Song Quotes - Page 374

I think any song should sound good just played on a solitary instrument with the vocal. If you have those basics you have all you need. The production then just polishes that idea into the finished thing.

I think my strength is in shaping a song - you know, making it feel like it reaches its peaks and valleys, and ends when it should end.

The lyrics seem to follow the music, and that's usually how I write. I write more about what comes out of my mouth while I'm writing the chords, and that seems to work better than filling up notebooks of what I think is really cool poetry, and try to put it on a song. That usually sounds like it's taped on.

If anything, my problem is, I'm not a genius, it's just that I can write songs very quick. I have a lot of ideas, let's put it that way - I have too many ideas. And my problem is, I stockpile ideas and I get lazy and I don't finish them, and next thing I know, I'm looking around and I've got a hundred song ideas, but are any of them any good? I don't know.

Kevin Costner told me that 'True' was his and his wife's song. I'm not sure if that's a good thing because they split up soon after.

It's weird for me to try and write punk songs - I'm almost scared of it.

I opened up my mind as far as playing music. I was at a Cody Chesnutt concert a few years ago, and a friend introduced me to him. We just started talking about music, and he asked me what I did. I said, "I have these songs and I'm kind of nervous to put them out, because I've just kind of been playing blues stuff, and playing other people's songs." He said, "You should just put them out there, man. Why not? It's just gonna bother you if you don't. The easiest thing to do is to just let it go." So I just took that with me.

You can tell the difference between songs that were created in a garage and songs that were created in the studio.

I tried to stick with what I knew best, which is writing rock n' roll songs and melodies. I am as passionate as I was when I was 20.

There is nothing like singing a song that 20,000 people know and are singing back to you.

I try never to focus on the radio, just find great songs, find emotion and just write the best songs you can. I think when you get fixated on trying to do something too accurate, it becomes more washed out and less what you intended it to be. So I think each time the challenge for me is to try and reinvent a little bit.

I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.

I don't want to hear songs about how sunshiny things are. I don't like songs that feel like radio candy I like the ones that make you think, laugh or cry - they pull some kind of emotion out of you.

If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.

I can't think of a recent baseball song except John Fogerty's Centerfield. It's very difficult to write a baseball song that pleases fans and non-fans alike.

Getting older doesn't help you in the fact that you might have covered some of this ground before. So you're listening to a song that you know is a hit, but it just can't be a hit for you, it's gonna be a hit for somebody else. That's tough.

Singles are your safest songs on the records. Ones that piss fewer people off, that appeal more to the masses.

If I ever hear "Power to the people" again, I'llà I just found out that John Lennon wrote that song, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." I couldn't believe it. I thought it was terrible; I hated that song. They used to bring out the Pete Seeger wind-up toy to sing it. Tiresome.

I was crying when I was editing [Beacher] but I stopped all the screenings years ago because I had a headache but then I had seen it again... Well I always cry at the same place, when they play that song "Wind Beneath My Wings". It gets you.

You do a little more of a record album these days. See I just wanted to put a few songs in Beaches and we did very well. The album of Beaches went gold.

Ralph Stanley is like an uncle to us and now that all my uncles are gone, Ralph's singing is even more precious. This album of classic folk songs is one of his best.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up … then down … then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name.

I think being a singer-songwriter... your job is to tell a story that other people can't really tell themselves. And I really hope that people kinda go: "This happened once and I kind of like this song because I relate to it..." So if at least one of my songs over this tour's that song, then that's really cool.

Song forbids victorious deeds to die.