Pop Song Quotes

#1. I'm not good at happy, lightweight kind of music. I'm not really good at pop music. 'Cars' is probably the only true pop song I ever wrote. I wish I could write more, but I'm not very good at it.

Gary Numan

#2. For me, with the Blue Man Group, I got asked. It was for the Royal Variety Show, which was something I always wanted to be a part of. I'm really interested in things people don't necessarily expect. I did a pop song, but I did it in my own style.

Katherine Jenkins

#3. To me, ballads are special, because you can have a pop song that'll be know for three weeks and then you'll hear nothing else about it. Nobody else will record it and it'll just be gone. But if you do a good ballad, it'll be in the world forever.

Michael Jackson

#4. With my records, it's just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don't know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.

Tom Verlaine

#5. I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

Moon Unit Zappa

#6. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

Bruce Sterling

#7. It's lifestyle music. It's not like some secretary who likes some pop song, but can't name who the band is; whereas a heavy metal fan is into every aspect of it. We'll see if rap holds up to that. Run-DMC seemed to be the Led Zeppelin of rap.

Rob Zombie

#8. We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.

Travie McCoy

#9. Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.

Paul Epworth

#10. And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea's couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing, in a gray morning of Paris rain.

William Gibson

#11. I hear a really good pop song every now and then. 'ROAR' by Katy Perry, I love that! 'Poker Face' ... Oh! What a song! And 'Rolling in the Deep' ... Oh!

Bjorn Ulvaeus

#12. A cupcake is like a great pop song. The whole world in less than three minutes. And it's impossible to have a bad cupcake. In New York you walk everywhere. So I'm always looking, always on the eternal search for the perfect cupcake. I take them very seriously. It's like hunting and gathering for me.

Laurel Nakadate

#13. Creating a decent pop song is a challenge - and occasionally, once in every decade - it's kind of fun to do that.

David Sylvian

#14. I'm an older woman who's not going to have a shiny pop song ever again, so that gives me license to do whatever the hell I want.

Jill Sobule

#15. I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.

Autre Ne Veut

#16. 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,' if you go through the lyrics, is such a haunting melody, and the words are, for a pop song, pretty deep and dark.

Jake Epstein

#17. I'm really attracted to music that sort of toes that line between pop and avant-garde, that pushes the envelope of what you can get in a pop song.

Patrick Stump

#18. Sometimes you want something really serious that makes you feel emotional and makes you think, and sometimes you do just want a pop song. What I love about Taylor Swift is that she offers both.

Tavi Gevinson

#19. I've never really gotten into the whole labels thing. There were times I would cover a pop song, and people would say 'You sound really country.' I gave up on that whole thing a long time ago.

David Nail

#20. In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Brian Eno

#21. When we try to write a pop song, we go for standard pop arrangements, even to the point where we will go to the key change at the end, which is really cheesy.

Joe Elliott

#22. I'm not the best at choosing what's good and what's bad. I wouldn't even know what's a good pop song and what's a bad one. With that said, I wanted to say what's true to me. Some people might say that the Skrillex record was pop, but that was just about the chemistry between me and my boy.

ASAP Rocky

#23. If you're single, then I'm single? What's that supposed to be? Lyrics to a pop song?

Sophie Kinsella

#24. Jesse James is like a Leonard Cohen song, I wanted to do something that was like a pop song.

Andrew Dominik

#25. My favorite records are by bands where the musicians are all playing like themselves, but those personalities connect in an exciting way and create music that is one cohesive unit. It's not catchy like a pop song, but it's a really cool song.

Dylan Baldi

#26. Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.

Camille Paglia

#27. Most people in the U.K. discovered me playing a standard on Parkinson. In America, it was on VH1 singing an original called 'All At Sea,' which is a contemporary pop song. So the people that know me there tend to think of me in the singer/songwriter category.

Jamie Cullum

#28. One of the nice things about a favorite pop song is that it's an unconditional truce on judgment and musical snobbery. You like the song because you just do, and there need not be any further criticism.

Henry Rollins

#29. I don't think I'd be able to flat-out write a pop song and make it satisfying to me. I'm ready to make a consistent sound in whatever way I can.

Leon Bridges

#30. I think the true test of a pop song, for me, and I've talked to a lot of other writers about this, is you take your demo, you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica, and that's the Hollywood car test.

