Songwriting Quotes - Page 21

• 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 blame it [never taking a break] on my mother. She was a born entertainer. Leave the songwriting, the singing and all that behind, and I still would have found some way to be an entertainer. I would have never been an actress, though, because I realized early in my life, in like sixth grade, I was a terrible actress.

  Stevie Nicks

  Mother, Singing, Way

  Source: www.usmagazine.com

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• A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.

  St. Lucia

  School, Class, Pivotal Moments

  Source: www.planetnotion.com

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• I've always been very politically interested from a very young age and I hadn't felt that was something I could begin to bring into my songwriting because I hadn't felt I'd reached the stage, that I had the skill with language enough, yet, to do that.

  PJ Harvey

  Skills, Age, Enough

  Source: www.wfuv.org

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• Opportunities may come along for you to convert something - something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it.

  Bob Dylan

  Opportunity, May, Might

  "Chronicles: Volume One". Book by Bob Dylan, 2004.

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• A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized. Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. That's why I write the way I do.

  Suzanne Vega

  Song, Smart, Writing

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• You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle.

  Annie Lennox

  Song, Three, Lines

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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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• 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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• The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'.

  Chuck Berry

  Country, Song, Boys

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• I'm fascinated by America...it's so odd.

  John Prine

  America, Odd, Fascinated

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• All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

  Townes Van Zandt

  Song, Writing, Guitar

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• I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

  Alex Ebert

  Pain, Thinking, Agony

  "Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I would sooner be robbed by a fan than a company. The fan may be broke and have but one choice. There is no excuse for the way the "songwriter" is robbed by everyone from the record company to the broadcaster, by the pure bottom line, greed. If it continues, sadly, in time, the music will suffer. It takes many many years to learn how to write a song properly. Songwriters will be forced to hit the road in order to make a decent living and, in my opinion, these two careers are related but not compatible.

  Mickey Newbury

  Song, Writing, Order

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• Do I start with the lyrics? No. Quite honestly, it's the opposite. I generally get the melody first - I kinda fiddle around on the guitar and work out a melody. The lyrics are there to flesh out the tone of the music. I've tried before to do things the other way around, but it never seems to work. Obviously, I spend a lot of time on my lyrics, I take them very seriously, but they're kinda secondary. Well, equal, maybe. I think sometimes that if you write a poem, it should remain as just a poem, just... words.

  Iron & Wine

  Writing, Thinking, Guitar

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• What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something stays with you like catching a cold. And during that time what happens is that I can then fit things on to it, it all fits and glues together. Sometimes it's crazy cos it can almost be anything. But if you catch the cold then the nonsense makes sense. It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand. It's not a pleasant experience necessarily.

  Thom Yorke

  Crazy, Hands, Together

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• I write about what I know and what I've experienced. That's the only way it can be real to me. I love songwriting. There is something so satisfying in coming up with an idea and turning it into a song that means something to people.

  Aaron Tippin

  Song, Real, Writing

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• I discovered at 18 that singing and songwriting was my strength. I decided that it was closest to my heart and if I pursued it then there would be no competition. I would just live my life being myself and living my dream.

  Jason Mraz

  Music, Dream, Heart

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• Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand I'll do with my left.

  Art Tatum

  Music, Hands, Looks

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• I don't think I'm ready for New York.

  Art Tatum

  Music, New York, Thinking

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• Young people can learn from my example that something can come from nothing. What I have become is the result of my hard efforts.

  Joseph Haydn

  Music, People, Effort

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• I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King I wrote over four hours worth of tunes, and they were really pretty -but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide, on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

  Hans Zimmer

  Music, Kings, Hands

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• I've always gravitated towards songwriting that happens easily and spontaneously, because those have always been my best songs.

  Jane Wiedlin

  Song, Happens

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• I studied acting and there's certainly an element of performance. I think that the songs are in many ways written to be performed. I think about what it's going to be like to sing them on stage rather than what it's going to be like to have someone at home listening to them on a CD. I guess in that way there's a connection between my acting experience and the songwriting and the way the songs are written.

  Loudon Wainwright III

  Song, Home, Thinking

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• We had some ups and downs, creatively, as the season went on, which is true of any show. If you compound that by the production that we go through, in terms of original songwriting and recordings, and all that is happening simultaneously, where we didn't do as good a job, as I hope we do this year, is the arcing of the storylines and the consistency of going in one direction with a character, and continuing in a really interesting way with that arc.

  Robert Greenblatt

  Jobs, Character, Years

  Source: collider.com

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