The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling – HuffPost 6.20.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Dave Wakeling: Well, you have to work on a song all night until the hairs go up on your neck. If the hairs don’t go up on your neck, don’t put any more time into that one. If you’re going to try and write something that moves other people, you have to write something that has quite a dramatic effect on yourself. It has to give you quite a jolt when you write it, “Whoa, blimey! That’s a little edgy, Dave!” Or it makes you cry or you might be crying when you write it. So it has to be loaded with emotion. You don’t want to waste a word in a song, really. One bad line’s enough to take away the power of the two around it. You have to weigh every word. It takes me about ten minutes to write a song and then about nine months to finish it. That can include a week, really, of wondering if something should be sung as a semi colon or a comma, and I just drive myself nuts over it. You can’t sleep, you’re wandering around chain-smoking, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing!” You don’t dare tell them it’s because you don’t know whether to use the word “yet” or “but.” [laughs] But it seems important at the time. I just think the nicest things are complicated things that come across as simple. What I really dislike is really simple things that are all tarted-up to look really complicated. That’s something I think you need to do. You need to put an enormous amount of work into it to make it feel effortless. That’s probably true for everything, but it’s definitely true for writing a song.