I wanna do a song with Adele! Nobody gets Adele as a feature, so maybe I can. I hope she knows who I am!
My favorite Adele song is βHello.'
But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.
I shout at the radio when someone starts talking over the end of a song. Shut up! I don't want to hear that the DJ has just found a mouldy sandwich in the corner of the studio. Nor do I like it when the magic of something you're watching is shattered by an advert for Argos.
I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives.
When you're watching 'Armageddon,' and the Aerosmith song starts... Super funny.
When I was growing up, you would put on a KISS record or a UFO or Aerosmith record and listen to it from the first song through the last song. It's been so long since a band has put out a record like that.
A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.
The emotions in a song - the anger, aggression - have got to be legitimate.
I've passed up on many a thing that could have made me a big artist or something. Like, I was offered a feature on a Christina Aguilera song and I turned it down. It just wasn't right. She's cool, but it just wasn't right.
I felt my music wasn't aiming at anybody. Everything I was doing was because it was a good song.
I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms.
It's not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn't sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?
I think it's really cool when artists have song titles or album names that are a really conversational sentence.
My nails are my rhythm section when I'm writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.
Whenever any great song or album gets lost in the ether, someone is deprived of the joy of hearing it, and the great effort of those who created and recorded the work is damaged.
When I was asked to do a song from 'In the Heights' at the White House in 2009, I chose instead to do 'Alexander Hamilton' because I felt like I was meeting a moment.
If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. Because that's what soul is all about.
I think I hid my singing talent from a lot of my friends at school because I didn't want to alienate anyone. If everyone was singing along in the car to a Madonna song, I didn't join in because when we're younger we're afraid of sticking out or showing off, when in fact we should own those things that make us really unique.
I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She's sort of become my fairy godmother.