Harry Shearer Quotes
Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows.
Quotes to Explore
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I don't really like to explain my songs.
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Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
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I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
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I really believed that my songs were good enough for the whole world to listen to. I had fans from America or the U.K. who would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your music'.
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So many songs are just a wink to the audience, but people take them seriously. 'My Humps?' C'mon!
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Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public's going to like, anyway.
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I love writing songs.
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I will say that a lot of songs that I've written are from my own personal experiences which are special to me.
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The biggest influence? I've had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
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I never set out to write songs about the world around me... it just kind of came about as a result of paying more attention to things.
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I tend to name albums after one of the songs.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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Every battalion has its marching songs.
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The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.
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My biggest advice for girls – and this is something that I wish I could have known when I was younger – is to have thick skin. It's something that you definitely develop when you get older, but when I first started, I was so obsessed with pleasing everybody. I wanted everybody to like me and to like my songs.
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I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director. So most of my songs come in a play form, you know, where there are characters and stories, so I like to go beyond just the song sometimes.
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I'm a lover of songs.
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We lived, ate, and breathed pop songs.
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Dad really had little to do with the songs, except to perform them.
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A songwriter writes songs all the time, whereas just writing a song can be done by anyone, anytime.
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We're going to go and play the songs one more time. It seems like the right time, so I figure we'll go out and play a few gigs and see where it goes. I think we might just show up in assorted places in the U.S. in the next few months without much notice and play some clubs and little theaters, and then go to Europe and play these festival gigs. Beyond that, we don't know at this point.
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There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
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Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows.
