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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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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I love writing songs.
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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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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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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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We've written something like 900 songs in all.
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We have always adapted ourselves to the songs instead of vice versa.
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My inspiration comes from God, so I always have to be open, kind of like being an antenna. I like to write songs people love.
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It's so amazing to hear a crowd of people singing one of your songs. It's the best feeling.
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I don't write about anything I don't want to write about. I like to think I could write about anything pretty much that I chose to. I have been asked to write songs about specific things, and I've always been able to come up with the goods.
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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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There's lots of bands where somebody will write lyrics and somebody else will sing them. It works for a lot of people, but that feels weird to me. I don't mean this in a bad way at all but it just feels fake.. I guess in my heart of hearts, whether the person has a good voice or not I want the songs to come from them. I don't know why.
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the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.
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I used to go into bars on my days off, and I decided that wasn't too good for me.
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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.
