Song Quotes - Page 119

I think of myself as a singer. The acting is just something I have to do between songs.

You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here's a hint - ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn't just the women. It's the great male fantasy - all it takes is one dance to know that she's the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know - this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don't want a very long courtships. They want to know immediately.

A song without a hook is like a train without rails. It skitters all over the place, bangs into everything. Boom! Crash! There goes Grand Central Station. Crushed by a train.

It would be as naive to study the song of the nightingale, as it would be ridiculous to try and win a King's Gambit against a representative of the old chess guard.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

Yorke's lyrics make me want to give up. I could never in my wildest dreams find something as beautiful as they find for a single song - let alone album after album.

It's terrifying to play your favorite band's song in front of your favorite band.

I'd love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

There's always this weird dark humor within a lot of Depeche Mode songs that people miss, tongue-in-cheek and also very British.

"I dissolve in trust, I will sing with joy, I will end up dust". The line really spoke to me. That's what it is: Enjoy what you have here. You're not going to be here forever, but the songs stay forever. For me, it's like Bowie songs - they carry me, and they continue to, even though he's gone.

I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.

Any song I don't feel good about, I shelve. Anything you ever hear me sing, it's because I want to.

Broadway is not just the song and the shows; it's the individual performers and the community.

Does it bother me that some people are burning their own System CDs and taking money out of my pocket? Not really. This has always been about putting the best possible version of the song in the fans hands. It was like selling an artist's painting before he had finished it.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: So this winged hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.

Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.

I had to take a bit of a break and fast for a while, but then I found myself very, very hungry when I got back to [song-writing].

If life is music, I sometimes feel as though I was born on the off-beat of the song, and I love it. As Christian numbers reportedly decrease in America, my love for Christ feels as though it increases. I must be honest about such strange feelings: I now want to be thought unfaithful about as much as a bougie aristocrat wants to be thought a hobo.

I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"

I was also thinking about isolation on an evolutionary scale as well, like when you think of an island like Madagascar where things are free to evolve unfettered by outside powers. That starts to reach into the underlying narrative, which is more of a literal story that I used as a construct to build songs around.

I think it's important to be able to write stuff that's personal to you and stuff that you'll really be able to understand what you're singing about and be able to truly sing it. Because if you're singing a song that someone's written for you and you really can't relate to it, it's hard to sing that song.

Growing up, road trips with Dad were something I hated. Sitting still for hours, singing that stupid song, "100 bottles of beer on the wall. 100 bottles of beer..." Dad, you know, keeping up with the song.