Song Quotes - Page 196

The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Usually a song being hard to write is a sign that the song isn't good enough. It should be like a good kiss. Effortless and smooth.

My childhood was filled with music and singing and a passion for traditional Yemenite songs, picked up from my mother.

A song will keep going round in my brain and keep me awake.

Fine, you do that, and you tell them that at the very first opportunity, I'm coming down there and killing all of them. Mass murder. And after they're all dead, I'm going to kick the bodies around, dance on top of them, and sing a happy song. No jury will convict me.

Every song that I play I wrote by myself.

Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

Slade was never pretentious. It was just music to them. Pop, rock, soul....it was all the same to Slade. They wrote great songs. And, besides, I'd like to raid their wardrobe.

I like Chris Martin. I think he's a really great songwriter.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

When I choose material for an album all these songs I grew up with pour into my head.

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

We've got the slowest 311 song ever, called 'Solar Flare,' which is a scathing political rap that [vocalist] S.A. [Martinez] puts over a really slow, heavy thing, And then there's also a really fast one called 'It's Getting OK Now,' which is [guitarist] Tim Mahoney channeling Dimebag Darrell [Abbott of Pantera].

Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.

The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

Truth only means something when it's hard to admit.

I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz.

I wasn't a kid when I came out. Soulja Boy was 16. I'm saying that when he came out he was a kid so it was naturally a show for him. It's not about the music right away. It's a show for him. Not that he's not putting enough effort into his music, but how much effort can a 16 year old put into his music because as you mature and get older even the songs he's doing now has evolved and he's looking back.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I'd basically break down an arrangement - I wouldn't plan endings or beginnings - so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I'd written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. I think "Peace Trail" is one of the exceptions, where it's a later take. It just happened really quickly.

I see a woman in the night with a baby in her hand, under an old street light near a garbage can.

If it can affect me, if it has meaning to me, if I feel I can do it well, I will do it and record it and thats why I recorded these songs.

The two biggest hits (by Machito)... were about that enduring Cuban song topic-food: 'Sopa de pichn' [pigeon soup] and 'Paella'. If you think that all songs about food are double entendres for sex... Well, maybe all songs about food can be double entendres, but in many periods of Cuban history, for many people, food has been harder to get, and the subject of more fantasies, than sex.

I actually hear into life - seeing everything that's occurring as a conversation with God in some form. So it really is the next song on the radio - a chance utterance of a friend on the street - it really is what's happening right now. I stop and think, 'What is life trying to tell me right now?' And "What does my soul know about this?'