When it comes to lyrics , what ' s your sort of typical process ? I write nearly every day , you know , for instance , this morning , I open the studio at about 7.30 , I go across the road for a coffee and as I ' m drinking my coffee , I ' m coming up with song titles and they ' re the things , to me , that you don ’ t do in the studio , is like get your lyrical content , your lyrical hooks , to open the door to a song , it usually happens that way for me , it ’ s a title or it ’ s a line or something that starts the song writing process off . So , yeah , they ' re being gathered constantly , you know , even when I ' m reading things or emails , I ' m picking up on words and things that inspire me .
I do that stream of consciousness thing a lot , I don ’ t know whether other writers tune into that , but that ’ s something I get a lot of song starts from is when you sit there and you go , right , I ' m going to set the timer , I always have a timer here on my desk , set it for seven or eight minutes and just write what ' s going on in your head , type it down , don ’ t filter any of it , just get it all in . Usually , when you look back , there ' s three or four really good ideas in there and that definitely was the start of Incredible for me because I was just , just felt really good , you know , came back after the summer , really excited to start booking sessions and just felt good about life and needed to write all those , you know , those crazy things , ' cause it ’ s a take on love but it isn ’ t , it ’ s a take on life really and the ups and downs of it .
Yeah , we get lots of different examples of those kinds of approaches . People say they come up with dummy words many times and then just replace all the words later or these sorts of things . Yeah and I think , I don ’ t know whether you find this , ' cause any sort of song writing shows , I always tend to listen to them and of course , I ' ve come across yours and I often find that , I think songwriters say a lot of things to try and prove that they don ’ t need to work at what they do , it just comes from the heart , man , [ laughter ], it just flows out and I often listen with my arms folded going , yeah , alright then , okay , [ laughter ], and now I feel like a complete loser . Song sculpting is really important and the big people I ' ve spoken to over the years talk about the sculpture and you know , you ’ ve got a song , you ’ ve got a track and you ’ ve got an idea and it ’ s flown from the heart or it ’ s been picked from the sky and then it ’ s the character then , how much energy and time and effort and ambition are you going to give that piece , I think it comes down to that .
The real big players , the guys that I ' ve seen , like , you know , Martin Sandberg , Max Martin ( hit writer for Katy Perry , Justin Timberlake , One Direction ) everyone would know him as , those guys never stop , you know , it ’ s been mastered and they go , ‘ hang on , I want to change a word ’ and they say , and it ’ s , like , if you can have that , if you can have the dedication to never stop pushing , then I believe , now , the problem is , there ' s a downside to that , is that quite often you can sculpture things and you end up with a little shitty piece of clay at the end , [ laughter ], ' cause you ’ ve just gone so to town that you ’ ve lost where you were going , but I believe that a lot of those big leading guys , they ’ ve got such an amazing work ethic that they just keep chipping ‘ til it gets better and better and shinier and shinier and more beautiful as they sculpt it . That ’ s , I think , what it ’ s down to .
I remember hearing you say you used to write in batches as , that was probably quite early on . With this record being so kind of stylistically different , did they all come in kind of a batch or not ? I think they do , I think there was definitely September , October last year . So , just to explain a little bit of the background , I went to my label , I have a good relationship with my label , you know , the guy who runs our label was our junior press officer in ’ 91 , so I ' ve known David Joseph for years and although I ' m signed to Polydor , I still chat with him a lot . I went to him and I said , ‘ listen , I ' ve got an idea , but to be really sure this is what I want to do , I need to make two songs , three songs maybe , but not just a demo , I need to make them , I need to book musicians , just give me some money and I ’ ll tell you whether I ' m going to do it or not ’. So , they did , they gave me , like , 30 grand or something and we went off and we went down the road , you know and I think from going down the road , I definitely rewrote bits of verses , because the musicians were inspiring me and the idea of going and playing it in one session was inspiring me too , so you know , I cut my vocals as they were playing , we did things we don ’ t normally do .
So , by the time September came , I sat with him and said , ‘ this is it , right ’ and he turned to me and he went , ‘ just make the album , go and do it , you know , let ’ s just get on with it ’, it felt right , you know , so I did and in that September , October , November , that was the batch , they were the ones that stuck , probably two thirds of the album was written and you know , we were mastering last week and I wrote a song at the eleventh hour and that went on . So , you know , in my own little world , I don ’ t stop pushing , ' cause I don ’ t think you can , so a whole host of things but I did used to write in batches , when I was , like , 15 , 16 , batches of 10 on TDK60s cassettes …
I ' ve still got them all and yeah , there were batches of 10 . As you will talk about on this show , song writing is a muscle . The more you use it then the better you are and the more fluent it is the more you use it . The people who don ’ t write for three or four years and then come back , I don ’ t get that , I think that ’ s really tough , that doesn ’ t work for me , not that it doesn ’ t work for everyone else , but to me , to always be working that muscle is a really good thing .
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