Songwriting Quotes
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Holy Joy were a cult '80s band led by the wonderful songwriting genius that is Johny Brown.
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I feel like I'm creeping closer to finding the situation that triggers songwriting, which is obviously an extreme of an emotion.
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I think my favorite thing is songwriting.
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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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I've come to recognize songwriting as something that I do, and I want to be good at that. At that craft, if you like. I want to practice it.
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Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.
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Great songs aren't written, they're rewritten
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We spent a long time learning the craft of songwriting, Roger Glover and I, for a few years before we joined Deep Purple. You learn about the percussive value of words, and you learn about rhyme and meter. You learn that you can't transform a poem into a song lyric, mostly because the spoken shape of words is different than the sung shape of words. You wouldn't use the vowel 'U' or the vowel sound 'ooo' for a high note for example, its very difficult.
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Songwriting was definitely first. I started singing, and then I was rapping; then I went back to singing. As I was growing up, I just taught myself piano and guitar.
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But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging.
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I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.
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Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don't have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them.
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The joy of songwriting only gets messed up if you are trying to follow up a big success, or you are trying to create a hit single, or if you have conscious thoughts of a particular outcome for the music.
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When a lot of musicians change styles, their songwriting suffers because they want to be different.
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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 wasn't born with a natural talent for songwriting.
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The best quote about songwriting I ever heard, that I borrow to tell people, was from John Lennon, that it’s like a sculpture. You look at this block of stone and imagine that you can see some form within it, and you just keep chipping away until it is revealed.
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I was able to apply ukulele to whatever I'm trying to write. It's become part of songwriting for me, the knowledge I gained from hearing the melodies come out, and then applying that to guitar or vocals.
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I don't work at being ordinary.
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Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody's living that. Not just somebody, there's a lot of people.
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I often say songwriting is like trying to climb down a ladder at night. You put your foot on the next rung and test it out and make sure it holds and then you reach for the next one.
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Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.
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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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I like the songwriting. I don't ever listen and then go back and change stuff. For me when I wrote the song, it's always really fun and exciting.
