Song Quotes
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Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.
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'Honky Tonk Badonkadonk' wasn't some serious song, but it was huge! It was funny.
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Shortly before she died Janis Joplin gave me the Gibson Hummingbird she recorded "Me and Bobbby McGee" on ... Janis was a good guitar player, for her purposes .. she just wanted to play along with her songs, and she had a real pure and nice style for that.
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Listen to the Song of Life.
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I grew up in a time when the only musicals were animated musicals because nobody wanted to see people to break into song.
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If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you're sort of writing the same song over and over again.
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Occasionally, you get a nice surprise when someone covers your song in an extraordinary way.
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When you write an album and you're writing about relationships, the stuff that I've been through in my relationships, 99 percent of it is really good, but it's that one percent that always inspires you to write a song.
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One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.'
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Beck said he didn't believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.
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I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.
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Lord, when the song wants to pick up and go a little faster towards the end, it's hard for me to resist.
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You know, your ears record. You might can sing a song once you hear it.
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You try to make a film, and you have to come up with the money. You need a big crew; you need to ask people for favors and get permission. If you have an idea for a song, you can pretty much go into your basement with your band mates and do it.
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Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.
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It's important to me that my songs actually make sense. So often, I turn on the radio, and I have no idea what the people are singing about. It may sound good, but when you listen, they're just saying words that rhyme. It's another song about nothing.
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When you write a song you're more or less saying, "This is everyone. I think this is everyone." It doesn't necessarily have to be this thing where I go out and I'm like candy-striping, or becoming a therapist or something. I think that maybe, maybe I'm supposed to be a musician, because of that fact.
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'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.
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It's important to me that there's not just one story told about our city. 'LSD' is an ode to Chicago, a song for the complicated love I have for my city.
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Usually a song being hard to write is a sign that the song isn't good enough. It should be like a good kiss. Effortless and smooth.
Nanna Øland Fabricius
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Pure entertainment is not an egotistical lady singing boring songs onstage for two hours and people in tuxes clapping whether they like it or not. It's the real performers on the street who can hold people's attention and keep them from walking away.
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We don't think about how the songs are going to translate so much during the writing process. Once the song is recorded, and once we're mixing, that's when it occurs to me. Then you start rehearsing to play shows. I never concern myself about how we're going to pull it off live, because I know we'll figure out a way to do it.
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I always tell up-and-coming DJs you have to really love what you do and find that interest to drive you. It requires so much attention to detail, and it takes up a lot of your time. You hear a song, and there are so many little pieces that make that song work. It requires a lot of patience, diligence and resilience.
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The album is a definite departure. I haven't written original material before, except for one song on my first album, but Elvis and I did six songs together on this one.
