Barry Mann Quotes
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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Thanks to the Japanese and Geronimo, John Wayne became a millionaire.
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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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I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.
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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 tend to name albums after one of the songs.
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I went to the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU and wrote and directed a small amount of stuff there.
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From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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I became conflicted in my late teens.
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A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.
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Every battalion has its marching songs.
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I don't have many easy songs.
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The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.
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A lot of my solo albums were produced by different people who had their idea of what songs I should do, and they had me doing a lot of ballads.
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When you are pushing yourself to not go back to the same well, you're gonna come up with something different, or you'll find songs that are different.
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When you make timeless music - and I like to think that's what I'm doing - the fun part is picking the songs. You can clip and flop and mix and match, and when the record is timeless and it feels good, you know it's going to have the same appeal whether you put it out now or 10 years from now. That's what I'm about.
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I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.
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Look at Paul McCartney, look at Elton John. They're jealous of Justin Timberlake. I'm sure they were jealous of me when I was in my imperial phase.
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Remember always that there are two things which are more utterly incompatible even than oil and water, and these two are trust and worry. Can you call it trust, when you have given the saving and keeping of your soul into the hands of God, if day after day you are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter? When believers really trust anything, they cease to worry about the thing they have trusted.
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We became the songs we wrote.
