Top 100 Lyrics As Quotes
#1. I've read and heard that some of the most inspiring vocal interpreters adhere habitually to one rule: Always think the lyrics as you're singing them, so that the sentiment is always appropriate and heartfelt.
Brandi Carlile
#2. The Eagles's 1977 hit "Hotel California" was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As
Rebecca Solnit
#3. Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.
Jeff Tweedy
#4. I like to play the piano with lyrics as if it was a piece of love letter.
Yoochun
#5. The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody.
Utada Hikaru
#6. We all love to sing along with our favorite songs. We sing in the car, in the shower, and at the karaoke bar. The problem is that half the time we don't know what we're singing. We're making up lyrics as we go along and hoping no one will notice.
Shawn Amos
#7. So one can say that I write all the time, that goes for the lyrics as well.
Billy Sherwood
#8. I love the sad songs with their maudlin, self-deprecating, almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman, they make a lot of sense.
Teddy Thompson
#9. I'm very honest in my music and I'm often asked to explain the lyrics; as an introvert, I find that quite hard. And I always wear high heels on stage, which can be painful.
Natasha Bedingfield
#10. I have not, in general, much belief in the ability of woman as a creative artist. Unwritten lyrics, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said once when we conversed on this subject, should be her forte.
Fredrika Bremer
#11. My favorite way of working is if somebody gives me a piece of music, because I'm quite limited as a player, so it's my favorite thing if somebody gives me a piece of music, and then I can write lyrics and melodies.
Sinead O'Connor
#12. As the smoke clears,
I awaken,
And untangle you from me.
Would it make you feel better
To watch me, while I bleed?
All my windows still are broken,
But I'm standing on my feet.
Demi Lovato
#13. So can you tell me exactly what 'freedom' means? If I am not free to be as twisted as I wanna be?
Disturbed
#14. Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.
Mika.
#15. The lyrics are critical of dogmatic belief, too, as I see it in many lifestyles and philosophy religious or otherwise.
Mike Scheidt
#16. Now who is the king of these lewd, ludicrous, lucrative lyrics; who could inherit the title, to put the youth in hysterics; using his music as spirit
Eminem
#17. It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?".
Paul Banks
#18. Finally I started really opening up as a songwriter and an interpreter and taking songs from all kind of genres and stripping them down to just lyrics and the story inside the lyrics, and trying to make them really mine.
Lizz Wright
#19. I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.
Neil Peart
#20. I miss the sound of your voice
And I miss the rush of your skin
And I miss the still of the silence
As you breathe out and I breathe in
Matt Nathanson
#21. At 24 I decided that my life is enough for me, and I stopped looking for some other piece to complete it. I also learned how to needlepoint ironic cross-stitches of rap lyrics and gave them to my friends as presents. I'll let you decide which is the more important revelation.
Taylor Swift
#22. As a songwriter you have an umbilical cord to the song and it's hard to expand on your understanding of the lyrics. Whereas when you cover a song you can create your own reason why you're attached to it.
K.d. Lang
#23. You know the Prince song where the girl's phone rings but she tells him, "whoever's calling couldn't be as cute as you?" I long to live out this moment in real life.
Rob Sheffield
#24. Roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
Gad Saad
#25. I took off my glasses while you were yelling at me once more than once so as not to see you see me react. Should've put 'em, should've put 'em on again
so I could see you see me sincerely yelling back.
Fiona Apple
#26. Usually I go to the studio to write lyrics and compose music. I try to be a dad as much as possible at home.
Miyavi
#27. I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
Paul Banks
#28. The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
Brian Eno
#29. The music, I think, is just as important as the lyrics; it portrays the emotion of the song. I play the kind of music that I want to listen to.
Courtney Barnett
#30. He'd like you to join the club that likes to say
there's no such thing as love ...
Patty Griffin
#31. Pretty much any given day, barring some major distraction, I get melodies coming to me. Lyrics don't come quite as easily. So I've been inventing little projects and challenges to sort of kick my ass with the lyrics.
Andrew Bird
#32. I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.
Eddie Vedder
#33. I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
Gloria Estefan
#34. Music expresses both in lyrics and in tune something of the orientation of the composer and author as to what the truth of religion is and how we ought to practice it
Robert Godfrey
#36. Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.
