I read your most recent album was more of a collaborative production than, maybe, albums have been in the past.
I did write with a lot of people and co-write which sort of bled over into writing some new Ezra songs because I’ve always written by myself, but I had a lot of song ideas that I’d finished with other people. So in that sense, yeah, of the songwriting I think I wrote three of the songs myself and the others are all collaborations. That’s always fun.
Collaborating, when you’re writing music, is just a lot of fun and you end up, a lot of times, getting a better song and end up finishing a lot more songs than if you were doing it all alone. You can’t procrastinate as much. So the album definitely has influence from a lot of other writers, too, and is different in that respect.
I didn’t realize you’ve written songs for Blondie and American Idol’s more successful contestants.
Yeah! About five years ago I wrote a song for Meatloaf who was recording next to us. He’d heard one of our songs and asked us to write a song for him, so I wrote this song called ‘Testify’ for him. It was a single from his album five years ago. Then I wrote a song for Blondie, which did really well, called ‘Good Boys,’ which did really well around the world. Neither Blondie or Meatloaf do much as far as record sales in the United States, but worldwide they sell a lot of them. It kind of opened my eyes to writing for other people.
In 2005 I wrote a song for Howie Day called ‘Collide’ which was a big Top 40 song and now I’m just kind of somebody people come to to co-write with other artists or write a song. I have a song on the David Cook debut called ‘Avalanche’ and there are a bunch of different artists I’m writing with now. So it’s cool and I’ve got a single coming out from the new album with Howie Day from the album I produced.
