Lyrics Quotes
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I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays.
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'Teenage Dream' was the most difficult song I've ever been a part of. We wrote five different versions of it. We couldn't get the lyrics right. Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote most of the melody, and then Katy Perry and I were responsible for getting the lyrics right.
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He explained to me that he wanted a simple boy-meets-girl story with lyrics. This I felt was quite beyond my capabilities. I did not know any boys who met girls.
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I like big, soaring melodies and fun, splashy lyrics. Maybe like what Blondie would do in 2013.
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I really like worship music. It settles my soul. Gets me back on track. The lyrics are almost like a prayer, so it's my go-to.
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Not a lot of people know I wrote the lyrics for the Arsenal club song, 'Good Old Arsenal'. We had a competition on ITV for it, and none of the entries were any good, so I approached their manager, Bertie Mee, and asked him if he would let me have a stab. He did, and within a few weeks they were singing it at Wembley on the way to the 1971 double.
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First we start with the lyrics. Most of the lyrics are done by Stefan Kaufmann and me. When we have enough lyrics and enough stories we have the lines to make titles. Then we collect all the ideas of everybody in the band and see which ideas fit together the best with the lyrics to get the right atmosphere. That's the way we compose.
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For me, naming bands was the forerunner to really writing lyrics, because I work off titles.
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The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.
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Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it's a tribal thing - country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.
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My father was the one who used to stand up in the middle of a number to flutter his lips and make sputtering sounds into lyrics.
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Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.
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Identified more with lyrics than people.
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My problem was that I felt ashamed of feeling sad or angry. Now, I don't hide my vulnerability in my lyrics. There's no way I was going to get raped and not get something out of it. I learned about power and hope and forgiveness. I like who I am now and I wouldn't be who I am if that hadn't happened.
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I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.
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You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.
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In hip-hop, sometimes that pace is so fast that you miss things. I don't mean literally miss lyrics; I just think there's an emotion in what these cats are saying that gets by you. When you slow things down, there's this emotion, this yearning.
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Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father's record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they're all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.
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Lyrics are really important for me.
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I just want to be a storyteller, and I think the way to do that is by your lyrics, by your visuals, by your choreography, by your dance. It's imperative as an artist.
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We covered 'Hey Jude.' My father panicked, misunderstanding the lyrics and thinking our lead singer was belting out 'Hey, Jew' to a roomful of Holocaust survivors.
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Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.
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One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it's not all up to me to do everything myself. There's always that fear that you'll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you've written, like, 120 songs.
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It's a combination of melody and lyrics, not one without the other. It's a confluence of these different elements that makes something powerful.