Azar Nafisi
#37. I'm a great believer in not over-thinking lyrics. You might become technically better as a songwriter, but you lose what originally made your songs great.
Paul Stanley
#38. I don't see myself as the boss. I sing and write the songs, and it would feel strange if somebody else wrote the lyrics I sang.
Gavin Rossdale
#39. We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.
Dave Haywood
#40. "The River" [song] is also, yes, very metaphorical. Rivers are cleansing. As long as human beings have been on the Earth we've used rivers to cleanse ourselves. And, for me, the lyrics "something in the river," I think is - well, the river is a metaphor for where I was at the time.
Ladyhawke
#41. Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
John Lennon
#42. Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
Michael Eric Dyson
#43. A digital download is not as visceral as buying a CD, removing the shrink-wrap, putting the disc in your player, and pouring through the booklet of lyrics and liner notes. The digital age has removed us from the tactile experience of what it meant to listen to an album.
Steve Weinstein
#44. While he originally sang about 'a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode', under pressure from white-owned radio stations Berry changed the lyrics to 'a country boy named Johnny B. Goode'. As
Yuval Noah Harari
#45. Composers now just don't have the depth of inspiration for melody. Most of the lyrics of the pop songs you hear today are repetitious. They're almost nursery rhymes, as if written by children - which they are.
Rudy Vallee
#46. Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Anne Stevenson
#47. They keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
John Lennon
#48. I try to pick music for a diner that doesnt involve a lot of lyrics, so you're not paying attention to that. As long as it doesnt dominate the party, it should be more atmosphere music. When I'm by myself, I never play music.
Amy Sedaris
#49. Satan rejected my soul; as low as he goes,
he never quite goes this low.
Morrissey
#50. Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other.
Ahmet Ertegun
#51. I get even more nervous singing when everyone's fallen silent, but I really try to communicate the meaning of the lyrics, and there's people there listening to that, and if they're moved by it, then I'm moved as well.
Namie Amuro
#52. I'm not saying I'm God. But as far as lyrics, I'm God MC.
Jay-Z
#53. I first bought a Buffy Sainte-Marie record when I was 12, and her music has always remained with me. In the 1960s, as a political activist, Buffy's lyrics were fearless, and I'm very grateful for all the risks that she took.
Morrissey
#54. I scrutinized the lyrics to every worship song, debated the content of every sermon. I rendered verdicts regarding the frequency of communion and the method of baptism. I checked the bulletins for typos. In some religious traditions, this particular coping mechanism is known as pride.
Rachel Held Evans
#55. In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.
James Fenton
#56. If I hadn't had Freddie Mercury's lyrics to hold on to as a kid I don't know where I would be. It taught me about all forms of music ... it would open my mind. I never really had a bigger teacher in my whole life.
Axl Rose
#57. I've never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process.
Tori Kelly
#58. We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.
Art Garfunkel
#59. Even I, as sick as I am, I would never be you.
Even I, sick and depraved, a traveler to the grave, I would never be you.
Morrissey
#60. The lyrics aren't simple, either. They're extremely difficult because I'm trying to say complicated things in as few words as possible.
Neil Diamond
#61. My interest in the theater led me to my first writing experience as an adult. My husband David wrote the music and lyrics and I wrote the book for a children's musical, 'Spacenapped' that was produced by a neighborhood theater in Brooklyn.
Gail Carson Levine
#62. As a songwriter, I don't rush. I may sit on lyrics for two years before the music hits.
Ben Harper
#63. As a kid, I was always listening to music. I would just go in to my room and put on an album, read the lyrics, and just spend hours and hours in there. Plus, my sister Laurie played piano (in fact she taught me my first few notes) so music was always around one way or another.
Andrew Hollander
#64. I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.
Vic Fuentes
#65. Started as a flicker, meant to be a flame. Skin has gotten thicker, but it burns the same. Still a baby in a cradle, got to take my first fall ... baby's getting next to nowhere with her back against the wall.
Sara Bareilles
#66. Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics,
Charlie Chaplin
#67. Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.
Dan Hill
#68. Big, evocative words get thrown around, and people can sing along to passionately as if the lyrics just materialized out of the ether, largely because they don't ever seem to coalesce into a writerly voice.
Dan Bejar
#69. When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.
