Pastoral Resources

All the songs we do are basically about one of three things: booze, sex or rock n roll.

With this new album, I prepared for it a long time, and I was happy with the songs and the production. I felt that I proved myself with the first album, and with this new album, I just want to share some of my music. And that was always my feeling and my intention.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known.

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

I write a lot of songs people don't hear. I really just enjoy the process. I finish 'em all. I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the bad ones and the good ones.

Young people don't want to be second to anyone. Everyone wants to be an overnight star. Look how many years I had to wait, how many roads I had to travel, how many songs I had to sing. And now I'm just beginning, never ending.

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.

I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.

My songs are the reflection of how I think and how I feel in that moment. But I'm conscious of the fact that artists have a responsibility before the masses and they have to take care with their words.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

When I was about 3, my grandfather used to give me and my sister a nickel to sit out on the front porch with him and sing songs.

I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.

I had 25 or 30 songs. Sequencing the record, I left that to the producer. I'm not into doing that stuff.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

I don't know too many people because I stay at my house, I write songs, I go to the store.

I tend to think of all the songs the same - I give them all kind of equal rights.