Song Quotes - Page 420

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

I think from a major-label perspective, if you were on the flip side of things and that's the world you were used to working in, your interpretation could be, "Oh, they're having trouble writing songs," when really it's like, "No, I'm not ready to write songs, I don't want to write a song right now, if I did write a song, it would be forced."

I don't get mad with people, like, 'Oh, but that's not what the song was about...' It's also nice to know that people are mindlessly dancing to a song about the US Government's stance on same-sex marriages... especially straight jocks. I love that idea. I think that's the beauty of music - it's different for everybody.

A black face, run-down shoes and elbow-out make-up give me a place to hide. The real Bert Williams is crouched deep down inside the coon who sings the songs and tells the stories.

I noticed when I was writing the book that I would tend to mention 'outside' songs right through to about the middle of the 70's. And then all of a sudden that starts disappearing from the book, and just about everything I'm talking about from that point on are the records that I'm totally involved in.

And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.

I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

I'm not particularly worried by any of the songs we've written in the past, except for some of the really early stuff which is total tripe.

Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there's great truth in the songs, and that's what was so wonderful to find.

You find your preferred resolutions and harmonic intervals and what-have-yous, and then you either keep writing the same thing until everybody is as bored with your songs as you are, or you try with all your might to get out of those patterns. This is what a lot of the work is all about.

A lot of ideas get re-used and made part of new songs if the first version didn't cut the mustard, and the stuff that gets left off usually contained the germ of something good but failed to reach a satisfactory state by the recording stage.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.

All the best songs are, I think, the easiest write because they just come out.

The whole time you're bouncing ideas off each other, you continue to try and push the songs as far as you can take them and make them the best that they can be.

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

I like albums where all the songs are written in one go. If you're trying to create the number-one album with the best songs ever, I get why you'd want to write for three years and pick the best ones, but for me, I'd rather hear a group of songs that are all expressing a state, or time of your life. I think it's more that.

Isabell, she treads so lightly, floating in her gipsy dresses Even as her words cut deep, I can't deny the truth in them On the phone, she talks a lot, and me, I listen hopelessly So directionless, I head into oblivion And then I decide to give another random memory To remind her of the first time we sang out to the sea Oh Isabell, you always understood me Please Isabell, forgive me now

My band is the best band in the world, period. So, I insist on every song being better than it is on the record. So by the end of the tour, we have to be playing the song better than how it's recorded.

The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.

There's only one proper way a song should go, but you've got to be patient enough to let them come together time wise. Sometimes it's lightning in a bottle and you got the song. But oftentimes it shows up.

I don't spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself - and if other people like it, that's great.

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

I take things a little bit more critically now, like, "What did I think I was saying in that song? What is this song about?" I thought the lyrics were incredibly descriptive, and now they sound really cryptic and weird. I'd like to also think that when I listen to songs from Something About Airplanes that I'm proud of my development as a writer. I don't think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.