Song Quotes - Page 248

Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.

Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a Lamb." So I piped with merry cheer; "Piper, pipe that song again." So I piped; he wept to hear.

The first song that I wrote was when I was with The Del Rios. I was like 14 years old but I was always putting my thoughts down on paper even before then because it was like an escape - a way of unleashing all the stuff.

I'm not avoiding specifics, but I've always written songs from more of a global standpoint.

I think that a great song needs the full package. I think that a great song needs everything from lyrics, to melody, to music, and it needs to be interesting and it needs take you in and swallow you and swish you around, and then regurgitate you back in better form.

I'm not bashing people who write songs that are just 'get on the dance floor and party party', I understand why people need those songs too, but I don't really write lyrics like that.

I write songs so that people can make them into what it means to them as well.

I mean a song that's specifically for the girls. It's saying you know we talk about them night and day, we're constantly pondering on men and what they've done good and what they've done bad and all these things in our lives.

Every single song that I've listened to is in my memory forever.

I can't sing “I Believe I Can Fly”. I sing that horrible. But I can sing “I Gotta Feeling” good. I wrote it for my capabilities. So I Gotta Feeling is just about let me make a song to inspire people to have a good time.

I was always one of these people who is irrationally moved by stupid pop songs.

If I'm working on a set of songs, and thinking about putting them together in a collection, I start to think about what they have in common. Either on purpose or without meaning to, I shape them all in the same kind of way, because I'd rather the album feel like a galaxy of things that all have to do with each other. I do that with sonic elements, too - it's a matter of each record having its own specific identity.

I was never a kid who dreamt of being a performer. I started singing the songs because nobody knew who I was or cared at all. If I wasn't going to sing them, nobody was going to sing them, so I had to step in and fill that role myself.

I think that anything is a form of folk music. That's just me being glib, but the thing I like the best about humans, and there are not many other things besides this, is that humans make culture. If you're an artist, a big part of folk is noticing what other people are doing and incorporating it and changing it - the way that songs warp and change over time.

Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music.

When you're a songwriter, people wonder about your personal life and the meanings behind the songs, and that can feel pretty invasive, so you become protective about your inner world.

Everybody has had the experience of something they love - whether it's a pop song or a painting or a movie - feeling so perfect to them that it's almost like it came from another planet. It has nothing to do with ordinary life, which is very plain. And there's something depressing about that in a way, because you feel like you're this small little human, and you feel like it has nothing to do with you.

It's a really common trap to want your life to live up to some standard that you believe in, and then you start to really examine those standards and realize they come not from experiences you've had, but things you've seen in movies, or feelings you've felt listening to pop songs, or ideas you've received from reading books. And not just happy things, but a lot of the time, sad things. It gets kind of depressing, when you see how movies and songs make these promises to us.

When I listen to little fourth-dimension artifacts, they're like they were made as time capsules in the first place. You know that when you're writing the song and recording the song, you're already sending a message to the future listener, whoever and wherever and whenever that will be.

A record is something that isn't real or true. It's like cinema. It's a construction of something hyper-real and surreal and unreal all at the same time. You make a space that doesn't really exist. One of the big joys of being in this line of work is building the recorded versions of the songs.

I feel much more physically connected to my voice, and I like the physicality of the voice, and how the voice can physically occupy a song.

The less people present in an urgent situation that a moderately high stakes recording session can create - the less people there are in the room - the more openness there can be. These songs share that as well, in addition to just the obvious, basic starkness.