Song Quotes - Page 285

Lust is raw selfishness. It's all about my wants, my needs, my pleasure. Most love songs are actually lust songs.

The whole point of me doing a Christmas record and what I centered it around was the song 'Christmas with You' from the point-of-view of the soldiers in Iraq.

I write to be truthful in my songs, which is why I wrote what's painfully truthful about my life in my autobiography.

Different elevator music was playing since my last visit-that old disco song "Stayin' Alive." A terrifying image flashed through my mind of Apollo in bell-bottom pants and a slinky silk shirt.

Annabeth’s shoulders ached. The elevator’s easy-listening music didn’t help. If all monsters had to hear that song about liking piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, no wonder they were in the mood for carnage when they reached the mortal world.

I feel that I have to say something in a song and that it's not just enough to lay down the music.

You can't outdo 'Street Songs' and I didn’t even try. [It] had that special magic that comes with timing and good vibrations and you can't even try to capture that exactly again.

I like to tell the artist what the song or album means to me, in detail. Then I let the artist run with it and create in an unrestrained manner. Once the artist gets back to me with a few ideas, I like to do the little changes to make it perfectly speak to the audience.

The way that I've always viewed my career, I always do what comes to me. I don't write forty songs per album, I write fifteen to twenty songs and pick the ones that represent this period of my life the most.

I try to look at most of my solos as a musical piece within the song, not, say, showing off.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.

I want people to come to my music without prejudice. I want them to get the music first. And who I am isn't that important. If they like the songs to me that's a good thing.

It's amazing what some people read into songs.

I just like to entertain myself by sitting down and writing songs.

I think there are shades of political songs; some are more subtle and can be more effective for being subtle, for being more metaphorical. I've written a lot of songs like that, where it's not really clear if it's a war song or a relationship song. The metaphor can be the most powerful thing of all, but sometimes you have to speak more clearly to more people, and I think this is one of those times.

If you're up there performing a song for the first time, it's as if you're hearing it through their ears. You become acutely self-conscious of the song in performance, so that's a good thing before recording. But I like to have some surprises for the audience; I don't want the audience to know everything that's going to be on the record, because these days, with the Internet, people become avid collectors of pre-knowledge.

People want to be the first with the record, they want to be the first to know which songs are on the record, all that kind of stuff. So I like to just stall them a bit. Personally, I love the idea of an album that's completely new, that no one's heard any free downloads, any pre-record releases, all that kind of stuff, and nothing's been played on the radio. Totally virgin, you know, a sealed record. That's my ideal, but it's very hard to get anybody else to agree to do that.

An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.

If you're up on a stage, naked and solo and singing songs to people, there's not much place to hide, so you may as well confess what you want to confess and say what you want to say, whatever that is. Some songs just turn out as being more about me, and some are more through the eyes of other people, or third-person descriptions of people.

I don't really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don't necessarily know where it's going, and even if I think I know where it's going, it'll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding.

Depending on the story, I don't feel that the music is disappearing. I feel if the story demands songs, they'll have songs. If it doesn't demand songs, you'll have underscore.

Walt Disney was a great believer in the use of song to convey story. He was primarily a storyman & story-driven songs were his 'pets.' He always asked what was going on with the song - he hated 'singing heads.' He loved learning about character & motivation thru music & lyrics.

Sometimes, months elapse before we've completed the song completely. There's no set rule. Something inside of you says - 'now you can present it!' If one of us feels it's not quite right, lyrically or melodically, we don't present it.