Media interviews are part of a musician’s life and the best interviewers – Vic Fernandes in Barbados; Carlton James and Wanita Huburn here – will come at you with stuff that makes you turn inward and unravel things you learned along the way but never articulated. Of course it requires that you be able to think on your feet, so to speak, but you get better at it as you go.
In many interviews you get hit with the process of song-writing; what comes first, music or lyrics? Faced with that question, I quickly identified that the key, before even music or lyrics, is the thing/behaviour/event, etc that says “song” to you. In other words, the observation; what you noticed. Of course that will differ from writer to writer ‒ Leonard Cohen is not noticing what Little Richard is, and vice versa ‒ and the actual creation of the song is, in a way, already underway, and that, too, differs from writer to writer and even for each writer, so some songs come from a snatch of melody, some from a phrase (‘Government Boots’), etc. So it could be from a joke you hear, or something you read, or, sometimes, just a combination of words that sound appealing together.
