Song Quotes - Page 286

All films created by Walt Disney at the time of his major outpouring of work were carefully crafted to fit scenes, characters, moods and situations. If these elements changed in any way, songs - no matter how good they were - were discarded. Others were written for the new scenes. Many times, character songs were dropped because characters were dropped...sequences were dropped etc.

Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer; Rarer is the roseburst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it rarer; Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmastered the meter.

You can't just walk into someone's house and take $15 bucks out of someone's wallet and then walk out with their song. You can't do that. You got to know the difference between stealing from being cool to the band and paying them what they're deserved.

People take songs so literally.

Jesus this song you wrote The words are sticking in my throat Peace on Earth Hear it every Christmas time But hope and history won't rhyme So what's it worth? This peace on Earth

Try not to sing too many sad songs for yourself. The universe already hates you. Self-pity isn't going to help.

I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. It seems as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south winds calls into being.

Bob Dylan tells interviewers what he wants to tell them, not what they necessarily want to know. His responses are really part of the art, and often have a relationship to the songs that have just come out or are about to come out.

Blues songs, like folk songs, are a continuous stream, and catching the continuities and thefts is part of what puts meaning and complexity into it - also part of the fun of it all.

Bob Dylan truly is a poet whose song is part of the poetry.

There are some singer-songwriters who start out as poets. So someone like Leonard Cohen wrote and published poetry in the early 60s, but then started writing songs. Bob Dylan's a poet in the sense of bard, aoidos or vates.

Bob Dylan tends not to have geographical or chronological markers that tie a song to any specific context, so they stay alive, stay relevant.

The thing about Bob Dylan's performative essence is that he keeps singing these old songs as well as the new songs, and the old songs become new with new arrangements and new contexts as time goes by.

I've never stopped working on songs and practising singing and guitar.

When one individual writer sings her song of beauty, she changes the lives of a million others.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore

I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out. But I've also always loved the technology part of it. I've always loved the studio part. Making albums. Besides writing songs, which has been my primary thing, making records would be second. Obviously, touring would be third. Touring wasn't my favorite thing to do, but the first few tours were pretty fun. Seeing the world and everything.

Seeing that the 97's are a democracy through and through, inevitably, some of these tons of songs I write will get vetoed. The first time that happened (and every time thereafter), I consoled myself with the thought that sooner or later I'd make a solo record

Yesterday I wrote the majority of a song called 'Burn the Nightclub Down' which was about kind of driving into Cleveland full of dread at the prospect of playing at this night club and actually just the night before I had called my girlfriend whose birthday it was. And it's her birthday and here I am on the road in some hellhole in Ann Arbor in Michigan.

Another important time when I feel most alive is when I hear a song that I love so much that all I can do is dance - I feel so free!

I think it's OK to compose songs and sing them about questions that we don't have answers to yet.

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I feel like there's just so much of everything that I don't know what people have heard and what they haven't heard. I think with the fact that there's the Internet and that people can share home-made recordings, I think a lot of the songs do get to be heard, even if it's not the best quality, or there's clinking glasses or it's just piano and voice, people can at least hear the song.

If somebody wanted to go and find songs of mine to fill an iPod, that aren't on any records. They could probably find dozens of songs besides the ones that are on records.