Stephen Sondheim Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.
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'Paper Planes' was an accident. It wasn't a song we made for the masses. It took two years to get popular, and there were many fights about censoring the gunshot sounds.
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Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.
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I think that kids need to grow up watching what I grew up watching - great entertainment; you know, Judy Garland and all these musicals that bring song and dance and acting all together in a polished way.
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The buzz you get when you're playing a song and everyone is screaming and dancing and what have you and singing along is incredible.
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It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.
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To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.
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Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it.
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I didn't used to do shows, because I used to be so shy. We'd perform, and I'd be at the back, thinking of another song. I was so shy, I ain't never getting in front of the camera; I would never get on stage.
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For me, a perfect pop song is something like 'This Year,' by the Mountain Goats.
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'God Made Girls' was such a success for me. I'm so blessed to have over half a million downloads on that song. I was the highest-charting new female in 2014, and I couldn't have done that without Big Machine and their support.
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I was once sitting on a tube, and someone was playing my song so loudly through their ear phones next to me. I just stayed silent and chuckled to myself.
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If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.
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She’s a nice girl – I just feel very honoured that she wanted to sing my song. I used to scream for her in Times Square and now I work for her. When I was 13 she was the most provocative performer of my time. I love her so much! Britney certainly doesn’t need any freakin’ tips from me! Britney Spears is the queen of pop. I was learning from her.
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When we did that album (Vol. 4) it was like one big Roman orgy-we'd be in the Jacuzzi all day doing coke, and every now and then we'd get up to do a song.
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I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.
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The people that only listen to one song from a record and flip around that much, if that's the only way they listen to music, they're probably the kind of people that like music as something to drive to, you know?
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The one thing I did know - because I've seen many, many of the road trip movies that everyone thinks about - is that death to a road trip movie happens when you spend too much time in the car.
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Justice has always evoked ideas of Equality, of proportion of compensation. In short, Justice is another name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
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I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.
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I'm not running away from the fact that I had previously said I did not contemplate a major increase, and that was a fair statement of the Government's state of mind at the time I made that.
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We may experience moments of profound inner peace, a sense of oneness with nature, or a sense of something that is more important that we're not reaching by the usual goals of human society. Perhaps we could say there's a common heart to all the religions.
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So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
