Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen Talk Lyrics | Louder - video Dailymotion

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4/12/2025

Exclusive: Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen, whose debut Smith/Kotzen album is out now, chat about songwriting and lyrics.

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00:00The song I want to stay kind of started just with...

00:10Sort of vibe. Obviously going to be a bit of a ballad.

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.

00:30But you made me crazy.

00:34One of the times, maybe I got lazy.

00:42I didn't know what to sing there, you know, it took forever.

00:45But 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. I mean, lyrics are important.

00:55Mind you, when I was a kid growing up, some of the...

00:58I didn't know what, you know, Ian Gillam 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.

01:14You know, some words just don't sing.

01:16And when people say, oh, the lyrics are that...

01:18When a singer says, this song has got great lyrics, they probably mean...

01:22They 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 two-fold 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 well.

01:42All the great songs, you know, even Sinatra and all that.

01:45Man, 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.

01:54And you're sort of searching.

01:56You've got the chords, you can hear the melody.

01:58And then, you know, I want to stay.

02:00And for some reason, you come up with a title.

02:03And 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.

02:15The great thing about having someone to bounce off is, you know, Richie will say, oh, I want to stay.

02:20What was that you saying there?

02:21Oh, okay.

02:22That sounded good.

02:23You know, just keep that and work around it.

02:25Well, that happened in, remember, Solar Fire.

02:28Yeah.

02:29And I remember you sitting there and saying, oh, that sounds because I had a rough sketch of a vocal on there.

02:35And he said, oh, Solar Fire.

02:37That's interesting.

02:38And I said, what would you come up with that?

02:40And you actually said, oh, I thought that's what you were saying.

02:43Yeah.

02:44And I'm like, no, but I could be saying that.

02:46What does it mean?

02:47You're sort of scatting and then out again.

02:49Oh, you know.

02:51And then, so how do you make it?

02:53Sounds great.

02:54You know that.

02:55Whatever.

02:56That's a great, really strong title or something.

02:59How do you make sense out of that?

03:01Yeah.

03:02Yeah.

03:03So then the song was about, I thought, well, make it about something that's burning hot, glowing brightly.

03:08You know, when you're in the prime of your life, you're on stage and you're, you 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, you know, you're burning.

03:19That was the spirit of that song.

03:21Yeah.

03:22That's great.

03:23And so he heard something.

03:24I was just hearing the melody and the rhythm and he actually heard a lyric that I wasn't even saying.

03:29But then once we established that, we wrote a song around it.

03:32So these songs come in all different ways.

03:35Yeah, they just seem to be, you sort of pull them out of the air, you know, they sort of, they just come to you.

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