I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it.
The nature of the music business is such that it's better to have a few chances for some things to be successful than just one, and that's kind of been my attitude all along.
We were called 'Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.' We had that name for a week or so. We were also called 'Are You My Mother?' for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names - almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.
The truth is that I don't work any harder than anyone else in the world. I don't work 18-hour days. I don't stay up until 4 in the morning trying to finish a line.
The Ting Tings have been a huge hit in my family. I have two young daughters, and both of them love that record, so I pretty much have to listen to that ten times a day.
What should a song be about? It's a trick question for songwriters because lots of amazing songs aren't 'about' anything. Or, at least, they're not about anything that's obvious or logical.
I'm just like anybody else: I have stuff to do in the day, whether that's writing a song or recording a song. I try to treat everything I do as just work.
I think when we were starting out, it was more about imitating our songwriting heroes. We would try to write songs like Neil Finn, or we would try to write songs like Ray Davies, or we would try to write songs like Glenn Tilbrook.
I think people sometimes confuse 'catchy' with something that should automatically be a hit in today's world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that's catchy, that sticks in your head. But that doesn't necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru or whatever.
I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.
In the '80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn't really figured out how it worked yet... You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions.
I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn't want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I'll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.
I had a job transcribing a biotechnology-litigation seminar. You put headphones on and fast-forward and stop with your feet. There were a lot of 'um's.'
I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.
I am not very regimented unless I have to be. I wish I was someone that could just write every day, but I tend to work on specific projects for a specific period of time and then stop.
For me, it's just more satisfying when you follow the rules rather than just make a bunch of sounds. The magic of just making noise in the studio goes away after a while.
Either I need an assignment with a strict deadline - like something for a movie or a TV show or whatever - or else I need to create a made-up deadline for myself for my own records. Otherwise, I don't write anything.
Bands like R.E.M. and even The Replacements, during that initial wave of college rock, would sell 40, 50, 100,000 copies of a record, and that would be seen as extremely successful - and definitely enough to keep doing more.
