When I feel inspired about something I usually sit down with my guitar and try to find a good chord progression. At that point I either know what the song is going to be about – because I am thinking about lyrics – or I have an emotion that I need to just get off my chest. So once I figure out a good chord progression, then what I do is I start humming different melodies along to that chord progression. And then once I have a good melody stuck in my head — that I’m not going to forget — then I start to do thick babbling, kind of like jibber-jabber; where it almost sounds like words but it’s not really words. Then I record it to my tape deck, I have a little tape deck that I keep close to me all the time.
I write the whole song in jibber-jabber and when I go back through and listen to it I just sit flat on my back, in the room, with my eyes closed and just listen to what it sounds like; the emotion and tone the feel of what I was trying to convey. That’s usually when I feel inspired and I start to write the lyrics. And at that point the song is done. Sometimes it can take me just listening to the song twice, to get the whole song finished and then sometimes it can take me a year to finish a song.
I always feel like… it’s kind of like when a miner finds a lump of diamond. The diamond is there, it’s just cutting off all the junk to get to the diamond. That’s how I feel about all of my songs. I feel like they are all already in me, in here, I just have to cut out all the stuff that doesn’t work, until I find the finished product.
It’s surprising that you don’t start with the lyrics.
Yeah, that is unusual. I’ve had people tell me that before. I usually start with an emotion and that emotion turns into whatever is on my heart at the time. Like, for example, “Come Home” – the third song on the album – if I hadn’t been in such a low emotional state and I had just gotten into an argument with my wife and it just kind of came out. I’m not saying that I don’t ever write lyrics at the same time or before, but 99 percent of the time I usually write the lyrics last.
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