MusicRadar Interview ~ Part 2

MusicRadar has posted the part-2 to the Richie interview they did in CT last month.

Excerpt:

Let's talk about songwriting. If you can put it into words, what have you learned over the years? Can you learn something over time?
Absolutely. Sure. You just gotta keep at it. Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think. And you can measure success by a couple of different things: Finishing a song first lyrically and looking at it yourself and saying, 'OK, now I have some cohesive lyrics.'

And then the other part of success is obviously making a record and having it be accepted by people, having it touch people and actually mean something to people. Livin' On A Prayer, Wanted Dead Or Alive, It's My Life - I'm lucky to have written a bunch of those.

We've talked about this before: You guys are pretty lo-tech when you write; you don't make elaborate demos.

No, no, no, no. I swear to God, we still do it the same way: we used to do it on cassette decks, and now we've been backing it up on our iPhones. Big technology guys, me and Jon.

What happens when you and Jon disagree on a song? Let's say you have a song that you originated, and it's one that you love and he's like, "I don't hear it"? Or vice-versa?

It doesn't matter. The songs that fall by the wayside - and there's a lot of them; I mean, Jon and I have probably written over 400 songs together in our career…You just follow every idea to its end. And a lot of times, whether or not they're satisfactory to me or him…Honestly, he's the mouthpiece of this band, so he's gotta be comfortable singing whatever lyric and whatever story we're actually telling in whatever song. So, if he doesn't like that, and I like it, I'll keep it for a either a solo record or…You know, we're not little girls about things like that; we never were.

I always realized, hey, look, he's the lead singer of this band. I was the lead singer in a lot of the bands I was in. You have to be comfortable. You gotta get up there and sell the song. You have to get up there and sell the lyric. You gotta be able to feel it. So, if you do not, people are gonna point at you and go, 'Bullshit! That's bullshit!' And I think that's one of the reasons we're still around - because we never pretended to be anybody but who we are.

You can listen/download from the site, and the whole text of the interview is also posted.

I've pulled down the interview, and will upload to my MediaFire tonight, in case you don't want to go out to MusicRadar :)

If you love hearing Richie curse (like I do) this is the interview for you.

Find out about his "growing flowers from cow shit" analogy and more!  lol


~ Hath