Song Quotes
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A good song and good musicians can really move mountains.
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For me, I've always wanted to be a nun. I mean, I think about what it's like to be a nun. And I've always been fascinated with nuns, and I have a nun collection, I've been collecting nuns for 20 years. And I have a song that I wrote, 'I Wanna Be a Nun,' when I was 25.
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A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!
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In India, the measure of a singer's freedom is in his own creative personality. He can sing the composer's song as his own, if he has the power creatively to assert himself in his interpretation of the general law of the melody which he is given to interpret.
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When you get a song placed with two of the top stars in the world, like Rihanna and Eminem, especially as a new writer, they're gonna take a huge chunk of your publishing. That's just the way the business is. I'm not complaining.
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When we did that album (Vol. 4) it was like one big Roman orgy-we'd be in the Jacuzzi all day doing coke, and every now and then we'd get up to do a song.
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I find that the time that goes by is actually your best friend when you are making a record. The passing of time gives you perspective on what you recorded and what you wrote. If something sounds good to you 12 months after you recorded it then chances are pretty good that there's something valuable about the part or the song.
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Every song that I've done is me in one way or another.
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I wrote my first song when I was twelve on the piano.
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When you start writing songs on your own, there's no Bible, there's no one around you, so you're just writing, and you're left with, like, the dead space in your head to know if it's a good song or an interesting concept.
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It's no fun for me to cover a song and produce it the exact same way as it already exists. When I hear that happening, I have to say, 'What's the point?'
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I don't want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.
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I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.
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One of my real goals was to hear someone whistling a song I'd written.
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Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song. Until I heard 'Little Earthquakes' all my lyrics used really obvious analogies like rain for tears.
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I may not be able to re-record a song, but I can do a better job each time I sing it.
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People have so much going on in their heads. I'm like, If you could write a song, you'd feel so much better!
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When I write a song, it comes from the heart and is based on a specific experience. You can't really say that one experience is greater than another, because all of your experiences take you through life on this journey.
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I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.
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Then all of a sudden, Quentin Tarantino comes along and puts a song from 40 years ago in one of his films and they've suddenly discovered you. That was a real gift that Quentin gave me.
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People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
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Doing a scene truthfully is very similar to doing a song truthfully. They're really parallel.
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I wrote 'She's a Lady' on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones's TV show. Jones's manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don't have a pad of paper, I'll write on whatever is available. What's the difference? Paper is paper.
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Colonel Roosevelt liked the song of the blackbird so much that he was almost indignant that he had not heard more of its reputation before. He said everybody talked about the song of the thrush; it had a great reputation, but the song of the blackbird, though less often mentioned, was much better than that of the thrush. He wanted to know the reason of this injustice and kept asking the question of himself and me. At last he suggested that the name of the bird must have injured its reputation. I suppose the real reason is that the thrush sings for a longer period of the year than the blackbird and is a more obtrusive singer, and that so few people have sufficient feeling about bird songs to care to discriminate.
