Song Quotes - Page 260

Well, at the very beginning of the Amboy Dukes, I was doing background but I never sang my own songs. I would sing them for the guys to show them how I wanted the songs to go, but I always had lead vocalists.

I've dreamed about performing songs, songs that don't even exist, as a complete song.

I actually dream a lot of songs, and I try to be good about voice-memoing ideas.

Someone once said that "The Waste Land" was a scum of poetry floating on a sea of footnotes. That resonated with me, because that's kind of what I was doing lyrically for a while. I was being very referential in a way. I would drop in these little phrases or ideas that were sort of portholes into a whole bigger realm of thought or whatever, that would work within the song, but that you could also poke through into a bigger discussion.

You play the one song that people want to hear the most every night, and for every audience that's a special thing. And usually that translates back to you.

When you're traveling on a body of songs that you have played for many, many years, for most nights of your life - I'm sure you've experienced this yourself - it's not that every night is not it's own thing. It is.

I am the stereo-typical classic lapsed Catholic. Religious themes crop up in my songs sometimes as metaphors and other kinds of touchstones for getting at issues and "deeper issues," and all that. Right now, honestly, I think all religion is proving itself to be a NET negative on the human race. I recognize its valuable place in individual lives and many larger communities - I know the good that is done in its various names all over the world, but I don't believe in it anymore, and I see the negative aspects dragging us down at a much faster rate than the positive ones are bouying us up.

I write songs about what I go through.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

People talk to me a lot about, "Why don't you ever rebel?" And I feel like I do rebel. To me, rebelling is - is that rush you get when you sing a song about someone and you know they're in the crowd.

Where is the video of Kanye [West] telling me he was going to call me 'that b***h' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that b***h' in front of the entire world.

I like to write about relationships. I like it when my friends come over and we crowd around the piano and sing Journey songs at the top of our lungs... And I like things that make me feel seven again. I don't ever look down on people for the way they choose to have fun; it's just not necessarily the way I like to have fun.

I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through.

When I listen to a song, I don't say, 'Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.' I'm thinking, 'That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.'

'Mean' is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

If guys don't want me to write bad songs about them, they shouldn't do bad things.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

Factoring in millions of people when I'm writing a song is not a good idea. I don't ever do it.

(Talks about Lucky You) "The song was about a girl who didn't fit in and she didn't care and she was different than everyone else. I think there's a long chorus of me singing "Do do do do do do do do do do". It's very young and I look back and it's kind of interesting to hear those kind of storylines and the lyrics that I used to write compared to the lyrics that I write now.

I really don’t want a compilation of sounds. I just need them to be songs.

I'm not that complicated. My complications come out in my songs. All you need to do to be my friend is like me.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

For some reason, I'm really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.