Song Quotes - Page 174

I got tired of playing other people's songs.

You take all the time to write a song: you have to let it ooze on out by its natural self and that is pretty time consuming. Then you teach it to the band so everybody gets all the parts. Then you rehearse it and road test it, and all that. Then you get to the studio and there is a new guy in the band who calls himself the producer, right? Huh. He either makes it or breaks it usually before nightfall.

A lot of philosophy is bull***t, but a lot of it is what we write songs about too. And it's organizing your thoughts, organizing your intellect.

I like kind of varied songs, not just the same song all the time. And I thought things like "Too Sentimental" is a different thing for us, but it works and we love the way they all came out. There's definitely varied songs on there.

I only do solo albums when songs are screaming at me to be let out of my mind.

I wasnt thinking of the longevity of any of my songs, but I am extremely pleased with the lasting effect.

I know this song!’ Rosie laughed. ‘If you didn’t, that’d be the final proof that you’re from Mars.

[P]salms are basically prayers and hymns, by their very nature they are addressed to God or express truth about God in song.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

I know that sentence is long and has too many joining words in it but sometimes, when I'm angry, words burst out of me like a shout, or, if I'm sad, they spill out of me like tears, and if I'm happy my words are like a song. If that happens it's one of my rules not to change them because they're coming out of my heart and not my head, and that's the way they're meant to be.

I'm the kind of cat that can finish three songs in a day. Two or three songs in a day. If my voice is up to it and I feel up to it, I can finish two or three songs in a day.

New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song.

I find it not just strange but almost ridiculous that people could take a song like the one I was doing and interpret it is corroding anything. Folks have the feeling that oftentimes if you don't talk about something it will go away.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm damn well gonna do it!

The dance is the most universal of the arts, since, as Goethe justly said, it could destroy all the fine arts. It is an expression of all the emotions of the spirit, from the lowest to the highest. It accompanies and stimulates all the processes of life, from hunting and farming to war and fertility, from love to death. It enables, in turn other arts to come into being: music, song, drama. Despite all their riches, the dance is no formless complex, but a simple unity.

I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, ya know.

You don't have to be a cheater to sing a cheatin' song, that's what I'm saying.

We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.

Basically I see that song as a bunch of images which I threw together to represent the fact that I was seeing one girl and then I started seeing another, and it was just the guilt in between those two periods. The ballads I've written since have been about things that really hurt me.

Let patriotism have its high days and freedom its monuments, and let the triumphs of navigators and generals be annually observed; but surely, beyond all these, a season that stands for as much to the race as Easter does may well be remembered each year with songs and flowers and with every mark of gratitude and of loftiest jubilation.

Listen, sweet Dove, unto my song, And spread thy golden wings in me; Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing, and flie away with Thee.

So it's the unwinding of your nervous system. The corresponding experience to what winds you up comes out in your dreams. To write a song then, even one like Don't Bother Me, helps to get rid of some subconscious burden. Writing a song is like going to confession.

It's in the films and songs and all your magazines. It's everywhere that you may go, the devil's radio.