Song Quotes
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I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing. I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney and Wings
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I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.
Tom Scholz
Boston
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I'll never forget when me and Jason Matthews wrote the line, 'Don't be a tape player hater,' in 'Country Man,' I don't think I ever laughed harder. We didn't know where we were gonna put that in a song, but we knew we had to make it into a song. I just remember laughing and being so proud of such a goofy little line.
Luke Bryan
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I think 'Invisible' is a great song, but I don't know how accessible it is.
Bono
U2
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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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I only worked with people that I musically identify with. I typically chose songs they played for me, but in some instances I told some of the producers how a certain song should sound. Some songs were co-written by applying lyrics I had prepared over top of one of their old instrumentals or simply through improvisation. I wrote all the lyrics and was there during every production process, checking out every sound. However, most of the music was composed by the artists themselves. Most were usually very surprised at how their songs sounded with vocals! C.H.I.F.F.R.E. did the main production very well and we both wanted to try and achieve a roots-y electronic music sound, a little raw and noisy, but not too digital. I wanted a warm sound that left space for intimacy.
Hanin Elias
Atari Teenage Rio
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I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.
Benmont Tench
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
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Writing a song is a long road. Or it can be.
Dean Wareham
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'Good Life' was my gold-medal song and is what I sing when I need to get focused and keep calm. It also just makes me super happy, and I love jamming out.
Victoria Arlen
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By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
Jay-Z
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Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.
Alice McDermott
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Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.
Jason Isbell
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The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.
Doug Aitken
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Being a rock musician is already like ego-tripping hardcore. You're self-consumed, and you're always thinking. It's really easy to say, "I'm going to write a song about this situation, and when I'm done, everyone will care." To everybody else, that's ego-tripping.
Ryan Adams
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If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.
Jenny Lewis
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We haven't really changed, we've just gotten better at executing what we've always been trying to do. We're not really a band that has undergone huge stylistic decisions to change, we're just trying to follow the song. More and more, we let the song lead us - we don't try and put the song into a structure of our taste or our fashion.
Torquil Campbell
Broken Social Scene
