Song Quotes - Page 263

The Wreckoning is a darker song. But the record is positive

It's so funny because I listen to songs that I recorded that I didn't really know anything about at the time. Later on I'm starting to feel the songs. Sing them first, feel them later.

Sometimes sentiments were better left in song.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands.

My debut single "Pointless Relationship" is about a girl's view of where the relationship is going with her partner and it sounds like a negative term. But the song is more of an empowering song from a woman's perspective! It's the life of them together and it's just never going to go where it should go, and so she's saying to him this is a pointless relationship.

Now don't laugh 'cause I just might be...the soft curve in your hardline. (from the song "Hardliners" by Holcombe Waller)

Some days I'll be like, "You know what? Why don't I go to my daughter's studio and make a song?!" And then I don't! I don't know if I would have all the time it takes to put into a song.

The visual side of being a performer or in a band is, to me, as important as the music. I know not everyone shares that same opinion, but when I'm writing songs or working on lyrics or coming up with an idea, I think about videos as I'm in the studio. If I had all the money in the world, I would have the most amazing videos ever, you know? You're saying grandiose, and big; if the song warrants it, I try to push the visuals as far as I can.

If you have a lot of textural stuff happening in music you get called shoegaze, or whatever, and then it becomes about the sound and not about the songs.

"Art Imitates life," of course, is that phrase by Oscar Wilde. I called that song "Art Imitates Life" because Oh No was in the studio and he actually came up with that hook. When I was trying to figure out a name for the record, it just kind of made sense.

To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.

We don't think about how the songs are going to translate so much during the writing process. Once the song is recorded, and once we're mixing, that's when it occurs to me. Then you start rehearsing to play shows. I never concern myself about how we're going to pull it off live, because I know we'll figure out a way to do it.

I've got a song on every album, two songs as a matter of fact on every album without Auto-Tune, and that's the song that nobody talks about. It's weird.

When I'm in the studio, I don't finish the song and say, 'That's going to be a big ringtone.'

I want to write songs and play them for people - live.

It takes a lot of good songs to write a great song!

Art is borne out of necessity. Music is a tool and men are doers. When a relationship is working, you don't need to write a song-you need to get toilet paper.

Say to your own minds, "I am He, I am He". Let it ring day and night in your minds like a song, and at the point of death declare : "I am He". That is truth; the infinite strength of the world is yours.

I've written more songs for this record than I ever have in the past so I'm trying to give it a lot of special attention to be sure my ideas really get translated right.

A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized. Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. That's why I write the way I do.

The first song I wrote was the first song I remember thinking, "Well, maybe I can do something here." The very first one. By the second one I knew I could do something.

I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won't change that much.

It's striking how commercially viable that impulse for instant intimacy is right now, especially in songs and writing.

If I love a song I hope to find a way to get other people to love it too.

..the fields might fall to fallow and the birds might stop their song awhile; the growing things might die and lie in silence under snow, while through it all the cold sea wore its face of storms and death and sunken hopes...and yet unseen beneath the waves a warmer current ran that, in its time, would bring the spring.