Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale says he thinks his songwriting abilities have gotten better, not worse, over the years.
“Well, I think as a songwriter, I just keep getting closer to the bone. And I’ve just written another record that is closer to the bone than the last one,” Rossdale said in a recent interview with Altwire. “And I keep getting more proud of the records because I think that the only thing that happens as you mature is you go, ‘Fuck, I better edit myself better,’ because you don’t have all this abundance of time.’ I sort of look at it realistically and I go, ‘Fuck’ — five more records, six more records. I don’t wanna be doing this forever and I don’t wanna be sort of one of those people that refuses to stop when it starts to tail off with law of diminishing returns. That’d be terrible. But each record gets more lethal because it’s such a big job.”
Rossdale added: “I could write a record really easily, but it’s not to say that record would infiltrate the set. So when I write a song, unless I can really come up with something pretty cool, there’s literally no point — no point. What’s the point? ‘I wrote this really mediocre, midtempo ballad. What do you guys think of it?’ ‘What do you wanna take out of the set for that?’ So there’s a degree of malfunction to it. It just ups my ante.
“My biggest growth is to be aware of my — not limitations, ’cause I have lots of weapons in my arsenal of being a musician. I’m not falsely modest. I think I’ve sort of learned my craft. I have a way of doing it. I’m incredibly unconfident at one point of the day, then I’m incredibly confident at another, and then I’m, like, ‘Oh my God. This is awful. It’s the last time I’m ever gonna write.’ So I torture myself horrifically through the entire process. When I get to the end of it and I’ve been fistfighting myself, I sort of dust myself off and I go, ‘You know what? These are all right. I just don’t need to go through that process.’ But it’s part of my process.
“I just think that as we get older, if you’re a creative person and you care and you have that fire burning, and I have a real fire, it’s all about editing yourself to get better.”
“When I’m seeing here in this room writing songs like I’ve just done last week, the last few weeks, I used to be a bit, like, ‘Oh, this feels good. That feels good. That bit. No, no, no, no, no. Chris [Traynor, Bush’s guitarist] will sound really good on that.’ … But I try not to have any of those gaps. I try to have no weak points. So it goes from me to the studio and Chris and to be going through the sort of funnel of the producer and Chris, who’s incredibly opinionated about everything. So it’s just the editing thing that I think is really powerful, to sort of pray to the feet of the editor in you. That’s what I find is the most interesting and important thing. So I hope I’m getting better. Obviously there’ll be a point where I won’t, but for now we’re on a rise.”