Jonathan Lethem
#70. A lot of my fans are young and hip and enjoy my pop album and know the lyrics to those songs as well, which is a real compliment to me.
Idina Menzel
#71. I was always an unusual girl.
My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.
Lana Del Rey
#72. A lot of underground hip-hop will inspire me as far as rhyme patterns - really wordy, intelligent lyrics.
Travie McCoy
#73. By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.
Criss Jami
#74. Each song had a different way of coming about. In some, the music was written first while others it was the lyrics. We didn't want to overthink anything too much - we just wanted to, writing-wise, chuck out as many ideas as possible.
Elena Tonra
#75. I'd rather live one day as a lion
than live a hundred years as a sheep
I'd rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven
live my dream out in reality and not in my dreams
Lukas Graham
#76. I do pinch myself, like when shows in non-English speaking countries are sold out, and people are singing my lyrics. I don't think I'll ever lose that; I'm always appreciative every day of the support I have as an artist, because I'm not a commercial artist.
Xavier Rudd
#77. Looking at the original lyrics [of "A Song For You" ] as I was preparing it, I thought, "Wow! I feel like it was written for me." That's what a great song does. You don't have to do a lot of homework. You can just say the words and it springs to life.
Cheyenne Jackson
#78. I've always wanted my lyrics to say something meaningful and, you know, you always want to tell a message with your art. So yes, as I continue to write music, I will write about things that are real and things that I feel aren't written about a lot.
Hayley Kiyoko
#79. I earned my place,
With the tidal waves.
I can't escape this feeling,
That something ain't right.
I called my name
As I crashed the gates,
Still I can't escape this feeling
That something ain't right.
All Time Low
#80. I like my lyrics to feel conversational and truthful, as if we're having real talk. I don't really like generic lyrics.
Meredith Brooks
#81. 'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.
Natalie MacMaster
#82. I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.
Laura Marling
#83. But these clouds won't leave
Walk away
Barely breathing
As I'm lying on the floor
Take my heart
As you're leaving
I don't need it anymore
Mayday Parade
#84. I think there's just certain lyrics and certain forms of hip-hop that definitely rang true, again, to a lot of people's truth, but you don't necessarily want to hear someone using that as a just kind of a in-the-moment, fun, careless expression.
Solange Knowles
#85. When I sing a tune, the lyrics are important to me. Most of the standard lyrics I know well. And as soon as I hear an arrangement, I get ideas, kind of like blowing a horn. I guess I never sing a tune the same way twice.
Sarah Vaughan
#86. And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.
Bakari Kitwana
#87. As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.
Zach Condon
#88. I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.
Frank Sinatra
#89. I used to be on the kitchen floor, crying, wasted and thinking of lyrics. That was the only way I could create - as a tortured artist. I've learned that you can be stable and taking care of yourself and still create beautiful work.
Mary Lambert
#90. And where colours like
A rainbow dance alive, as
Wisdom's arrows rain down
And ages come to pass.
Marie Symeou
#91. Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.
How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!
Joyce Carol Oates
#92. Skies are crying,
I am watching,
Catching teardrops in my hands.
Only silence, as it's ending,
Like we never had a chance.
Do you have to make me feel
Like there's nothing left of me?
Demi Lovato
#93. I write most of my own lyrics for my album and I am helping to produce some of the songs as well.
Lindsay Lohan
#94. I never sit and fill a journal with lyrics. Most of the time I'm trying to write a feeling, not a story. I'm not necessarily trying to describe the details of a place or event so much as the feeling of the thing. It is a kind of weird alchemy that is elusive until it feels right.
Matt Berninger
#95. Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
Bjork
#96. Got your fingerprints as evidence all on my body
Put your right hand on the book and you were found guilty
I can't wait forever but that's how it's gonna be
For me they'll never be
Case Closed
Little Mix
#98. 'Built This Pool' was an idea that I had for a song starting several years ago, and as we were in between takes of recording something, I was actually holding a guitar at the time, and I played this silly thing, and sang the lyrics to 'Built This Pool' kinda in the background.
Mark Hoppus
#99. It was so much fun conducting an orchestra and watching the musicians' faces as some of Kanye's lyrics went by. They couldn't believe what was going on.
Jon Brion
#100. The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song.
Bryan Ferry
