Song Quotes
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I feel like if you sit down and have an assistant engineer and a producer in a top-notch studio and everyone sets up all the mikes perfect, all of a sudden it's really hard to live that melancholy song. It's hard to really live it in the moment.
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There's songs like 'Africa' that just have kind of become part of pop culture.
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I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. There were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones.
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The big thing that everyone forgets, you're famous and on TV and everything, but I think there's something very rewarding to be able to write a song, record it, and have it turn out as you heard it in your head, or even better.
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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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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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Falling in love is awesome, but I'm never drawn to happy songs per se, so whenever you sit down to write a heartbreak song and you're happily in love, it's like, 'OK, now I have to go back to a sad place to get something good.'
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There has to be a song. There are too many dark nights, too many troublesome days, and too many wearisome miles. Somewhere deep in the forgotten corner of one’s heart- there has to be a song. Like a cool, clear drink of water and like the gentle warmth of sunshine, and like the tender love of a child, there has to be a song!
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I don't have to be working on an album to record a song.
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It was always very important for us that we presented ourselves as a band, because it's a three-part writing process and it's a three-part decision making process, it's not two producer guys and a girl that sings the songs. It's startling how many people make that assumption.
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When your hair is rising, that's when you know it's a good song - that's happened to me with some artists and some songs, John Lennon songs or when Nina Simone sings. It's great to make those moments yourself.
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We're all about exploring new sounds, so we don't have any limits whatsoever about how we go about finding them. We do tend to sample human vocals or sample sounds, which allows you to create your own sound. That's not our only way obviously, but that's a way you can use a sound no one's used before; it's not a sound in the synth. There's a lot of that going on in our songs in general.
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For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.
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The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being.
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I think particularly in music, popularity os a very fickle thing. You're only as good as your last song.
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There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.
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The song 'Paradigm' talks about nanobots - and how they can potentially be used to cure diseases and help you live forever. But how much of a human being would you be at that point? If you're 70 percent machine and 30 percent human, are you going to lose yourself?
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I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution.
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The thing about albums is just coming up with new material. I just got tired of that syndrome of putting out an album and then some reviewer claims that this song or that song has something to do with x y or z.
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A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy.
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I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.
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'Tailgate Blues' is kind of a lyrical masterpiece of a country song.
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I'm so happy to be a song-writer - I'm even surprised when I get to record anything. I consider it a considerable privilege and a blessing to have a medium of expression that has a place in the world.
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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.
