Songwriting Quotes
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Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.
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Great classic music that I've been turned on to has not only inspired and influenced me, but it has had an effect on my songwriting.
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I was always interested in science, and pre-med was arespectable thing to do while I ursued my songwriting.
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Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound.
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Sonic Youth has always been the vehicle for my writing, you know, because it's a collective songwriting entity: we write our songs as a group.
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I've been songwriting for a long time, usually while on the road, as a way to get my feelings out.
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Songwriting is something that I own - it's my property, it's my music, it's my voice.
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Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.
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My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.
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What I strive to do with songwriting is be really honest, authentic and try to be open and share that with people. I choose that over trying to be clever, poetic, or lyrical.
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Wherever inspiration comes from, it's like I'll hear a melody and chords, almost a rough structure of the whole thing [song]. I'll just hear it and chase what's in my head. The rest comes from jamming with band, improvising, seeing what comes up as well. I'll come up with it off the top of my head, catch it, sing and hum, and if something is missing, just jam, and that's the [songwriting] process.
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I have the same way of approaching songwriting and singing. It's always been about the pure love of music. I've always had an interest in production and arranging.
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I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.
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Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.
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Making vocal hooks is my favorite thing to do. That's what I love about songwriting - making catchy stuff.
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Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
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Traditional songwriting, to us, is where the experimental nature comes in. We're all involved with so much outside activity with really hardcore, experimental music-making.
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I blame it never taking a break on my mother. She was a born entertainer. Leave the songwriting, the singing and all that behind, and I still would have found some way to be an entertainer. I would have never been an actress, though, because I realized early in my life, in like sixth grade, I was a terrible actress.
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Songwriting is such a sensitive energy. It's just a vibration of frequencies.
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I enjoy the song writing process more than anything. It's what I like the most, just sitting in my room with guitar or at the piano or something. Just making something up, something that's not there, that suddenly is there.
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I love song writing, so I'm always happy to write for other musicians.
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I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play.
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Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter. ... I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.
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I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.