Ryan Tedder

#31. Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time.

Paul Muldoon

#32. You have to learn how to act a pop song. You have to find the balance of the pop from the pop song and the lyrical significance of the scene you are in.

Aaron Lazar

#33. I think 'Rather Be' is an amazingly written pop song with incredible production.

Jess Glynne

#34. I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

Julian Casablancas

#35. After a while, no matter how much you love any pop song, you're going to get tired of it. That's the way it is with any entertainment. It's good when you first hear it or see it, you like it for a while, then it gets old. It gets chewed up and spit out and it's done.

Joe Perry

#36. One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

Billy Collins

#37. I'm usually way more pleased with the stuff that just kinda happens by accident and is no way a pop song. But sometimes the easiest thing for me to write is pop songs.

John Britt Daniel

#38. It would have been easy for me to bring out a real cheesy pop song, but 'Please Don't Let Me Go' isn't your typical 'X Factor' single, and it's a grower, not a shower.

Olly Murs

#39. But that was Rishi... he was like a pop song you thought you couldn't stand, but found yourself humming in the shower anyway.

Sandhya Menon

#40. All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.

Andrew Bird

#41. I think, 'How could anybody mock a good pop song?' It is timeless; it transcends barriers; it breaks down every single type of social barrier that you can possibly have. It can deal with the most difficult subjects, even if it abstracts the subject matter.

Mika.

#42. It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.

Avril Lavigne

#43. The backside of Hollywood passion is disappointment and loneliness - and more often than not, resentment and cynicism about the nature of love itself.
Betsy and I were building more of a symphony than a pop song.

Donald Miller

#44. Doing something that you love regardless when it's a blockbuster movie or you're writing a pop song or trying shamelessly to succeed in something is not selling out. I think that's actually fine, and I would encourage that all the time.

Adam Levine

#45. The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.

Doug Aitken

#46. Why can't you write a great pop song when you are 85? Maybe you can.

Tim Finn

#47. To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

Jason Newsted

#48. I think there's a good pop song in pretty much anything.

Kesha

#49. I feel like humans are a disease. It's a hard thing to communicate in a pop song. I mean, who wants to hear that?

Zola Jesus

#50. In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.

M.I.A.

#51. I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song.

John Lydon

#52. My mom and I are very honest with each other, almost to a fault. But that's just the way I am in life. If you listen to my record, I'm just honest about stupid stuff most normal people wouldn't put in a pop song.

Kesha

#53. All men that date me have to know that their name may end up in a pop song.

Kesha

#54. A pop song that's as substantial as a balloon, but lifts us up the same way when we sing it.

David Levithan

#55. Soon we are singing at the top of our lungs. A pop song that's as substantial as a balloon, but lifts us in the same way when we sing it.

David Levithan

#56. I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple.

Andrew Bird

#57. I love a good pop song. I have no problem with the concept of doing that sort of thing. For me, it's usually what I'm inspired by, what I'm thinking about.

Jon Foreman

#58. In country and R&B, there's much more of that division between writers and performers, and that's where you see more of those [crossover] songs, but you don't get a lot of that coming out of the more pop and rock side of things.

Alan Light

#59. Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!

Kelis

#60. I was drawn to love songs, but I was just drawn to great music - no matter if it's hip-hop, pop, R&B or whether it's rock n' roll or country. It could be a Garth Brooks song, and if it's a smash, then I'll love the different wordplay and different melodies. That's what I'm a fan of - great music.

Nayvadius Cash

#61. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.

Jon Landau

#62. I have so many songs, it's ridiculous. I love so many different types of music and tend to write all over the map, style-wise. R&B, rock 'n' roll, screamers, pop, good-time songs.

Taryn Manning

#63. If it is a good song, it is a good song. The Beatles were pop, the beach boys were pop and it's the best music of all time.

William Fitzsimmons

#64. (for a while, I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which, as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked more or less the whole time),

Nick Hornby

#65. Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.

Stephen Malkmus

#66. People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."

Robert Wyatt

#67. It's cool when your husband starts to sing some old Merle Haggard song and I can pop in with a harmony and it doesn't sound too bad.

Trisha Yearwood

#68. Juliet, the dice were loaded from the start. / When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?

Mark Knopfler

#69. I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again.

