Everything needs to be catchy because a listener is either going to stay with the song or lose interest in the first five seconds. But people also like those songs they can relate to and say, 'Yeah, I went through that.'

Pop songs are like a D.J. set crammed into three minutes.

I'm not deciding what the artist is going to write about because it's the artist. They're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life. When they're old and they're 80 and they have their show in Vegas, they're gonna have to sing that song for the rest of their life.

Most of the time when people work with an artist, they don't give them what they need for the future, they give them what their last album sounded like. So it's like, 'Oh, One Republic needs a song, why don't we send them 10 that sound like 'Apologize?'

Basically, any time you have a real life experience, that can be a song. Because no matter how crazy or weird you are, somebody's had an experience just like you, somewhere.

I let the song come to me. Then that thing comes to you, and you just know what that thing is. Music isn't like a 9-to-5 job. You never know. It's just the most unpredictable thing.