Song Quotes
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I'm a fun song maker. I love to make people smile. I also love to see them big, burly dudes crying because their wives' song is 'Die a Happy Man.'
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There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.
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I write songs very quickly, so the 20 minutes of joy I get out of writing a song doesn't compare to the two months of joy I get engaging with the people who like my music.
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Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
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Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
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I am stupidly passionate about music; it has become a bit of drug. I buy tons of CDs and spend days listening to each and every one, putting notes on every song to know which tracks are good so that when I do my little MP3 collection, I know which songs to include.
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The great thing about "Shoot 'Em Up, Baby" is that it's the first song that we went and recorded [with Andy Kim].
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Not a lot of people know I wrote the lyrics for the Arsenal club song, 'Good Old Arsenal'. We had a competition on ITV for it, and none of the entries were any good, so I approached their manager, Bertie Mee, and asked him if he would let me have a stab. He did, and within a few weeks they were singing it at Wembley on the way to the 1971 double.
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Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.
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Anyone can rehearse and play constantly any song in the world.
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Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.
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Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.
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Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.
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You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.
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Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I think the ordinary guy has just as much right to say 'This is a good song' as somebody who is in the music business.
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A love song must respect the canons of music beauty, entering the fibers of those who are listening. It must make them dream and pleasantly introduce them to the universe of love.
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Stuff just comes out all the time, sometimes when I sing live it really comes alive and I sort of... I write songs and then almost... not forget about it, but live it really comes out and I suddenly realise what I've written. I don't know where it all comes from.
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My favourite piece of music is actually 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' as a whole. For me, it's the most perfect and brilliant example of rock song writing.
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I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.
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I was always nervous to play my father's John Lennon's songs.
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My first go at drinking did not go so well. I ended up getting sick in front of everybody. You know that Ginuwine song 'Pony'? It was playing at the party while I was getting sick. My entire senior year, everyone sang that around me. For a year. I would like that erased from my memory.
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'Man In The Mirror' by Michael Jackson - I used to have my very first dance parties with my kids to this song when they were little, even carried them around to it. It just makes you want to be a better person and be inspired.
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I love that song 'I Could Have Danced All Night' from 'My Fair Lady' so much. I love that song because watching it as a kid, it was such an unbridled expression of joy.
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I'm inspired by artists like Robyn, just because she writes amazing pop songs, and they're not throwaway. When I listen to a Robyn pop song, I don't feel like she's just kind of saying something and not thinking; I feel like it's really emotional.
