Cris Cohen: To dive into “Mean It,” there are lots of things that grabbed me about this tune, but I love particularly the lyric “There’s violence in silence”… the ability to paint this huge picture with just a few words like that. Is that a line that just comes to you or did you have to finesse it a little bit?
Kenneth Nixon of Framing Hanley: No, it was actually pretty natural. I think we have probably all experienced where… when you don’t talk about the elephant in the room, it can turn into a much bigger elephant. That was just a lyric that naturally came about because it really said exactly what I was trying to say in that moment.
Cris Cohen: How have you changed as a lyricist over the years?
Kenneth Nixon: I strive to always be a better writer and communicator in general. I’m always reading books on lyric writing, on poetry. Walt Whitman’s “A Poet’s Purpose” has stuck with me for 20 plus years now. He says the poet’s purpose is to put themselves in the listener’s place before the reader is even there.
I’m not saying I’m some poet or anything, but that’s always stuck with me. When I’m writing from personal experience, I write from personal experience. But there are a lot of times where I’ll have an idea and just run with it and think, “What if a person is going through this? What would be the next steps?”
Sometimes I write inspired by film or TV. I think, as a human, I would hope that we have an ever-expanding vocabulary. And with that comes me just wanting to be a better communicator and writer.