Lyrics Quotes
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'Despacito' started with a melody hook that I had with my guitar only. The beat for this track came after I wrote the lyrics, which I wrote as if I was writing a ballad.
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I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.
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I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.
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My second record I used a producer, which was frustrating in a way, because I think a lot of the punky spirit and provocative nature of the lyrics didn't come across - the music was pretty.
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We've played it [Milquetoast] a million times. When you play a song that much you sort of become disconnected with the lyrics. It's just another song essentially about people's opinions and being told how to live your life even though they may have less life experience than you have.
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When I say my work is travel, that's what I'm doing. And part of being biracial and multicultural is I'm always playing with genre and genre expectations. So even if I say I'm doing straight memoir, you'll see that I'm doing weird stuff with the structure. I've got images, I've got lyrics, and I've got journalism. I really try to not get stuck in genre expectations.
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I started listening to The-Dream a lot. That's when I really got into writing songs. I like the way he put lyrics and makes his songs. So I was like, 'All right,' and I just started writing. That's when I started wanting to be a songwriter.
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When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.
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Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work - that's Prince to me.
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I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.
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I'm not crazy about country-western music. But the lyrics are good. "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" is pretty clever.
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I first listen to someone who speaks the language and who reads the lyrics to me. I pay great attention to pronunciation. Once I hear the words spoken, I write the song lines phonetically in Hindi and then sing. By the grace of god, my songs in other languages – including Bengali – have been appreciated. People say they are good and the words have been correctly pronounced.
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A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.
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It's a natural tendency of mine to not even listen to lyrics.
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Our music may sound big emotionally, but that's more to do with the playing, the level of musicianship and the full-on energy. Often, the lyrics are often quite small and focused.
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Based on the lyrics I think it's not as highbrow academic.
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I'm probably tougher on myself than I used to be. I'll revise my lyrics more. Part of that is working with the right people and producers who will say, 'How can you make that better?' Allowing yourself to collaborate with people will push you toward transcendence.
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Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.
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I'm more honest in my lyrics than I am in anything else. It's where I feel the most safe to express myself.
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There is an actor's responsibility in presenting the emotional content of the lyrics to an audience. But whether you do that in a straightforward fashion or an ironic fashion or a blase fashion is all about opportunities, and singers are missing opportunities as artists if they don't pay attention to the lyric.
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When I published my first novel, 'Slammed,' I included lyrics at the beginning of each chapter from one of my favorite bands, The Avett Brothers. The overwhelmingly positive response from readers to those lyrics really surprised me.
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The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.
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I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.
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In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.
