Song Quotes - Page 424

I always want to do something that just sort of fits the mood. It's supposed to help the song, it's not supposed to take away from the song or re-contextualize it. I always feel like the less you make it a conceptual territorial debut, the better.

I hate not understanding the words, because it kind of squashes the song. It shrinks the visual landscape that you've made for the sounds. And, all of a sudden, the content eclipses things.

I released that I could crank out a song if I practiced it a lot. If I am in the practice of writing songs everyday or every other day, getting ideas and following through with them, and not just saying "I've got this idea, but I will get to it at some point." If I actually sit down and not be lazy, and follow through with it then you just get in the practice of doing things. It feels very productive, and then it gets a lot easier, because you are working the muscle in your brain. The "song-writing muscle" so to speak.

The Country Music Awards were held Wednesday night at Universal City. The best country songs are always about drinking and guns and love gone wrong. Next year they're giving Robert Blake the Lifetime Achievement Award.

With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.

I want to produce with people that are going to be on the charts and win Grammys because having regular old street songs is cool, but I did all that already.

The songs came from a more solitary place and I hadn't played them with many people before recording. So I just added the layers of people who are in my life, and built up the songs.

When I sang the line, 'Songs about Old Ireland.Songs about being young again.I wish I was young again,' twice people cried. I saw them.

My creative process isn't a long one, so I could have started a song 10 years ago and then finish it 10 years later. It's all just about pushing around words and melodies, for me. The material is kind of shape-shifting.

I see everything as creative material. If I pick up a shell of a song that I wrote 10 years ago, all that matters is the reality of that material as it's living today.

One of the coolest moments for me is still when Kenny G came back to a venue to find me and personally tell me that he loved my song "Void of a Legend" and had watched the video several times. It's the ultimate feeling to get feedback like that from an artist you look up to

As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.

We've put songs out on singles and weird little packages that only the real vinyl-philes care about.

I want to explore and do things with excellence. I want to write songs that resonate with me and will resonate with a live audience. I'm exploring fresh sounds.

I might ask about the first time a person heard a song that they really responded to, like when I asked Mos Def when he first "got" hip-hop and he went into this memory about how hearing someone rap really affected him. He wasn't simply remembering the event. It was almost like he was occupying that space again. When you can really transport an interview subject like that, your readers can feel it and it helps them to connect with the artist.

In Othello, Othello kills Desdemona, but no one reads that play as a model for their own behavior. In Lou Reed's case, you're listening to a song, and in my case you're reading about a life. Like Lou, I trust my audience to make their own moral determinations.

The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.

The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.

Success is being artistically fulfilled and happy. You can't control how people see your movie or how much money it makes...and the same thing with music. When I'm writing a song or I'm in the studio, those memories, that's epic.

I want people to understand me as a person with views, not just performing songs.

Let me be the only one to keep you from the cold Now the floor of hell is laid, the stars are bright as gold They light for you, they shine for you They burn for all to see Come into these arms again and set your spirit free

The schematics are a little bit tricky, but once you get it down you're able to really program an entire show. Every song has a lot of different guitar sounds in it, so that's what it is.

Every part of every song can have a totally different musical sound, because otherwise if I wanted to go from a verse of one song to the chorus of another, I'd have to go: "Uh, okay, press that pedal and then... press that pedal, and then press that pedal off."

I wanted to give the songs a run for their money, to see if they stood on their own without a lot of accoutrements. It made more sense - and it was easier, too - to go out alone and see if these songs could get in a couple of fistfights and still be standing.

There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.