Song Quotes
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I'd always put on little shows at home, but when I was 11, I did a community event in Woodford, where anyone could go. You had three days of vocal training and performed your song at the end. I sang 'I Say a Little Prayer.' It's a tough song to sing but they gave me the confidence to go for it and belt it out.
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When I was about 14, I got a tacky keyboard for 250 pounds and put on a drum machine and found I could write a song.
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It's so hard to be the girl in a country song, so we're speaking up.
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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.
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I did a song in eight minutes. I thought everybody could write songs that fast. But working with a lot of them, they don't.
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I wrote my first song when I was twelve on the piano.
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All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.
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Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I'm crazy for that man. And he thinks I'm hip!
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If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
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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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'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.
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It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
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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 have a sweet tooth for song and music. This is my Polish sin.
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A good song and good musicians can really move mountains.
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He made me mess the song up when I looked at him... We can show the kids the tape and say, 'Look, that's when we first laid eyes on each other.'
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I have breakups that I can credit to every song. In my twenties, I picked people who would create that dysfunction and drama, so I could draw upon 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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We never really set out to talk about California on the album ['California'], it was something that we noticed that was happening about three-quarters of the way through the recording process. We were looking at which songs we thought would make the record and we realised that there was this theme coming through. I think it's just a product of being in California for as long as I have.
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I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.
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Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.
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It is easy to get an interesting loop to happen, but it becomes a collage when the song and loop are constantly changing.
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The coolest part about 'God Made Girls' is you had all these different women writing it, so you had all these different perspectives in this song.
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You can't try and make something you think someone else will like. You can only make what you like. How can you make a song that Yo-Landi Visser likes? You don't know me. You'll never understand me.
