Song Quotes
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There are so many songs that have become massive hits merely because the video is great, while the song is pretty rubbish. From that point of view, I think I've always preferred to listen to a song rather than look at it.
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Sometimes when you're writing a song, it's work, and you really have to make sure you're kind of pounding out every little piece of it. And then sometimes you write a song, and you turn around and you go, 'How did we do that?'
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It's just weird that for some people, art is a luxury. My parents had no artistic outlet. Some people pass down music to their kids, but I couldn't tell you what my mom's or dad's favorite song is. So when I started going out into the world, I was drawn to people who knew about movies, art, even fashion.
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For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.
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'Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.' ... They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song.
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I think my music is definitely country but it's got a little bit of that rock flair about it. I always try to find the things that everyday people deal with in their everyday lives and situations in the songs that I sing.
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I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.
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I'm not into, Hey, what's your sign? or any of that. But I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how I write songs. I don't know why I breathe.
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Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
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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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The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.
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A song just doesn't have verse-chorus-verse. It could just be one line. There are Chinese love songs that you have to learn one melody for a three-minute thing, and nothing ever repeats. I like that.
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The song is the center; the song is the key. If you don't have a good song you don't have anything by my value.
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I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.
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It took me 29 years to finish that song. That's a typical Jardine move.
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Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.
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We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.
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Every song I ever wrote, I wrote to be heard. So, if I was given a choice that 50 years from now I could either have a dollar or knowing that some kid was listening to my song, I'd go with the kid listening to my song.
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The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.
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I've had a lot of fans come up to me and say, 'I love the video song.' It's like it's a soundtrack recording or something. We'll never forget that the music comes first. I sometimes find video a little distasteful for that reason. People associate a band with their video images rather than with the music they produce, that's a little scary.
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As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge.
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I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.
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The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.
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I feel like if it's a good song on a guitar, it's a good song no matter what.
