Top 53 Popular Song Sayings
#1. No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.
Aldous Huxley
#2. I think if the United States gave anything to culture at large in the 20th century, the most important contribution made was the popular song.
Linda Ronstadt
#3. I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.
Tom Lehrer
#4. A popular song is one that makes us all think we can sing.
Andy Williams
#5. But, in fairness to them, too, the popular song per se is really a pretty shallow medium to perform in.
Mel Torme
#6. A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.
Albert Murray
#7. The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.
Barry Humphries
#8. I don't write songs, songs write me ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.
Sammy Cahn
#9. It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater ... it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.
Kurt Weill
#10. For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation's poetry.
John McWhorter
#11. There's a saying, cited in popular song, that if you love someone you must set them free. Well, that's just nonsense. If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains.
David Nicholls
#12. few years after Ball was herded south, a slave trader marched a coffle past the US Capitol just as a gaggle of congressmen took a cigar break on the front steps. One of the captive men raised his manacles and mockingly sang "Hail Columbia," a popular patriotic song.
Edward E. Baptist
#13. I was blessed with the talent. God gave me the gift to put words together and make popular songs.
Yo Gotti
#14. 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
#15. If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
Sylvia Plath
#16. 'Paper Planes' was an accident. It wasn't a song we made for the masses. It took two years to get popular, and there were many fights about censoring the gunshot sounds.
M.I.A.
#18. There's no reason anybody should be reading too much into 'Thrift Shop.' I just have because I have a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old who are really into going to lyric websites, hitting print, and printing lyrics for every song that's popular.
Al Madrigal
#20. At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.
Stephen King
#21. I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.
Tony Bennett
#22. Popular music usually has a chorus that needs to repeat, and people need to remember the song. That's sort of the major guideline when you're writing a song.
Alex Ebert
#23. I don't think any artist really knows why a song gets popular.
Chick Corea
#24. As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Terry Teachout
#25. You're so vain. I bet you think this song is about you.
Carly Simon
#26. When you enter the realm of politics, you don't enter it because you want to be popular. When I want to be popular, I pull on a guitar and sing a song.
Wyclef Jean
#27. The term 'popular culture' always used to mean what the people do - pop songs, folk songs, music in general used to live because people would sing these songs and tell these stories together. Then all of these new technologies came out and it became the work of professionals.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#28. Well, as a songwriter, it's really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It's a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it's the most popular topic to ever write about.
Jack White
#29. People showed me this way of dealing with music, writing songs, thinking about music and shows and our community and the fact that it doesn't have to be about being popular or fashion or making money.
Chuck Ragan
#30. I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.
Gavin DeGraw
#31. Well, the problem I've had with all the interviews I've had in America - I had meetings with about nine labels - and they all say to me "Will your new songs fit in with what is popular and what is in the chart?" And I say "Good God, I hope not!
Steven Morrissey
#32. I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.
Linda Ronstadt
#33. In the year 2525, that song will be even less popular than when it first came out.
Garry Shandling
#35. The most popular single in the world was "Livin' la Vida Loca," a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay.
Chuck Klosterman
#36. If you want to be a songwriter and place a song with a popular artist, then it's OK to follow the trends. This is mainly because many labels are afraid to take big risks on something that sounds too different than the status quo.
Wendy Starland
#37. Drunk, if you like; so much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts; and Caderousse began to sing the two last lines of a song very popular at the time, -
Alexandre Dumas
#38. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
#39. I play popular songs. This is not some obscure, unusual music. This is popular music.
Frank Fairfield
#40. Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.
Les Baxter
#41. For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
#42. I never know if a song's going to be popular so I don't select them with that in mind. All I can do is follow my heart and my gut and go for songs that make me feel great.
Nicole Scherzinger
#43. I want to collaborate with Amy [Winehouse] because she's really hot and cool right now. I know one song Rehab was very popular particularly because a lot of young people are in rehab as well. In fact I'm thinking about going. It looks like loads of fun and I know my career will benefit from it.
Sheryl Crow
#44. Now some they do and some they don't
And some you just can't tell
And some they will and some they won't
With some it's just as well.
Roger Hodgson
#45. I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern ... I'm pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular.
Simon Cowell
#46. When I want to be popular, I pull on a guitar and sing a song. Pras did not affect me because, in the realm of politics, he has never stood up for anything.
Wyclef Jean
#47. I guess I've never been introduced properly to Pink Floyd. I know they're great, don't get me wrong. Excellent, excellent musicians; great band; awesome harmony; great song writers; I just don't know anything besides, I guess, the popular songs on the radio.
Phil Anselmo
#49. What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.
Robert Wyatt
#50. There are places I'll remember All my life though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places have their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life I've loved them all
John Lennon
#51. How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?
Bob Dylan
#52. My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I'm trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
Nina Simone
#53. Doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?
Carole King
