Song Quotes - Page 96

Be serious. Folk songs are serious. That's what Pete Seeger told me. 'Arlo, I only wanna tell you one thing. Folk songs are serious.' And I said, 'Right.'

I deal with everything in my life in music - everything that ever happens to me just finds its way into a song or onto a record. I need it. It's like my life jacket. If I didn't have that way of processing those feelings, I'd probably be a murderer.

I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

Songs don't just come out of the air. They take time, but its good fun, too. Maurice gave me encouragement.

Our shows have always been sort of an all-generations thing, people from 6 to 60. The other night, we played a show and we had a woman who was probably 70 to 75 years old, and she was there alone and she was singing every song. On the other end of the spectrum, there was a 7-year-old on his dad's shoulders and the dad is singing along.

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I’ve done poetry at the end of the day, because I’ll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won’t touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don’t have time, because I’d rather be doing other things, like knitting.

I've come to recognize songwriting as something that I do, and I want to be good at that. At that craft, if you like. I want to practice it.

When you're walking down the street or in the car just listening to the radio, and you're, like , 'Oh, that's my song.' You want to say, 'Hey Mom!' That never changes.

Every song, every form of art, clothing, shoes, it has to be special.

I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.

I sang a song at my sister's wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

I never feel like I need to make a song that sells 5 million copies; that's not the point of why I make music. It's great if that happens, like it did with 'Clarity,' but my goal is to always make a better track than the last one.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

No dreams, no visions, no delicious fantasies, no castles in the air, with which, as the old song so truly says, hearts are broken, heads are turned.

Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

Quit shouting those rerun songs at me.

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?

It would be fun to go back and see where all my songs stopped, because I think I'd have every number in the top 100. It never ceases to amaze me. It still hurts when one doesn't work, because you put your heart and soul into it.

I don't want to sing boring pop songs - I want to sing songs that are meaningful to me.

I love, love, love songwriting. It's like the most therapeutic thing in the world.

My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.