Song Quotes - Page 300

You want to sing this song. And so it goes on until eventually, after - well, however long it can take - sometimes a few days, sometimes months - you piece the whole thing together.

It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.

To a certain extent, yes, we do. But there's - but there's a very limited menu. There's only about sort of 20 songs that you hear on rotation.

Well, this is shortly after the idea was put to me because it wasn't my idea to do a Christmas record. We can talk about that a little bit, if you like, later on. But I wrote that song actually about two days after the idea was put to me.

I think the best songs that come to me are ones that you sort of listen for. The ones - when I listen to some of my old stuff, I can tell when I had a good idea, but I forced it through, and I can hear myself - the bit that I've written, which sounds clunkier than the stuff that just sort of comes.

The older I get, the more I think it's this listening. You listen for it, and you have a bit of patience. And it'll come until it sounds - to me, the best songs I've written, I think, are ones that I can't hear anything - any of myself in it. It sounds like a cover song, like somebody else's song - really something you've stolen wholesale off a radio that you've listened to in someone else's flat.

And religious music and the sort of symbolism of it and everything. But I had this idea. Actually, I sort of dreamt it. I woke up - just before waking up one morning, I sort of dreamt this song or the idea of it and the first little bit of it. And I jumped out of bed and I thought, well, you're still asleep. You're going to forget this in a minute - you know, like you do when you've had a dream.

I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.

You've got to really know your song, inside and out.

So you can be about your business, and then on it comes again. And this time you're ready, and you've got a wine glass or something. And you put the glass up to the wall, and you can hear through the wall a little bit more of the song - maybe just the middle bit this time. You know, you managed to get in a little bit of the end. And so it goes on until - because you just got to - you really just want to sing it.

And then, one day, they program a new tune, and it really catches your ear, you know, because you can be doing the washing up or something, you know, in your apartment and suddenly you go, whoa, what are they playing in there? And you run to the wall, but it's finished - but the song's finished. You only heard enough of it just the pique your interest. And you never know when they're going to play it again, of course, like a normal radio station.

When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.

It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.

I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I'm not born to run, I know that Seven Sisters' Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can't be different, can they?

I'm a Syd Barrett fan, and early Pink Floyd, and then about two things from the rest of their career. I don't like them, really. I mean, I like the psychedelic stuff. I listen to the first albums, and even on those, they go off and off and off. Songs that are 20 minutes long. I don't like long songs.

We only came up with the Kaiser Chiefs about a year and a half ago when we scrapped every song we'd ever done. It was a complete change of direction, songs, outlook and everything.

What I mean is I'd rather be a Burt Bacharach figure, where if I did gigs there'd be other people there singing the songs. I just don't want to promote myself as an artist if you like. I've been writing loads and loads of songs and I want to feed them out and produce artists. But I have to do that from a center. There has to be a structure. It has to be from a company that has an image, that has a name.

What you're really after when you see a film or listen to a song is a singular vision, and I'm not sure how much of that you really get in Hollywood.

The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.

My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.