Lyrics Quotes
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Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century.
Austin Clarke
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Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.
Jimmy Buffett
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I loved to talk about music to Nicky ... His influence came from people like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and he had these ideas about layering vocals, painting landscapes with music. Roma knew about Irish mythology, told stories, wrote poetry and had this special feeling for lyrics. My grounding came from the classics.
Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin
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Sometimes, after I finish the lyrics and have all the melodies and harmonies and the pop and vocal, I'll be like, 'I have to keep it. I love it too much.'
Sia
LSD
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You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.
Kevin Macdonald
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And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.
Bakari Kitwana
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Everybody likes to listen to a song because it's fun, and nobody wants to sit around and listen to 'I-really-have-to-analyze-these-lyrics' songs all the time.
Chris Stapleton
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Legions of young hip-hop fans are as against this as hip-hop's most fierce critics. There is a huge underground movement within hip-hop circles that against these representation. You can hear this message on tons of lyrics and rap songs produced by independent emcees. But they are fighting against a well-oiled and well-financed machine.
Bakari Kitwana
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The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
Jeff Buckley
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I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news. You can call them topical songs, songs about the news, and then developing into more philosophical songs later.
Phil Ochs
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Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Anne Stevenson
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I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
Rivers Cuomo
Weezer
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Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
Jason Robert Brown
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People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. F**k them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there. ... I think my melodies are superior to my lyrics. ... I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.
Freddie Mercury
Queen
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Maybe Kurt Cobain meant it to mention suicide in his lyrics; maybe he didn't. We're never going to know. When Andy Wood died, there were tons of lyrics that he wrote that sort of alluded to, well, it's possible that it's going to happen. It's not likely I'm going to kill myself, but those lyrics are still there.
Chris Cornell
Soundgarden
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I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne
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I always had a passion for writing, but I always visualized other artist singing my lyrics, I never visualized myself.
Anthony Santos
Aventura
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I had this thing about not giving too much of myself away, so I thought, if I sang lyrics, that's giving too much away. You know, I really didn't want to give myself away.
Alison Goldfrapp
