Song Quotes
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What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It's never about you stepping out and showing you can play something fancy.
Benmont Tench
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
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The way to write really good songs is to write about the things that happen in your life and where you are in the moment, and writing about stuff that happens in your 30s is not the sexiest song subject.
Jens Lekman
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I think from the very beginning with 'We Are Young,' there was never any question about where we wanted the song to go and what we wanted it to sound like. And we knew that we wanted it to be big, we wanted it to be booming over the speakers at an arena or something.
Andrew Dost
Fun.
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You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
Ellie Goulding
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Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.
Babyface
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Tinashe doing 'I Wanna Get Better' - it's a really personal song, and it was hard for me to imagine anyone else doing it, but stylistically her and I are so incredibly different that I was fascinated to hear what she'd do with it, and I completely loved it. It just felt like the different expression of a song that, to me, was so stamped in one way.
Jack Antonoff
Fun.
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I love words. They're fun. I don't think any word can just be filler. There's no room for it. It's like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?
Kacey Musgraves
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I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.
Jackson Browne
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The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.
Steven Tyler
Aerosmith
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That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all.
John Fogerty
Creedence Clearwater Revival
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My intent for EPs - and, really, my philosophy on my music - is that every single song has to be worth it.
Jessica Anne Newham
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I don't really have a favorite genre. I could listen to a rock song, a metal song, jazz, pop music, whatever. For me, whatever style it is, it always depends on the chord progression, the lyrics, and the melody used.
Lodewijk Fluttert
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We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.
Art Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel
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I learned early in my writing career that if I try to tailor a song for someone else, I'm usually off base. They're usually looking for something from you with your character.
Brenda Russell
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The beautiful thing about it is that 'Despacito' is not really an English crossover. It was just another song that the world made a crossover. I didn't really push it; it just kinda went there.
Luis Fonsi
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In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.
Peter Ackroyd
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He was annoyed 'cause I didn't say that he'd written one line of this song 'Taxman.' But I also didn't say how I wrote two lines of 'Come Together' or three lines of 'Eleanor Rigby,' you know? I wasn't getting into any of that. I think, in the balance, I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have had with me!
George Harrison
The Beatles
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I think the Beatles is one band that, if I'm working on a song arrangement or if I have some idea for a song, and there's a little bit of a Beatles quality to it, I never avoid that. I always will steer into it.
Chris Cornell
Soundgarden
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My songs can make you cry, take you by surprise at the same time, can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme
Marshall Bruce Mathers III
Bad Meets Evil'
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I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.
Sarah Vaughan
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'Shooting Star' started out as the arrangement on the record, and it's developed into a real audience-participation song, just from playing it.
Paul Rodgers
Bad Company
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If my life were a song the title would be 'The Comeback Kid.'
Stefano Langone
