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

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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 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.

00:30Oh, she 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, but it just sounded great.

01:04So sometimes the lyrics just have to sound good.

01:07But I think if you dig deeper, you want them to mean something.

01:11And they've got to sing good as well, you know, the phonetically, you know, some words just don't sing.

01:16And when people say the lyrics are that, when the singer says this song has got great lyrics,

01:21they probably mean they can really get their voice around it and it just makes it easy to sing.

01:27That's a great point. It is twofold because you have lyrics in a story that reads well.

01:33So, you know, you read it. However, how it sings is really a big part of why a lyric gets written in a certain way.

01:41One of the great songs, you know, even Sonata and all that, man, My Way, lots 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, you've got the chords, you can hear the melody and then, you know, I want to stay.

02:00And for some reason, you come up with a title and then you have to work around that and kind of make it make sense.

02:08You know, because what comes to you is often what you stick with, you know, and you write a song around that.

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

02:20What was that you sang there? Oh, OK, that sounded good. You 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, that, that, that'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.

02:43And I'm like, no, but I could be saying that. What does it mean?

02:46You're sort of scatting and then that again, you know, and then, so how do you make it?

02:53Sounds great. You know, whatever.

02:56That's a great, really strong title or something like that. How do you make sense out of that?

03:01Yeah.

03:02So then the song was about, I thought, well, make it about something that's burning hot, glowing brightly.

03:07You 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.

03:19But that was the spirit of that song.

03:21Yeah, that's great. And 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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