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Louder
  • 4/4/2025
Exclusive: Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen, whose debut Smith/Kotzen album is out now, chat about songwriting and lyrics.
Transcript
00:00The song I want to stay kind of started just with...
00:10Sort of vibe, obviously going to be a bit of a band.
00:14Yeah, I remember that song, the chorus melody was driving me nuts.
00:20Because you had that part and I had the chorus and that melody I didn't know what to sing there.
00:26I kept waking up every day with that...
00:30I guess you made me crazy.
00:34One good time, maybe I got lazy.
00:43I didn't know what to sing there, you know, it took forever.
00:46But I think some of the stuff, the lyrics is what we probably spent the most time on, isn't it?
00:50Yeah, we sat for hours here.
00:52I mean, lyrics are important.
00:55Mind you, when I was a kid growing up, some of the...
00:58I didn't know what Ian Gillan was singing, you know, Highway Star.
01:03But it just sounded great.
01:05So sometimes the lyrics just have to sound good.
01:08But I think if you dig deeper, you want them to mean something.
01:11And they've got to sing good as well, you know, phonetically.
01:15Some words just don't sing.
01:17And when people say, oh, the lyrics are that...
01:19When a singer says, this song has got great lyrics,
01:21they probably mean they can really get their voice around it.
01:25And it just makes it easy to sing.
01:27That's a great point.
01:28It is twofold, because you have lyrics in a story that reads well.
01:32So, you know, you read it.
01:34However, how it sings is really a big part of why a lyric gets written in a certain way.
01:41It's because it sings great songs, you know.
01:43Even Sinatra and all that, man, my way.
01:46Lots of vowels and stuff like that, and stuff you can get, you know.
01:49And also, when we're writing, you know, with that, say, I want to stay.
01:55And you're sort of searching.
01:57You've got the chords, you can hear the melody.
01:59And then, you know, I want to stay.
02:01And for some reason, you come up with a title.
02:04And then you have to work around that and kind of make it make sense, you know.
02:08Because what comes to you is often what you stick with, you know.
02:13And you write a song around that.
02:16The great thing about Amazon and Bounce Off is, you know, Ritchie will say,
02:19Oh, I want to stay. What was that you sang there?
02:22Oh, okay, that sounded good, you know.
02:24Just keep that and work around it.
02:26Wait, that happened in, remember, Solar Fire.
02:29Yeah.
02:30And I remember you sitting there and saying,
02:32Oh, that sounds, because I had a rough sketch of a vocal on there.
02:35And he said, Oh, Solar Fire, that's interesting.
02:39And I said, What? Where'd you come up with that?
02:41And you actually said, Oh, I thought that's what you were saying.
02:44And I'm like, No, but I could be saying that.
02:46What does it mean?
02:47You're sort of scatting.
02:48And then now and again, Solar Fire, you know.
02:51And then, so, how do you make, it sounds great, you know, that.
02:55Solar Fire, whatever.
02:57That's a great, really strong title or something.
02:59How do you make sense out of that?
03:01Yeah.
03:02So then the song was about, I thought,
03:04well, make it about something that's burning hot and glowing brightly.
03:08You know, when you're in the prime of your life, you're on stage and you're,
03:11you know, you're having a great time in your life, really.
03:14Just when you're at your peak, you know, Solar Fire, you're burning.
03:18You know, you're burning.
03:20That was the spirit of that song.
03:22That's great.
03:23So he heard something.
03:25I was just hearing the melody and the rhythm.
03:27And he actually heard a lyric that I wasn't even saying.
03:30But then once we established that, we wrote a song around it.
03:33So these songs come in all different ways.
03:36Yeah, they just seem to be, you sort of pull them out of the air, you know.
03:39They just come to you.

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