Songwriting Quotes - Page 2

• I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last. Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

  John Legend

  Writing, Ideas, People

  Seventeen Interview, www.seventeen.com. November 23, 2006.

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• Music breeds its own inspiration. You can only do it by doing it. You may not feel like it, but you push yourself. It's a work process. Or just improvise. Something will come.

  Burt Bacharach

  Inspiration, Writing Songs, May

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• Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Writing, Bird

  FaceBook post by Tom Waits from Nov 11, 2009

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• You know, it's a pretty mysterious thing still, why you start the songs you start, and the specific flavor of them, the nature of them. I don't know about other writers, but, for me, it's still somewhat out of my control. It's not really a logical process.

  Gillian Welch

  Song, Mysterious Things, Flavor

  "Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: Welcome To The Machine". Interview with Jewly Hight, americansongwriter.com. November 04, 2009.

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• Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

  Paul McCartney

  Funny, Money, Writing

  "Paul McCartney: One for the Road". Interview with David Fricke, www.rollingstone.com. February 08, 1990.

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• Those in power write the history while those who suffer write the songs.

  Frank Harte

  Song, Writing, Suffering

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• I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play.

  Ozzy Osbourne

  Music, Kids, Guitar

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• Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. ... Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.

  Jimmy Webb

  Writing, Simple, Should Have

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• It's the damage that we do and never know. It's the words that we don't say that scare me so.

  Elvis Costello

  Scare, Damage, Knows

  Song: Accidents Will Happen, Album: Armed Forces, 1979

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• Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

  Johannes Brahms

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Music

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• Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

  David Bowie

  Speak, Extremes

  Song: A Big Hurt, Album: Tin Machine II

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• The secret of a great melody is a secret.

  Dave Brubeck

  Writing, Secret, Melody

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• I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

  Angus Young

  Humor, People, Sick

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• I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down...Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.

  John Lennon

  Meaningful, Song, Morning

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• Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.

  John Lennon

  Song, Sleep, Writing

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• Isolation is a big part of songwriting.

  Natalie Imbruglia

  Isolation, Bigs

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

  Taylor Swift

  Thinking, Able, Form

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• For a songwriter, you dont really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes.

  Tom Waits

  School, Listening, Tunes

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• You know, a song is like a kid. You bring it up. And sometimes something you thought was going to be fantastic, by the time it's finished, is a bit of a disappointment...Beyond a certain point, the music isn't mine anymore. It's yours.

  Phil Collins

  Song, Disappointment, Kids

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• You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

  Joni Mitchell

  Music, Song, Writing

  "If You Seek a Moment of Clarity While Complaining, You Just Might Stop Complaining" by Dennis Merritt Jones, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 3, 2012.

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• Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

  Pablo Casals

  Music, Beautiful, Heart

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

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• If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction. And those rules can change if you realize it's a dumb idea. You start to mutate it to see what fits best.

  Trent Reznor

  Ideas, Dumb, Realizing

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• Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody's living that. Not just somebody, there's a lot of people.

  Loretta Lynn

  Writing, People, Ifs

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• As far as songwriting, my inspirations came from love, life and death, and viewing other people's situations.

  Ed Sheeran

  Inspiration, Love Life, People

  "Redhead Redemption: Ed Sheeran". Interview with Ilana Kaplan, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 14, 2011.

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• To play without passion is inexcusable!

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Passion, Play

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