Billy Joe Shaver Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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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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If I weren't a performer, I would be still be writing and songwriting. Plus, I also really want to get into producing.
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That's the era we grew up in. It's weak to go to a psychiatrist.
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Nothing can stop a great song, so just keep songwriting.
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That's my favorite part about songwriting, the way you write a song, and someone else might hear it a different way.
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I think my favorite thing is songwriting.
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I'm a songwriter first...In my career I have never felt that my being a woman was an obstacle or an advantage. I guess I've been oblivious...Sensitive, humbug. Everybody thinks I'm sensitive...There is a downside to having one of the biggest-selling albums ever.
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After two years in the songwriting world, I wrote 'All About That Bass.' L.A. Reid heard it and signed me as an artist.
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The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio...well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.
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I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.
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Great songs aren't written, they're rewritten
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I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.
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The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
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Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.
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I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.
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If you don't know what sex is before you're 21 you're going to have a problem and should go to your psychiatrist.
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I love analogue tape and I love digital, they both have pluses and minuses and I don't really feel like I have to use one or the other. I love digital because it's really great for songwriting because you can just cut and move choruses around and pull chunks of songs. It's really easy to hear quickly "Oh, maybe the arrangement should be like this."
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Songwriting is a very frustrating art form. You have to get on tape exactly what's playing inside your head...
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Wherever inspiration comes from, it's like I'll hear a melody and chords, almost a rough structure of the whole thing [song]. I'll just hear it and chase what's in my head. The rest comes from jamming with band, improvising, seeing what comes up as well. I'll come up with it off the top of my head, catch it, sing and hum, and if something is missing, just jam, and that's the [songwriting] process.
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
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The scientists split the atom; now the atom is splitting us.
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A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish.
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Songwriting is the cheapest psychiatrist I know.
