Songwriting Quotes
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Living in war, and being a wartime band, I don't think there's any way that can't somehow influence the songwriting.
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Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.
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I love songwriting ! It's my Number One passion other than performing. Well, actually it's like wearing three different hats: songwriting, recording and performing. They're all completely different and draw on different types of skills. With recording, there are so many different phases of production, and you have to be very careful because you can polish it until it doesn't shine.
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To me, the guitar is a tool for songwriting, and it's fun, too. The day that it's not fun, that's when I'm not gonna play guitar anymore.
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I think sometimes songwriting becomes diluted when you have lots of components to mask a lack of core.
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I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.
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Songwriting is the cheapest psychiatrist I know.
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Writing is a way of living other lives. It is a way of expanding your life. It's not actually living a different life, it just means that you're hungry for life. There are so many things you want to do.
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The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
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With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.
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Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song.
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I think just letting go is a really good thing to do in many areas of your life, songwriting included.
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Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.
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In songwriting a term that we use a lot is, ‘Does this sing well?’ So for me, my job as a curator and composer was to come in and be like, ‘Ok, this sings fine, this sits well on the ear, but it could sing better if we make a few changes.'
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Songwriting has always been a means to an end for me. That end being a tool to try to understand myself in the world and, through observation, make sense of the world.
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I get to play with pop music and mix up the style. It's fun to play with party music and nice to get into the club. My big love is songwriting. I write the lyrics and the vocals, and I work with the producers.
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That's really where my heart is, unfortunately - I'm less interested in songwriting and more into just making noise.
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I don't really have a set-in-stone process or formula. Sometimes the melody is there and I have to chase down the lyrics. Sometimes, the song is there and I have to make the melody fit. What I've learned so far about songwriting is that I can't force a song. If I try to do that, it's hollow, and people know a hollow song when they hear it. It's the song they stop listening to and forget about. I'd prefer not to write those kinds of songs.
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I've been thinking about songwriting more in terms of playing it live, and how it will sound as a band.
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What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!
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By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.
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You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.
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I think it was Tommy who told me, 'When your song is called 'XYZ' or whatever, every line has got to make sense against your title.' He showed me little methods of proving to yourself whether the line belongs, and ways of finding out whether you were able to get more out of a line if you tried.
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All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.
