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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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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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 do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.
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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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Great songs aren't written, they're rewritten
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It's always amazing seeing the song-writing process. A song just starts off as just an idea or a story you want to tell. It keeps building and building when you add the lyrics, the instruments, the vocals until you finally reach the finished song other people can enjoy.
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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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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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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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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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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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I wasn't born with a natural talent for songwriting.
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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 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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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 don't work at being ordinary.
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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 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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Lennon was such a great writer and exactingly honest. That was the thing that was defining about his songwriting and is weirdly absent from so much songwriting today, and I don't understand why.
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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 see God as a song-and-dance man. If I had my way, he'd be able to carry a tune, too. Preferably, one of mine.
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It happens so quickly it seems like it's coming from somewhere else. It's not. It just means that you're in sync with yourself.
