Song Quotes
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I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.
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Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.
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John could write a mean song. He had a lot of venom in him. Whereas I had a happy childhood.
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I tried to make a 'When Doves Cry' in a rap version. I used a lot of instruments and I broke it down like I thought Prince would do, and that's the song I sent to Big Boi.
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It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.
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The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't.
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A timeless pop song is the hardest thing to do as a songwriter.
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When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs. A Frank Sinatra album sets a certain mood, just as a Clash record sets another.
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It's a dangerous game to write a song for a person you don't know. It feels disingenuous.
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Oh you who read some song I have sung What know you of the soul from whence it sprung
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When I create a song, I immediately think about what I'm going to wear when I perform that song. I think about the music video treatment and about how I'm going to look on stage when I perform the record. The connection is so obvious that it's a single package. An outfit, to me, is almost a tool to express the music.
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I can't even speak Hawaiian, but if you go there and listen to a Hawaiian song, you get captured because it's so beautiful, like the melody is just gorgeous and you know Bob Marley is on the radio every single day. It's very reggae-influenced down there. Basically, you haven't been to paradise if you haven't been to Hawaii.
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The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil’s whole structure away.
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From a very early age, I started to get really interested in how songs were put to tape. Not just listening to the songs, but the way the songs were recorded.
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One song will launch you, but you don't want to be a one-song artist.
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I love the feeling of nostalgia vying with the present. That can be from song to song, or within the same song.
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I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."
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A song called Never. Which we never play. But it's a great song.
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I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.
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I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon. Part of the reason I work on stuff for so long is just because I love working on it. It's not that I'm haunted by some ghost sound. I just have nothing else to do with my life. Some people like to obsessively shop online. I like to obsessively rack up studio bills.
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'Big Love' was originally an ensemble song, but it's done now as a single guitar piece.
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It feels so satisfying to hear a song I wrote come out of the radio.
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Sometimes you're gonna write a song and it's not gonna be right from the beginning. And you're just gonna have to work through that wall. But if you know something is there, you've gotta just keep doing it until you get it right. So, I'll work on a song for three months if I have to, to get it right.
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I think it's kind of difficult to write a good Christmas song because you have a narrow framework of references that you have to work within, and at the same time you want to do something that's personally original and hopefully somewhat unique.
