Song Quotes - Page 417

I don't want to do children's music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids - like when I'm putting them to bed. We sing some song that we made up but I don't want to make a record like that.

I can remember back as far as age 8, performing with the Boston Folk Song Society. It was a Woody Guthrie song.

My most cryptic, strange songs might be my most personal, but that isn't how people are going to receive them, because they don't know the code.

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and I'm thinking about family more, but I'm trying to set up this thing where I can play in one city for a month, and then write music for a couple months, then play in another city for a month, write music for a month. Just so it's not these two schizophrenic, Jekyll and Hyde kind of things; you don't have to be this monster. You get inspired and you can go write one song from that, and then you go back and play a few shows. If I could've done that in the 90s, I would have.

There's so many songs about heartbreak that exist this in the world, because music is somehow the perfect medium to express something like this.

I'm not as religious as some people about "the album." To be honest, that was a product of a format. You had vinyl, and you could fit five songs on each side, and that's 45 minutes. You had A-side songs and B-side songs; I always loved the first song on side B. And there's nothing wrong with that. Prog albums of the 70s adapted to that format very much. But not all musicians want to create 45 minutes of music that has to be listened to in chronological order.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

It was great fun to be able to work with so many different artists. And I'm paying a tribute to the Beatles. I've just recorded some of their songs.

I look at some of the songs I wrote years ago and I can't believe I wrote such crap.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

I started just concentrating on songwriting when I was abut 20; I'd been in rock bands six or seven years, kinda got that out of my system, I said, "ok, you ain't gonna be a rock star, you don't look like a rock star, it probably ain't gonna happen. So what you should do is write songs and maybe other people will do your songs."

I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.

I actually wrote the song first as "well, it's 9 o'clock on a Saturday." That bit. Then I said, You know what? It needs some kind of an introduction to kind of set the mood and set the flavor. So I just played this kind of cocktail lounge thing, the hustle and bustle of waitresses going by - that kind of thing.

They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio. They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone. But only songs like these played in minor keys, keep those memories holding on.

My songs are like my kids.

Here I am starting a franchise and I'm gonna be 65 years old. I should've started this in 1978... I wrote like 300 songs and I'm gonna have to re-learn some of them!

I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. ... I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14-to meet women. ... If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings. ... My songs are like my kids.

I had a melody and a rhythm and chords, but nothing to talk about. I remember reading about how the decline of the steel industry had been affecting the Lehigh Valley, and I decided that's what I was going to write the song about.

I am the entertainer, I've come to do my show You've heard my latest record, it's been on the radio It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life It was a beautiful song but it ran too long If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit So they cut it down to 3:05.

Sing us a song you're the piano man. Sing us a song tonight. Cause we're all in the mood for a melody, And you've got us feeling all right.

Don't go changing, to try and please me You never let me down before.

I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking "Uptown Girl!" I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called "Ragdoll," which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.

If you said good-bye to me tonight, There would still be music left to write.