Song Quotes
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I'm an auditory learner, and if you put something into a song, I'll remember it forever.
Jennifer Hyman
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Sometimes something becomes a lot better. It's like a puzzle . You can't force a round brick into a square. It's a delicate thing. You need to let the song decide.
Nanna Øland Fabricius
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I'm the kind of cat that can finish three songs in a day. Two or three songs in a day. If my voice is up to it and I feel up to it, I can finish two or three songs in a day.
Elgin Baylor Lumpkin
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The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
Colin Meloy
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For us, the stuff we know is writing songs, playing shows, and that's what we're trying to concentrate on. Not trying to read about yourselves or looking up things about yourselves on the Internet - it's the key, or you'll go insane!
Lauren Mayberry
Chvrches
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When a song is written, depending on who wrote what, the percentage split between the writers and performers must be agreed. In a democracy, e.g. New Order, it was all split into quarters, 25 per cent each, and the same for the performance royalties. This stayed the same up until Republic, when Barney decided he wanted more, and truth be told, he deserved it. He was doing two jobs.
Peter Hook
New Order
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It's interesting how songs can evolve. Sometimes I'll write a song that feels relevant in the moment, but four years later, I don't want to sing it anymore. Then something will happen in my life, and the song becomes relevant again.
Jenny Lewis
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I suddenly thought about being backstage, and I think it shocks you to meet the people you shared your bedrooms with. And a lot of them either take themselves too seriously or don't know how to take themselves at all. But I wanted to be aware in a very sarcastic way that every song I've written has probably been written about 12-16 times before. And doing that makes it very hard for me to accept serious singer-songwriters in the world, the up-and-comers, the ones who are out there who let that define their every move, who live and die and breathe for it. It's a bit of a tragedy, I think.
Kevin Drew
Broken Social Scene
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It's a powerful thing to be able to write a song. Even the least powerful feeling - like insecurity - that makes you feel weak when you experience it, when you write about it, you are powerful.
Jillian Rose Banks
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My mother and father come from that post-Depression, middle-of-World-War -I kind of thinking that says, 'Find a practical job. You know what I mean, Mr. Big Shot? So, you can sing a song ...'
Al Jarreau
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People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
Alan Lomax
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When we were making the record, I just decided, at the last second. I thought, "This song ["Ordinary World"] makes a lot of sense, being on the album [Revolution Radio]."
Billie Joe Armstrong
Green Day
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A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other
Sean O'Casey
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Rarely do I finish a song lyrically before I have a musical idea there, but then again, rarely ever would I finish a song musically before starting the lyrical ideas. So a lot of the time, they come in tandem, or they just come at a glance.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne
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I will say that I know Nirvana did a show and played a few chords from 'More Than a Feeling' before they did 'Teen Spirit,' and it wasn't very good. But in all seriousness, 'Teen Spirit' was a great song. If subconsciously or somehow I had any influence on that, I'll take that as a compliment.
Tom Scholz
Boston
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I try to make everything I write a little bit different. Those songs that go, 'I love you so much and you love me,' they're boring. If I'm going to write a love song, it's going to be a little bit tortuous.
Jane Wiedlin
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We always talk about our kids being a great way to judge whether it's a hit song because there's something very basic about the way they perceive the music that I think needs to be there if it's gonna be a hit.
Matthew Ramsey
Old Dominion
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Ever since I was 2 or 3, I loved to perform for people. I would walk up to another table in a restaurant and crack a joke, sing a song, do a dance, or something entertaining, and the 'audience' would almost always smile and laugh.
Maxim Knight
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Well, what's interesting, I try not to think about the radio when I'm writing a song. I want people to love the song, and that means it might not be exactly thinking about the radio, but it's thinking about your audience and saying, 'I want people to like this song after it's done.'
John Roger Stephens
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My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible.
Emilia Clarke
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I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.
David Bryan
Bon Jovi
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Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.
Shana Alexander