I think for me to be involved in a festival, there has to be a strong element of songwriting and musicianship.
Die Like a Rich Boy' has, for me, some of the strongest lyrical content I've heard in many years; an epic love song laced with dark imagery and acerbic social criticism.
There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.
You have to learn how to act a pop song. You have to find the balance of the pop from the pop song and the lyrical significance of the scene you are in.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up with a song in my head, and I have to finish it so I can fall back asleep.
I never really got paid for 'Tell It Like Is,' but I look back at it and say God knew what he was doing; he probably figured that if I had got money back in them days, I wouldn't be here now. That's okay. I'm here. And I'm still singing the song.
There are so many songs in my heart and in my brain. I wake up at 2 in the morning, and I have to get up and sing them. There are so many of them, it's ridiculous.
A lot of my solo albums were produced by different people who had their idea of what songs I should do, and they had me doing a lot of ballads.
The first album I ever bought with my own money was 'Ten.' Every single song reminds me of my childhood.
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
