaborating with a musician is like a conversation: each experience is unique to that person.
I’m primarily a storyteller. As a kid I really wanted to write comics. Comics were fabulous. They were a place you could do things that nobody had ever done before. But I also wanted to make movies. I wanted to make television. I wanted to write novels. What I wanted to do was tell stories.
In the early 90s I was getting flak – particularly from the British comics press – for not being political enough. People were doing political comics about how Margaret Thatcher was a bad person, and I was talking about diversity of race and gender and sexuality. When I was asked about it in interviews I […]
