Songwriting Quotes - Page 22

• I like myself better when I'm writing regularly. ... I was influenced a lot by those around me-there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields. ... I'm a country songwriter and we write cry-in-your-beer songs. That's what we do. Something that you can slow dance to...I never gave up on country music because I knew what I was doing was not that bad. ... Most of the stuff I've read about me has been true.

  Willie Nelson

  Country, Song, Writing

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• There's only two kinds of music: the blues and zippety doo-dah.

  Townes Van Zandt

  Two, Kind

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• I suffer from the curse of being multi-talented. There's no doubt about it. Politics and literature have gotten in the way of songwriting.

  Kinky Friedman

  Doubt, Suffering, Literature

  Source: www.axs.com

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• Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

  Leonard Cohen

  Song, New York, Men

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• I knew I had to have a hit. I would get no more chances. Analyzing what they had in common I discovered they had many similar elements: harmonic rhythm, placement of the chord changes, choice of harmonic progressions, similar instrumentation, vocal phrases, drum fills, content, even the timbre of the lead solo voice. I decided to write a song that incorporated all these elements in one record.

  Neil Sedaka

  Song, Writing, Voice

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• You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

  Rodney Atkins

  Song, Writing, Eye

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• I love, love, love songwriting. It's like the most therapeutic thing in the world.

  Troye Sivan

  World, Therapeutic

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I was always interested in science, and pre-med was arespectable thing to do while I ursued my songwriting.

  Neil Diamond

  Meds, Things To Do

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• I love songwriting ! It's my Number One passion other than performing. Well, actually it's like wearing three different hats: songwriting, recording and performing. They're all completely different and draw on different types of skills. With recording, there are so many different phases of production, and you have to be very careful because you can polish it until it doesn't shine.

  Delbert McClinton

  Passion, Skills, Numbers

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• The New Kids took some hits for, you know, not writing their own music. But on a songwriting standpoint, I mean, I'd never written music before when I was in the group, ... Now the music is my music, so it's kind of like my baby, and that was a whole different experience.

  Joey McIntyre

  Baby, Mean, Kids

  "Music vets offer hints on boy band survival" by Brooke Alexander, www.cnn.com. February 18, 1999.

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• I think the nature of songwriters is that they are philosophers, and philosophers have a bent towards poetry and songwriting, so I think that the two run around together. The nature of a songwriter could be philosophical. Looking for universal ideas, a way to say things, get the story across as a means of entertaining, provoking thought.

  Tom T. Hall

  Running, Philosophical, Mean

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• When you're songwriting, it's like talking about your own life experience. When you're with a band, you have to compromise.

  Timothy B. Schmit

  Talking, Band, Compromise

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• Anybody I'm in a band with can do what they do better than me. I'm a huge believer that I can play bass or whatever I bring to the table - producing, songwriting, orchestrating - and I can look at the other guys and say, "He's got that, he's got this, and I have this." It's a team thing.

  Nikki Sixx

  Team, Play, Guy

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• I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case.

  Dan Piraro

  Song, Writing, Government

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• I was able to apply ukulele to whatever I'm trying to write. It's become part of songwriting for me, the knowledge I gained from hearing the melodies come out, and then applying that to guitar or vocals.

  Eddie Vedder

  Writing, Guitar, Ukulele

  Source: www.twofeetthick.com

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• I feel like songwriting changed from something that I liked doing to something that, I feel, is a very important outlet for me to digest all the things around me. Once I put thoughts into a song, I can let it go, it doesn't bug me anymore you know what I mean? It's kind of a catharsis.

  Dan Mangan

  Song, Mean, Important

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• Gatekeeper was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I havent written many like that.

  Feist

  Mind, Trying, Littles

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• I didn't even know the industry of songwriting existed. I thought everybody sang songs and they were only singing the songs that they wrote. So after I found out about songwriting in college, I was like, "Okay, I want to do that."

  PJ Harvey

  Song, College, Singing

  "Singer/Songwriter PJ Shares Her Soundtrack For The Come Up". Interview with Interview with Todd Davis, www.parlemag.com. September 9, 2016.

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• There are a lot of new sounds I've gone for, which I may not have been ready to go for in the past, especially moving away from just rapping. I really tried to push my songwriting side on this one. I think that, for better or worse, people have definitely been able to tell. Changing style is always gonna be a love/hate thing for people, but I love it all, and I can't please everyone so that's all that matters.

  Illy

  Hate, Rap, Moving

  Source: acclaimmag.com

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• It's not a lot, but we have 8,000 people following us. I get the biggest kick out of it, to hear words that I wrote and chords that I wrote being sung by somebody else. It's a true honor, and it might sound intense, but it's one of the most rewarding parts of the songwriting experience.

  Taylor Goldsmith

  People, Honor, Intense

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

  Billy Joel

  Song, Kids, Player

  "Backstage With Billy Joel: The Billboard Cover Story Interview (Exclusive)". Interview with Ray Waddell, www.billboard.com. January 31, 2014.

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• In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.

  Michael Kosser

  Writing, Rocks, Nashville

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• [Non-performing songwriters] climb the mountain the first time, take their successes in stride, and when they tumble down the mountain, they just consider the tumble part of their profession and don't even waste time mourning their slump. They continue to write, make new connections, and move forward toward a new round of success.

  Michael Kosser

  Moving, Writing, Mourning

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• Especially on Broadway, composers and lyricists fretted over their creations, obsessed over every rhyme, every critical chord or interval. The stakes were so high. On Broadway, people were watching and judging, especially newspaper critics who knew a thousand ways to slice and dice a songwriter for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of faithful readers. There was no anonymity for the Broadway songwriter. Even the best could find themselves stripped naked the morning after by the tastemakers and their readers.

  Michael Kosser

  Morning, Writing, People

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• Songwriting is a craft. Writing good songs on a a consistent basis doesn not happen spontaneously. In fact, most of our best songwriters learned to write good songs by writing a lot of not so good ones. Education matters in songwriting, just as it matters for physicists, chemists, doctors, lawyers and MBAs. Education lays the foundataion on which to build experience.

  Michael Kosser

  Song, Writing, Doctors

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