James Gunn

#70. Magne Furuholmen is a very dear friend of mine. A-ha are a classic pop band and they've got some brilliant songs. I'd say 'The Living Daylights' was one of my favourite Bond tunes: regardless of it being a Bond song, it stands alone as a great piece of music.

Guy Berryman

#71. I instinctively want to create pop songs and I think it's really good to challenge that, otherwise it becomes a habit.

Gwenno

#72. Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again.

James Surowiecki

#73. Anyone can sit down and write some boring artistic song. Pop music is the hardest [stuff] to write.

Britney Spears

#74. I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'

Lady Gaga

#75. I just felt like I'd rather listen to even the worst metal song more than most current pop music.

Brian Posehn

#76. I think Badfinger was the epitome of that type of music before the power pop term was coined. 'No Matter What is always gonna be a great song on the radio. There?s probably two or three others off their records that are as cool like 'Day After Day'.

Robin Zander

#77. With a pop album you can listen to one or two songs from it, but a music album is really an experience. It's not something a whole lot of rock bands do.

Dylan Baldi

#78. The songs that I'm able to write are the songs I'm able to write, whatever they may be. The path I've cut for myself is pop music - love-y pop music. That's what I enjoy doing. And I don't think I'm going to get sick of it anytime soon.

Mac DeMarco

#79. It's like a little folk song. I think it might've been Harry Belafonte or someone like that who did it. And "Merry Christmas, Everybody" by Slade, which is a rock group - a rock-pop group who are very big over there.

Nick Lowe

#80. Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

Robyn

#81. If you say, 'I listen to pop,' you picture this kind of perfect, colorful, polished song. I want to have that, but when you open it, you see this gritty dark - kind of like dancing your tears away. Disguise the sadness in a pop beat.

Tove Lo

#82. I've written about a lot of different things, but the whole idea of writing for another character is unusual for pop music. Most of the repertory is love songs, and most of mine isn't. I don't know if that's a mental defect, or shyness, or what.

Randy Newman

#83. Originally, I wanted a pop career and formed a girl-band 'Genie Queen' managed by Andy McClusky from 'Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark', but it didn't work out. My brother John is the talented singer and song-writer with 'The Razz,' while my other brother Sean is a footballer for Telford United.

Abbey Clancy

#84. So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

Thomas Dolby

#85. Pop culture, commercials. You only come across a commercial if you're watching a TV all the time. I've never been all that upset. I like hearing the songs. I guess I've never been all that caught up in it.

Iron & Wine

#86. Sometimes when I get home after a long day, I'll turn on music - I love Latin, disco, and pop - and do my own workout, even if it's a short one. Know a good song to work out to? 'I Will Survive.'

Summer Glau

#87. Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.

Stephen Sondheim

#88. I was always one of these people who is irrationally moved by stupid pop songs.

Will Sheff

#89. I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz.

Nelly Furtado

#90. I grew up listening to all kinds of music, everything from country to rock, pop, R&B and even rap, so for me, music is music and a great song is a great song.

Jason Aldean

#91. I can answer anything about any American pop culture song ever.

Mark McGrath

#92. I was raised really strongly on The Beatles; they were huge in my family, my parents loved them, and they used to quiz me on who was singing which song, and we'd play certain records for certain events, and things like that. So I mean, they were sort of my introduction to pop music.

Eric Hutchinson

#93. My songs are like Bic razors. For fun, for modern consumption. You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop.

Freddie Mercury

#94. Everything (N.W.A.) attempted had to possess criminal undertones. I can only assume they spent hours trying to deduce villainous ways to microwave popcorn (and if they'd succeeded, there would absolutely be a song about it, assumedly titled "Pop Goes the Corn Killa", or "45 Seconds to Bitch Snack").

Chuck Klosterman

#95. My songs aren't bubble gum pop dance songs and I don't have background dancers on every single song.

Avril Lavigne

#96. We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10

Lady Gaga

#97. The challenge is to translate the song into something that works on the stage. It's pop music, but I try to keep it as loose as possible.

Tove Styrke

#98. 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

#99. For my money, insecurity, depression, etc, can be healed by way of El Morocco, sad songs at 4am, and the pop of a champagne cork

Elaine Stritch

#100. And within the computer's innards, a spreading cancer. A self-replicating corruption. A B-pop mutiny of bass and drum and oscillating frequency. Inane quasi poetry glorifying a pointless act of intimacy.

Jay Kristoff