Song Quotes - Page 199

Everything in the service needs to preach - architecture, lighting, songs, prayers, fellowship, the smell - it all preaches. All five senses must be engaged to experience God.

My art is not limited to the songs I create but also to the reaction it creates. I like to sit back and look at the whole thing as if it's a tornado that I'm controlling. It's creating chaos. When you create chaos, ideas are turned upside down, and everybody looks at things in a different way.

I love all holiday music. My two favorites would probably be Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas" and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song." They epitomize Christmas for me. Those two recordings will never be touched. That's why I've never redone them.

Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process.

It's so different going in the studio and singing your own music and you don't really think about making sure that the message of the song or the idea behind the song comes across to people. Because it's in your head, it's in your heart, whatever, but it's... different when you're playing a character and you're singing as the character. There's just a lot more involved in that, I guess.

It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

I can write for weeks or months sometimes and edit it down to a song. I feel like it's a piece of music that will hopefully stand the test of time and hopefully capture a moment in history if I'm doing it correctly and honestly.

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

I don't think Neil Young has a beautiful voice but it's something that grabs you and the songs are so good.

It feels good, you know. It feels like you're out there, you know, doin' your own thing, know what I'm sayin'? It's like, people can't really compare it to anything, and that kinda feels good. It opens me up to a lot of different arenas, a lot of different type of situations, you know like Tony Hawk will call. You know what I'm sayin'? I can just image if my songs was about shootin' up, and like sellin' cocaine, I doubt Tony Hawk would be callin' you know?

It's just like an idea, like a chorus, and then we just jam on it - it happens in loads of different ways. The best songs I find always come from the subconscious, like when you don't think. Not to be pretentious about it, but usually songs just blurt out rather than thinking about it. I never write lyrics and then do a song, I find that really hard - that's like a real skill.

Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

Jesus doesn't just want songs. He wants justice for the people on planet Earth.

If I had five minutes to live, I don't think I'd be bothered singing a song. I'd be dead, so it won't really matter. I'd have a glass of wine and a cigarette.

I wanna hear some Diana Ross, I wanna hear some Marvin Gaye. I wanna hear a song that reminds me of a better day.

When I start to write a song, I have the words and I have the melody, and then it's just a matter of making it to the end. I think if I have something that I could identify as a talent, it would be that I can finish a song. I kind of know intuitively where the melody should go.

Cowriting is very personal. A great song is an honest song, so you have to be able to open up to the person in the room. It's like a blind date. I know in the first five minutes if it's gonna be weird.

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

Suddenly I burst into song: 'Awe, sweet mystery of life, at last I found thee...' And I felt so good inside and my heart felt so full, I decided I would set time aside each day to do awe-robics. Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don't understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.

Music is an emotion and it makes you feel a certain way. Some songs make you want to dance, while some make you think. Some songs are positive, while some people see those songs as negative.

It's very important to have a good song - one where you can strip away all the production and just play it on guitar or at the piano. It has to hold its own. That's why I've put videos online with acoustic versions of my songs, so you can hear them in their original form.

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

Many times you never know what's going to happen. You'll play songs that you never thought you were going to play.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.