She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.
The wind has a language, I would I could learn! Sometimes 'tis soothing, and sometimes 'tis stern, Sometimes it comes like a low sweet song, And all things grow calm, as the sound floats along, And the forest is lull'd by the dreamy strain, And slumber sinks down on the wandering main, And its crystal arms are folded in rest, And the tall ship sleeps on its heaving breast.
My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs.
Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.
I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together.
Adam [Cohen] is a great singer-songwriter in his own right.
Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.
Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.
Part of the shabbiness of our culture, if indeed it is shabby, is that it doesn't seem to prepare people. With all the songs about love and all the movies and all the books, there doesn't seem to be any way that we can prepare the human heart for this experience.
It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.
As soon as anybody does one of my songs, I rejoice. This particular case of all these great singers doing my work - the implications are very rich and the temptation to think of the outcome of these masses of the mainstream injecting my work into the marketplace, it's a very sweet speculation.
No one's ever done one of my songs badly. People say to me, "God, so-and-so wrecked that song." Well, I'm unaware of it. Anybody doing one of my tunes has earned my gratitude, and I don't get that many covers where I have the luxury to choose.
I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.
There are so many songs I've recorded, only to hear other people singing them. It happens all the time.
I want all of my songs to do well whether I've written them or not.
It can even be a single note which defines the entire song.
Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.
I'm really happy about American Woman, it brought the Guess Who back. They started gigging again and got their song out on commercials.
That's a big gift when people say to you that a song helped them or brought them to some place in their life where they needed to be.
Fly Away changed my life. There are certain songs that do. When I won the Grammy, I was in Paris. I sort of forgot about it.
When I stopped trying to write songs, that's when I'm able to begin writing songs. You have to just use your life, and the things around you for your inspiration.
If I had to associate myself with one song, it would probably be Let Love Rule. It's so simple and to the point. It speaks for itself.
A lot of my songs deal with spirituality and God, and I guess if you're in tune with that, you'll read into it.
I've always written songs, even when I wasn't doing anything with my personal life in music.
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