Exclusive: Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen, whose debut Smith/Kotzen album is out now, chat about songwriting and lyrics.
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00:00 The song I want to stay kind of started just with...
00:02 Sort of vibe, obviously going to be a bit of a band.
00:13 Yeah, I remember that song, the chorus melody was driving me nuts.
00:19 Because you had that part and I had the chorus and that melody I didn't know what to sing there.
00:26 I kept waking up every day with that...
00:29 Oh, she made me crazy.
00:33 One more time, maybe I got lazy.
00:40 I didn't know what to sing there, you know, it took forever.
00:45 But I think some of the stuff, the lyrics is what we probably spent the most time on, isn't it?
00:49 Yeah, we sat for hours here. I mean...
00:54 Lyrics are important. Mind you, when I was a kid growing up, some of the...
00:58 I didn't know what Ian Gillam was singing, you know, Highway Star.
01:02 But it just sounded great.
01:04 So sometimes the lyrics just have to sound good.
01:07 But I think if you dig deeper, you want them to mean something.
01:10 And they've got to sing good as well, you know, phonetically.
01:14 Some words just don't sing.
01:16 And when people say, "Oh, the lyrics are that..."
01:18 When a singer says, "This song has got great lyrics,"
01:20 they probably mean they can really get their voice around it.
01:25 And it just makes it easy.
01:26 That's a great point.
01:27 It is twofold because you have lyrics in a story that reads well.
01:32 So, you know, you read it.
01:34 However, how it sings is really a big part of why a lyric gets written in a certain way.
01:40 It's because it sings great songs, you know.
01:43 Even Sinatra and all that, man.
01:45 My way. Lots of vowels and stuff like that.
01:47 And stuff you can get, you know.
01:49 And also, when we're writing, you know, with that...
01:52 Say, "I want to stay."
01:54 And you're sort of searching.
01:56 You've got the chords, you can hear the melody.
01:58 And then, "I want to stay."
02:00 And for some reason, you come up with a title.
02:03 And then you have to work around that.
02:05 And kind of make it make sense, you know.
02:08 Because what comes to you is often what you stick with, you know.
02:13 And you write a song around that.
02:16 The great thing about "Avanzon" and "Bounce Off" is, you know, rituals.
02:19 Say, "Oh, I want to stay."
02:20 "What was that you sang there?"
02:22 "Oh, okay. That sounded good."
02:23 You know, just keep that and work around it.
02:25 Wait, that happened in, remember, "Solar Fire."
02:28 Yeah.
02:29 And I remember you sitting there and saying,
02:31 "Oh, that sounds..."
02:32 Because I had a rough sketch of a vocal on there.
02:35 And you said, "Oh, 'Solar Fire.' That's interesting."
02:38 And I said, "What? Where'd you come up with that?"
02:40 And you actually said, "Oh, I thought that's what you were saying."
02:43 And I'm like, "No, but I could be saying that. What does it mean?"
02:46 You're sort of scatting, and then now and again, "Solar Fire."
02:50 And then, so, how do you make... It sounds great, you know, that.
02:54 "Solar Fire." Whatever.
02:56 That's a great, really strong title or something.
02:58 You're like, "How do you make sense out of that?"
03:01 Yeah.
03:02 So then the song was about...
03:03 I thought, "We'll make it about something that's burning hot and glowing brightly."
03:07 You know, when you're in the prime of your life, you're on stage,
03:10 and you're having a great time in your life, really.
03:14 Just when you're at your peak, you know, "Solar Fire," you're burning.
03:18 You know, you're burning, Bruce.
03:20 That was the spirit of that song.
03:22 That's great. And so he heard something.
03:24 I was just hearing the melody and the rhythm,
03:27 and he actually heard a lyric that I wasn't even saying.
03:30 But then once we established that, we wrote a song around it.
03:33 So these songs come in all different ways.
03:36 Yeah, they just seem to be... You sort of pull them out of the air.
03:39 They just come to you.