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 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.
00:55When I was a kid growing up, I didn't know what Ian Gilliam was singing, 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, phonetically.
01:15Some words just don't sing.
01:17And when people say 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.
01:33So 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.
01:43Even Sinatra and all that.
01:45Lots of vowels and stuff like that.
01:50Also, when we're writing with that, say, I Want to Stay.
01:55You're searching.
01:57You've got the chords.
01:58You can hear the melody.
01:59And then, I Want to Stay, for some reason, you come up with a title.
02:04And then you have to work around that and make it make sense.
02:08Because what comes to you is often what you stick with.
02:13And you write a song around that.
02:16The great thing about Amazon and Bounce Off is rituals.
02:19Say, I Want to Stay.
02:20What was that you sang there?
02:22Okay, that sounded good.
02:23Just keep that and work around it.
02:26That happened in, remember, Solar Fire.
02:29And I remember you sitting there and saying,
02:31Oh, that sounds good.
02:32I had a rough sketch of a vocal on there.
02:35And you said, Oh, Solar Fire.
02:38That's interesting.
02:39And I said, What?
02:40Where did 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.
02:51And then, so, how do you make it sound great?
02:54You know that?
02:55Solar Fire.
02:56Whatever.
02:57That's a great, really strong title or something.
02:59How do you make sense out of that?
03:02So then the song was about, I thought,
03:04we'll make it about something that's burning hot and glowing brightly.
03:08When you're in the prime of your life, you're on stage,
03:10and you're having a great time in your life, really.
03:14Just when you're at your peak.
03:16Solar Fire.
03:17You're burning.
03:18You're burning.
03:20That was the spirit of that song.
03:22That's great.
03:23So he heard something.
03:24I was just hearing the melody and the rhythm,
03:26and 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.
03:38They just come to you.