Art & Creativity Quote by Paul McDonald

Original songs are the one place a singer doesn’t have to audition for authenticity. Paul McDonald frames “favorite” not as a genre preference or a crowd-pleaser’s calculus, but as a claim to ownership: he knows the tunes because he made them, and that knowledge reads like emotional authority. It’s a subtle pushback against the long pop tradition of being a voice-for-hire, where performance can become a kind of stylish ventriloquism.

The repetition - “my own songs, my original songs” - isn’t redundancy so much as insistence. He’s building a boundary line between interpretation and testimony. When he says the newest songs are his favorites, he’s not just talking about novelty; he’s describing songwriting as a live wire, the closest available proof that he’s still becoming himself in public. New material is where the self hasn’t yet calcified into a brand.

The subtext is an anxiety lots of modern musicians carry: audiences are trained to treat singers like content delivery systems, while the industry rewards familiarity and covers, and streaming punishes risk. McDonald’s “it means something, it’s real” is the language of a performer trying to re-center the relationship: don’t measure me by how well I reproduce the canon, measure me by what I’m willing to put on the line.

He’s also quietly naming what fans actually chase when they say they want something “real”: not perfect vocals, but the sense that the person onstage isn’t hiding behind someone else’s words.