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Louder
  • 5/31/2025
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 ballad.
00:14Yeah, I remember that song, the chorus melody was driving me nuts.
00:20Because you had that part and then I had the chorus and that melody I didn't know what to sing there.
00:26I kept waking up every day with that.
00:30Because 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 Ian Gillum 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 the 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.
01:45All that man my way.
01:46Lots of vowels and stuff like that.
01:48And 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.
01:57You'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.
02:04And 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.
02:15Or the great thing about having something to bounce off is, you know, Richie will say,
02:19Oh, I want to stay.
02:20What was that you sang there?
02:21Oh, okay, that 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,
02:31Oh, 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?
02:39Where'd you come up with that?
02:40And you actually said, Oh, I thought that's...
02:42Oh, 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.
02:48And then now again.
02:49All of that.
02:50You know.
02:51And then, so how do you make...
02:53It sounds great.
02:54You know that.
02:55All of that.
02:56Whatever.
02:57That'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,
03:07glowing brightly.
03:08You know, when you're in the prime of your life, you're on stage and you're, you know,
03:11you're having a great time or in your life, really.
03:14Just when you're at your peak, you know, Solar Fire, you're burning, you know, you're burning.
03:19But that 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
03:29even saying.
03:30But then once we established that, we wrote a song around it.
03:33So these songs come in all different ways.
03:35Yeah.
03:36They just seem to be, you sort of pull them out of the air, you know, they sort of, they
03:39just come to you.
03:40Yeah.
03:41Yeah.

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