Song Quotes - Page 293

I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it.

Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

Our dad played us a lot of old country songs by The Carter Family and he would sing along to it. I loved listening to him sing.

I've already done two cover albums. I don't know, maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to do another, but I just did the Led Zeppelin song for fun, and I thought I could do it kind of quick since songs that I love a lot I can do fast.

Everyone knows about The Who, but I didn't. I knew the popular songs like "I Can See For Miles." So that was the first song I worked on because it was the catchiest and easiest.

I put out Imaginaryland, I heard a lot of, "Oh she's copying Laurie Anderson," and I was like, wait... but I don't know her music! Maybe - didn't she have a song called "Superman"?

The first song I wrote was "Look Both Ways Before You Cross" from Imaginaryland. I started the song by singing a bass line, "hoo hoo hoo hoo."

The songs worked as a different kind of rhetoric, one that could reach the fence-sitters.

The songs we sing invite the participation of the listener, who is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song at that listening. It's the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, 'This is it,' and the other says, 'Let's find this together.'

Such times of crisis have inevitably brought 'music of conscience' to the fore and I expect we will be hearing more and more of it in the immediate future. When people feel empowered to come together and raise their voices, also will mean raising their voices in song as well.

The ethic behind songs of conscience doesn't change, even though the issues are altered from generation to generation.

I don't believe in, and I am a devout non-believer, in playing new songs live if the subjected and pathetic crowd has not heard them before because I consider it like mass psychosis and genocidal.

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

That's a big battle to win, to be able to do a main title sequence and a theme song these days. That's not something network television does anymore.

An image, a dance step, a song may function from time to time as entertainment, but the root and full practice of the arts lies in the recognition that art is power, an instrument of communion between the self and all that is important, all that is sacred.

I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words.

I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don't catch flight. They just flop. It is hard to tell until they are out there.

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

Some songs seem to achieve the quality of a geometric object - a ball, box, or cone - and I don't mess with 'em.

I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

(before playing Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet) I couldn't really come up with a short way to sum up this song, but I was watching the movie 'Adaptation' the other day and this sort of sums it up in my head. You are not who loves you. You are who you love. Always remember that.

I am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is writing.

We have to focus on his early work, and just one or two of his movies, and elements of his TV shows, to keep his memory pure. People now know that Elvis could play a mean rhythm guitar himself, and needed no other musicians to perform a great song. But Elvis was not just a rock star, he was an all-round entertainer.

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces I sing my heart out to the infinite sea I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains I sing my song to the free.