Song Quotes
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It's got to be hard to be a band that's trading on your 40-year-old hits, where there's a certain thing that's expected of you. But that's why I admire Bob Dylan's live performances - he's steadfast about mixing up the songs, not just sticking to his greatest hits, and reinterpreting them to the extent that you really can't recognize them until halfway through. It's like, I DARE you to sing along.
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For me, with the Blue Man Group, I got asked. It was for the Royal Variety Show, which was something I always wanted to be a part of. I'm really interested in things people don't necessarily expect. I did a pop song, but I did it in my own style.
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Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
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I wrote 'Don't Stop' just like I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' - I didn't try to make either a hit. I just wanted to write a song I liked.
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The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever.
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I don't have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute 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 mean a song that's specifically for the girls. It's saying you know we talk about them night and day, we're constantly pondering on men and what they've done good and what they've done bad and all these things in our lives.
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I love when people get songs wrong. I love when people take something from a song that's totally not what I intended!
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Well, I make every song I sing personal. I've never chosen a song that wasn't.
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I've had lots of friends who've gone through 'Battlefield' situations in their relationships, so when I was singing the song I put myself in their position and tried to imagine what they were going through. I got so, so into it and I think you can tell.
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I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
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When you're writing a song and there are five people invested in it, it's easy for one person to say, 'Oh, this song is about this and that', and everyone has to hear the idea and see if they can do better.
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To create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish.
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I have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I'm not going to drive hard into 'You should buy my stuff,' because really, it's inevitable. If you like a song, you're going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.
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I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.
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Listen up, here’s our song, for the young, the lost, and the underdogs. We’re taking over. We get it right and we get it wrong. But we got used to staying strong. We’re taking over. We’re taking over now, yeah!
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It's not a nice thing to have a song written about you.
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I've never really been nervous about any concerts. I enjoy it so much. All that matters is getting the songs played well, trying to get them to sound as close to the record live, which isn't easy, because my music is quite complicated to play.
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Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.
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Oftentimes, especially in the context of an acoustic song, I'm motivated to write by some amount of melancholy.
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I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.
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Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.
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I saw 'Rolling Stone' magazine once, and they were talking about the top 50 songs, and there wasn't one Sly song; how does that happen? But, Sly isn't the type to brown nose for props. He's always known what he had, what he was capable of; I'm just proud that he took the time and effort to put it to music.
