Songwriting Quotes - Page 22

• 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 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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• 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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• As time progressed, my songwriting developed out of my bass, because that's all I could do. I decided to take it as far as it could go and to use my skill as a tool.

  Stephen Bruner

  Skills, Use, Bass

  "Thundercat’s Touching Bass". Interview with Tempe Nakiska, www.interviewmagazine.com. June 4, 2013.

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• I feel like when the songwriting slows, I'd love to help others with their records. If it's something I really believe in, it's worth the effort.

  Mark Kozelek

  Believe, Helping Others, Effort

  Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. February 3, 2014.

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• Personally, being somewhat envious of Richard's (Thompson) songwriting and guitar playing, it's somewhat satisfying he's not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good.

  David Byrne

  Guitar, Names, Envious

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• Finding out that Ray Charles sang country songs but it sounded as soulful as any rhythm and blues record that kind of opened up my horizons for what songwriting was and what singers I could listen to.

  Michael Kiwanuka

  Country, Song, Kind

  "Michael Kiwanuka: For Those Who Think Young". Interview With Scott Simon, www.npr.org. July 28, 2012.

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• 70 percent of what we do involves staring into space trying to figure out what the hell happens next.

  Robert Gregory Browne

  Writing, Space, Trying

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• Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.

  Neil Finn

  Stupid, Sound, Mystery

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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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• My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

  Taylor Swift

  Stories, My Own, My Own Life

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• I got into songwriting because I'm not very good at communicating sometimes, just my true words, so music was always my way of expressing myself and being able to put things into lyrics that I couldn't say necessarily in my everyday life.

  LIZ

  Everyday, Able, Way

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• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Writing, Poetry, Mind

  'A Defence of Poetry' (written 1821, published 1840)

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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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• 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 see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

  Mick Jagger

  Running, Imagination

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• I entered a songwriting competition, I didn't win, and one of the judges on the panel was an A&R man at a record label that had no other acts and I signed to them. We sent my demo out to five people and David Kahne got back to me that day, and said I think you're amazing I want to start with you tomorrow. He was like my Harvard reach school, I couldn't believe it. I was really excited. It was the first time anyone of any importance said I was good and I ran with that validation for a long time.

  Lana Del Rey

  Believe, School, Thinking

  "Ice Breaker: Lana Del Rey". Interview with Sean Fennessey, www.gq.com. October 6, 2011.

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• When I was 15, all I knew was that I had to be somebody and that I could be somebody. So I exploited the only thing I knew, which was singing and songwriting.

  Juan Gabriel

  Singing

  Source: articles.latimes.com

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• My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury.

  Brandi Carlile

  Rocks, Glam Rock, Two

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• What we hear now is great-sounding records with great-sounding grooves and loops. And the sound of these records is irresistible, but the craft of songwriting is just about over. That's why, whenever I get an opportunity to do an album full of standards, I jump at it because I miss it.

  Barry Manilow

  Opportunity, Missing, Sound

  "Barry Manilow On Singing Standards And His Real Job". "Morning Edition" with David Greene, www.npr.org. December 7, 2012.

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• Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

  Jakob Dylan

  Thinking, Wind, People

  "Women and Country: A Conversation with Jakob Dylan and More". Interview with Mike Ragogna, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 28, 2010.

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• With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Together, Form, Process

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