Songwriting Quotes - Page 33

• Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.

  Tom Waits

  Song, Thinking, Smoking

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• Martin Swinger is one of those rare singer-songwriters who excels at everything: singing, songwriting, guitar-playing, and being so present with his humor, tenderness, and wild mind that his performances are also deep conversations, soul to soul and heart to heart, about the quirks, surprises, and love that brings us most alive. His songs, ranging from the little plastic parts that hold the world together, to what enlightenment comes from Buddha and Betty Boop falling in love, are whimsically and wisely original and enduring.

  Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

  Song, Falling In Love, Heart

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• I'm just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life. Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure . . .

  Shane MacGowan

  Beautiful, Pain, Taken

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• Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Stupid, Writing, Editing

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• I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

  Bruce Cockburn

  Song, Rocks, Rock And Roll

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• Songwriting is like a therapy, it's a connection that you have with another person, and I'm not scared of it at all for some reason.

  Colbie Caillat

  Connections, Scared, Reason

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• We definitely set out to make a great 'radio' record. We set out to write great hooky choruses-but with verses that said something.

  LeAnn Rimes

  Writing, Records, Radio

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• I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

  Jeff Mangum

  Song, Pain, Writing

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Songwriting 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 to sleep. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them...

  John Lennon

  Letting Go, Running, Song

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• I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

  Rivers Cuomo

  Song, Writing, Caring

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• I feel some kind of duty to be really, really honest as a writer. The same is true of my songwriting.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Honest, Kind, Duty

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• Great classic music that I've been turned on to has not only inspired and influenced me, but it has had an effect on my songwriting.

  Scott Weiland

  Classic, Inspired, Effects

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• To begin with, the key principle of American indie rock wasn't a circumscribed musical style; it was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself.  The equation was simple:  If punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk.  'Punk was about more than just starting a band,' former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt once said, 'it was about starting a label, it was about touring, it was about taking control.  It was like songwriting; you just do it.  You want a record, you pay the pressing plant.  That's what it was all about.'

  Michael Azerrad

  Simple, Ethos, Indie Rock

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• Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

  Nanci Griffith

  Song, Mean, Hands

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• We've always just gotten up there and played. We don't have any dancers, we don't have all that stuff going on, we just get up there and play.

  Lenny Kravitz

  Play, Dancer, Stuff

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• I don't try to sound like anyone but me anymore. If something is out of my element, I try to avoid it.

  Norah Jones

  Trying, Sound, Elements

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

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• As a singer I tried on all these hats, these voices, these clothes, and eventually out came me.

  Carly Simon

  Voice, Clothes, Singers

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• If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Taught, Folks

  Bob Dylan (2011). “Chronicles”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• So it's not really whether you talk about politics, but how well were you able to do it. Peter Gabriel and Sting get away with it...U2...the examples are there, of people being able to carry these subjects in the music, and the audience is absolutely able to embrace subjects that aren't just the stuff they already know about. And they're actually able to learn stuff.

  Jackson Browne

  Writing, People, Example

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• Say a thing well and it will be remembered-and so too will you.

  Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

  Writing, Wells, Remembered

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• Try writing...a list, a letter, a journal, a novel, a declaration.

  Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

  Writing, Trying, Letters

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• Read something that YOU want to read, not something that you feel compelled to read.

  Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

  Writing, Want, Feels

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• Listen to what children have to say-their windows to the soul are unclouded.

  Sir David Baird, 1st Baronet

  Children, Writing, Window To The Soul

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• Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Normal, Fitting

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, Anchor

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• Back then, the business depended on bohemians. ... They needed Kristofferson and Roger Miller ..It was the tail end of something...the last Tin Pan Alley. ...and we were the night shift! They gave us keys, because they knew the best songs weren't written in daylight.... We got our keys taken away several times...me and Guy Clark.

  Steve Earle

  Song, Taken, Writing

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