I think Bridge Over Troubled Water was a very good song. Artie sang it beautifully. The Boxer was a really nice record. But I don't think I've written any great songs.
I knew the words to 25 rock songs, so I got in the group. Long Tall Sally and Tutti-Frutti, that got me in. That was my audition.
Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.
It must kill George Bush that John McCain is the most popular and Beloved Republican in America.
...and like a fool who will never see the truth I keep thinking something's gonna change There's a danger in loving somebody too much And it's sad when you know it's your heart they can't touch There's a reason why people don't stay who they are Baby sometimes love's just ain't enough
Most people like the sad songs. Some of the oldest songs known to man are sad. Listening to a voice singing something sad is a really great way to help you to feel sad when you need to.
You put a big bird in a small cage, it'll sing you a song
When you're No. 1 or No. 300, you still get to play and write the songs.
I came down to Orange because I sold the Smothers Brothers a song called 'Chocolate,' and that gave me enough money to move down here. I was washing windows down in Orange County when they called me up and said they wanted me to do their TV show.
I like music because... its expressive, you can convey whatever you're thinking through a song. And it's the best respite for me anyway to do it through music. So I like music because you can express and let your soul out through it.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
I usually don't share the music with the musicians until right before they have to record their parts, because I hate discussing it and just intellectualizing it on any level. I just want to speak from the subconscious, which knows way more about me than my intellectual side will ever know. Once I start doing the arrangements - what I call the architecture of the song - that has a lot of thought put into it.
There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.
Song is the licensed medium for bawling in public things too silly or sacred to be uttered in ordinary speech.
There's a lot of personal stuff that can go into songwriting but there's also a lot of dramatization and fictionalization. You have to do that to make a good song.
I do love to sing Jacques Brel songs, intensely. I get terribly excited, just by reading a couple of lines in any one of his songs.
I believe the time will come when the whole definition of pop music will change. It will get to the point where a song will not be a good song until it has a high level of creativity in writing and performance. In other words, in order to be popular, songs will have to meet these high standards.
Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
I think anything thats creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that Im going through in my life. If youre going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, its a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent.
Someone told me about drama schools, and they seemed like mythological places - you can really go and be in drama classes all day? I inadvertently entered into this world where people wore bicycle clips and did song-and-dance routines in the corridors.
I totally accept that it's a legitimate criticism that when you are involved in the day-to-day scrum of government that what can get lost is the narrative, the hymn sheet the song that inspires and lifts people's sights.
It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.
I'm unable to really write the kind of song that doesn't have a visual element, which most songs don't.
