Nick Cave Quotes About Songs

Quotes about: Songs

• I want to write songs that are so sad, the kind of sad where you take someone's little finger and break it in three places.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Three

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

• The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Love Is, Insane

• I don't like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don't want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music's supposed to do.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Heart, Attention

• There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Somewhere Else, Elements

  "Nick Cave is not in the business of telling people what to do". Interview with Christopher Kompanek, www.avclub.com. April 8, 2013.

• The songs that I like are the ones that you can't visualize, that are just cries from the heart - those very straight, direct songs that make rock & roll music so wonderful.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Heart, Rocks

• I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

  Nick Cave

  Change, Song, Couple

• Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Distance, Silence

• Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Strong, Memories

  Interview with Andrew Dominik, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 30, 2013.

• I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Stranger, Hotel

  Source: thequietus.com

• My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Giving, Wife

• The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, World

• When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Fall, Writing

  Source: pitchfork.com

• I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Doe

• The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Problem

  "Nick Cave is not in the business of telling people what to do". Interview with Christopher Kompanek, music.avclub.com. April 8, 2013.

• The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remains my prime motivation as an artist.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Motivation, Artist

  Falco, Nick Cave, Allen Ginsberg (2002). “Viva la poesia”

• I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Elements

• I just want to leave this world with a massive catalog of songs.

  Nick Cave

  Song, World, Want

• The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Ideas

• I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Views

  Source: pitchfork.com

• There's that kind of song, "Whoah baby, I love you," which doesn't have a visual element, but a very strong emotional element, and these are the great songs to me - those ones that you put them on and they just make you feel great, or whatever.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Baby, Strong

• I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Hate, Stories

  Interview with Andrew Dominik, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 30, 2013.

• The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Character

• When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Writing, Mean

  "Nick Cave on the Evolution of His Music". Interview with Simon Abrams, www.esquire.com. January 28, 2014.

• What you're really after when you see a film or listen to a song is a singular vision, and I'm not sure how much of that you really get in Hollywood.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Vision, Hollywood

  "Nick Cave: 'The greatest feat of artistic honesty would be to retire'". Interview with Alexis Petridis, www.theguardian.com. February 15, 2013.

• Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

  Nick Cave

  Song, Needs, Capacity

  "Nick Cave on the Evolution of His Music". Interview with Simon Abrams, www.esquire.com. January 28, 2014.

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