Song Quotes - Page 279

When you're DJing, there are songs I love to play, but I know people are going to walk off. It doesn't matter what I like. You have to be able to play the popular song and slip in one of yours, in such a way that they don't notice it. You've got them in such a roll that you get them back into what they think they like.

We wanted to not necessarily tell the story of the video or the song, but create an ambience. And I think now, I think that's gone now. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think we were all trying to make mini feature films. I remember when we were making the Duran videos, I would crop the top and bottom of the screen with black. So that it looked more like cinema.

I wanted to make mini features. And there was a wonderful creative freedom; not necessarily copying the lyrics, but just trying to create emotion. Like the songs, you know? Just like how the song creates an emotion, I wanted the video to create an emotion.

I thought we were gonna get "Smooth Operator." That song was big in the '90s.

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

I was tired of my lady, we'd been together too long, like a worn-out recording of a favorite song.

Every songwriter lives to have at least one song that a cab driver who asks 'You write anything I know?' will recognize.

My mother's songs are really turning out to be masterpieces. I have inherited this incredible legacy and am so fortunate to bathe in her sensibilities. It is tinged with tragedy. I'd much rather she was here in person, but there is still a positive force to come out of her death and that is having the gift of music that she gave.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens. It's about addiction, really, about knowing how it's all going to end up. In that sense, you're watching a movie of yourself all the time - and then you want out of that movie.

I find so many songwriters today are missing an element ... either the production is amazing but the songs aren't, or it's the other way around.

To me, songs come of their own volition - and with an open-ended philosophy.

When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work, my mother was the master, or the mistress. There were three or four songs she wrote about my father - songs about failed love.

I'd be hanging out in my bathrobe all day, stinky, just writing, and my mom allowed me to do this-as long as I was writing songs. She said, 'As long as you're seriously working on music, I'll support you. Don't get a job, because if you work, it will crush you.

I've written songs for Shirley Bassey, Marianne Faithfull, and Linda Thompson. I sort of focus on these wonderful, aging divas. But maybe that's because I think I'm Christina Aguilera.

Prima Donna is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.

I definitely consider 'Poses' - the whole album in fact - to be kind of a miracle. Like the last breath of that moment when decadence is healthy, 'Poses' encapsulates that feeling. It's a kind of song and a kind of album that I'll never be able to repeat.

When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.

Each one of us in Café Tacvba is a composer and we come to the group with songs written out, musically and lyrically. Occasionally, there's a collaboration between us. But each song is almost always written by one of us, and then we all figure out the arrangements. Up until now there hasn't been a moment where the composer explains the song and says, "I want to say this or that." It's always open for interpretation.

Personally, the songs that I've written, when they arrive to the Café Tacvba group , they become something more. Some begin to take spiritual aspects, political aspects, aspects that I had not initially put into the song. I think that's something magical that happens in our creations.

That song "Futuro" was written by Quique Rangel, the bassist. I wouldn't know how to explain the song, but each would have to give their own interpretation. If the lyrics generate that message for you, then that's good.

It so happens that certain songs becomes part of culture, and culture is a form of preserving patterns. Yes, we're Mexican, and we're proud to be, but we're also human. But like all cultures, there are retrograde elements and evolutionary elements. I think we'll chose to head towards the evolutionary ones and leave the others behind.

Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.

Artists don't always know. Almost every song I ever recorded that was a hit at the majors that the promotional people picked I didn't think it would be a hit. I was wrong every time!

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.