Songwriting Quotes - Page 26

• I've always written songs to use music as a form of therapy or as a way to look at my obstacles or my memories from a different perspective. It's always helped me realize the grass isn't always greener and how I need to live more in the moment. My songwriting is a documentation of whatever's happening in my life at that point in time.

  Chuck Ragan

  Song, Memories, Perspective

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am not one of those writers that just does songwriting one way. Personally, I think the best song will pop out all at once, because it's this feeling that the words fit the music so cleanly. When you really have a complete thought, and you always yearn for that as a songwriter. You always work for that.

  Crosby Loggins

  Song, Thinking, Feelings

  Source: www.fanbolt.com

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• I'm from the generation that's always been recording, from the very beginning. I learned to play the guitar on the four-track. I started listening to music at a time when people were doing recording at home, when the discussion about songwriting correlated to the discussion about producing and engineering. I think that's a description of my generation.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Home, Thinking, Guitar

  Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. May 15, 2006.

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• I don't have some songwriting formula that I kinda go by. Usually it just comes by way of inspiration. Sometimes I'm inspired by a melody first and sometimes I'm inspired by a lyric. Typically, I'm inspired by an idea for a lyric and then after we get the lyric going then we write a melody to it.

  Natalie Grant

  Inspiration, Writing, Ideas

  "Natalie Grant’s whirlwind success continues with 'Hurricane'". Interview with John W. Kennedy, www.beliefnet.com.

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• Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

  Voltaire

  Stupid, Book, Humorous

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

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• I think that female musicians are constantly fighting an uphill battle in general. Even when I'm not writing heartbreak songs... the fact that songwriting is so difficult and music criticism has become so content driven means that sometimes critics can go for the easy descriptors rather than an in-depth analysis.

  Marissa Nadler

  Song, Writing, Mean

  Source: thequietus.com

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• For me going solo meant freedom to collaborate and do whatever I feel I'm good at doing. For me it was really not ever expanding as an artist, developing everything from my songwriting to my singing to my mission statement to my vision. I've been so inspired by all the creative freedom that it brings that I have no complaints.

  Melissa Auf der Maur

  Artist, Creative, Singing

  Source: archive.alternativenation.net

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• Everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking. Busking, you learn people, you learn about reading people. You learn about reading the atmosphere of the street. If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. It's almost like you get to know personality types, just by watching people walk past. You get a sense for things.

  Glen Hansard

  Reading, Past, Cities

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, music.avclub.com. January 17, 2008.

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• I went to visit a friend of mine, a writer name Troy Seal, a songwriting fool. He's had a ton of hits. He said, "I've got a thing I'm stuck on." I can hear the wind a blowin' - he already had that. You and me lord, we had it all. He only had that first verse. For some reason he was stuck. But that's how that came about.

  Donnie Fritts

  Wind, Names, Fool

  "The Soulful DNA of Country Songwriter Donnie Fritts". Interview with Jacob Blickenstaff, www.motherjones.com. October 08, 2015.

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• I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

  PJ Harvey

  Writing, Issues, Matter

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I like the songwriting. I don't ever listen and then go back and change stuff. For me when I wrote the song, it's always really fun and exciting.

  Christopher Owens

  Song, Fun, Stuff

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

  Ben Folds

  Writing, Email, Bars

  Source: www.billboard.com

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• Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

  Bob Marley

  Song, Inspiration, Mean

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• All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.

  David Berman

  Writing, Character, Albums

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• There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping...in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.

  John Oates

  Song, Inspiration, Writing

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• With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.

  Ben Folds

  Song, Couple, Writing

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• One good thing about music, when it hits-you feel no pain. ... My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die. ... Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen. ... My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

  Bob Marley

  Pain, Fighting, Forever

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• The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio...well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.

  Brian Wilson

  Song, Writing, Exercise

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

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• What I strive to do with songwriting is be really honest, authentic and try to be open and share that with people. I choose that over trying to be clever, poetic, or lyrical.

  Brett Dennen

  Clever, People, Trying

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• People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.

  John Darnielle

  Nursing, Expression, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• At first it was my brother's songwriting and I was just doing what everyone told me.

  Gwen Stefani

  Brother, Firsts, My Brother

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• I write one step at a time, always finishing off the part I'm working on before even thinking about the next part. I need to hear it all together before deciding what goes next. I even mix before moving on...in other words, I write by recording.

  Zach Condon

  Moving, Writing, Thinking

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• The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination.

  Rob Brezsny

  Prayer, Writing, Mean

  Rob Brezsny (2005). “Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings”, p.194, Frog Books

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• Cowriting is very personal. A great song is an honest song, so you have to be able to open up to the person in the room. It's like a blind date. I know in the first five minutes if it's gonna be weird.

  Liz Rose

  Song, Writing, Able

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• The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

  John Fowles

  Writing, Ignorance, Reality

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