Quotes About Pop Songs

#1. It was a ridiculous question. Did I _love_ Char? Did I feel about Char the same way I feel about the Beatles, string instruments in pop songs, the way Little Anthony sang high notes, the way Jerry Lee Lewis played piano?

Leila Sales

#2. The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early '90s. I don't think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive.

Gary Numan

#3. Writing catchy pop songs is a super-minor superpower, but it's mine.

J.C. Lillis

#4. In the '80s, they were using an awful lot of technology but hadn't really figured out how it worked yet ... You had these really great, simple pop songs turned into these gigantic overproductions.

Adam Schlesinger

#5. We lived, ate, and breathed pop songs.

Barry Mann

#6. I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

Ben Gibbard

#7. I have the most eclectic audience - I've got gay, I've got straight, black, white, rich, poor, young, old, in 45 countries. And they don't all come because I'm the Sinatra kid, though that's a big part of it. My biggest successes have come from pop songs that I write myself.

Michael Buble

#8. I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

David Ives

#9. At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.

Neil Tennant

#10. Trust me Miki. Nothing cures heartache faster than a bunch of girls singing pop songs badly at the top of thier lungs.

Mark Crilley

#11. The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death.

Jonathan Davis

#12. 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

#13. I don't really have a favorite pop artist - I just listen to some pop songs here and there. Mostly, though, it's Beyonce and show tunes.

Lilla Crawford

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

Gwenno

#15. I feel that Jane's is really a vibe and a time. It wasn't like we were the Beatles. We didn't have crafty pop songs where it sort of didn't matter who played them because they're just really great songs.

Eric Avery

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. When I say I don't have to write pop songs anymore, there's no way I'm going to get on the radio at 60 years of age unless I'm doing a duet with Gaga or I was on 'All of the Lights,' which was a Kanye West record that managed to get on the radio.

Elton John

#19. When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

Tom Glazer

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

Will Sheff

#21. 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

#22. How do you know about Boy George? (Jesse)
I was in hell, Jesse. What do you think they used to torture me with? Bad pop songs. (Xypher)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#23. Pop songs are not as graceful as they used to be. Performers today haven't gone through the regimen of learning how to write. And of course, everyone wants to own copyrights.

Hal David

#24. I don't own an ABBA album, and I never had the urge to go and buy one. If you're just talking about well crafted pop songs, they were fantastic.

Phil Collins

#25. Britains still commemorate the Battle of Cable Street in London. There are still pop songs in Britain that reference Sir Oswald Mosley and his black shirts.

Rachel Maddow

#26. I'm not confident about my appearance, I'm not confident about anything really in my life, I'm a very tortured soul when it comes to self-confidence, but when it comes to my pop songs, if I started to question, I would never stop questioning.

Torquil Campbell

#27. 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

#28. I am a pop girl! And I'm on a major label. I enjoy singing pop songs.

Katy Perry

#29. I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

Laurel Nakadate

#30. The opening notes of a song began, some plucking of guitar strings. I knew the melody. It was Maroon 5's "She Will Be Loved." As pop songs went, it was pretty damn good, a bit of a favorite of mine.

Kylie Scott

#31. Pop songs are like a D.J. set crammed into three minutes.

Benny Blanco

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

Victoria Justice

#33. There are some pop songs I hate but I can't get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.

Kurt Cobain

#34. I sing songs from the theater and pop songs. When I say 'pop songs,' I mean from the 90's. And I tell jokes. So it's sort of a stand up show meets a concert - not your traditional lounging across a piano cabaret show. It's much looser.

Laura Benanti

#35. 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

#36. Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.

Michael Caine

#37. Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

#38. I love listening to pop songs in Spanish and Italian.

Stjepan Hauser

#39. 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

#40. There's always that struggle between me wanting to keep [song] new and fresh and then be - I can never get with pop songs being so repetitive.

Andrew Bird

#41. It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

Regina Spektor

#42. I love writing pop songs and I love the challenge. I love melodies and wanted it to be classy. I wanted it to have some substance because I feel as if I have a lot of things to say and wanted it to have something to it.

Courtney Jaye

#43. Sometimes, I write '60s or '80s style pop songs.

Peter Steele

#44. 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.

#45. Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock'n'roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I've done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.

Elvis Costello

#46. I really got into psych because everything has a really good groove to it and it's nicely spaced out, but ultimately they are just cool pop songs with a little something else that makes them special and unique. They are interesting and have another dimension to them besides a three chord change.

Mike Romano

#47. There's a whole range of sources of inspiration for the drawings and stories. They come from dreams, hallucinations, pop songs, or other things I see in the world around me.

Ryan McGinness

#48. My earliest memories as a child are listening to Beatles records, and they are a big part of how I've learned to write pop songs.

Christina Perri

#49. I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.

Sting

#50. In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.

David Byrne

#51. You can only write so many pop songs before they all sound the same. I got to a point where something overtly melodic and straightforward sounded sort of cheesy to me. Pop songs seemed too manufactured.

Dylan Baldi

#52. My music is not a particular genre. It's not bubblegum or cheese. It's just good songs, pop songs. It's just my songs.

Eliza Doolittle

#53. Mimesis has longevity on its side. But Oasis wrote two of the greatest pop songs of all time, each with lyrics that mean less and less the more you think about them. So I'm going to have to go with the Gallagher brothers.

Matthew Zapruder

#54. 'Time after Time' is one of the best pop songs ever written, in my opinion. It's an incredible, beautiful, timeless song.

Sarah McLachlan

#55. My songs don't play on pop radio; they play on black radio.

Robin Thicke

#56. I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.

John Mellencamp

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. If there are no pop stars churning out those mind-numbing songs, then there are no musicians in the booths backing them up, no clerks running back and forth with tapes, no shop owners selling the music. Taking out one person at the top destroys thousands at the bottom.

Kiera Cass

#60. 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

#61. You've got to go down the road you naturally go down, and for me it was pop, folk country, just feel-good music. I suppose most of my songs are very up-tempo.

Shane Filan

#62. People assume that a lot of pop artists don't write their songs. That, for me, is super frustrating because I think it detracts from some of the art and some of the craft of what we do. I'm at the helm of it, and I think that is what people don't see.

Ricki-Lee Coulter

#63. I love to sing big rock and roll songs; I love to sing country-pop stuff, and then I love to sing soft, sadder beautiful songs.

Elle King

#64. Thanks to many great K-pop singers, the groundwork has been laid for more Korean songs to be readily accessible to an overseas audience via channels like YouTube.

Psy

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. I love love songs. But I love pop music as well: Girls Aloud, Kylie, the Spice Girls, East 17, Mika.

Adele

#69. 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

#70. I try to listen to over a hundred different songs a day. I listen to every single thing. If you're just listening to pop music, you're just gonna make pop music. I listen to Adele, Yo Yo Ma, Gucci Mane.

Benny Blanco

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. It's not my concern to make a commercial pop record. I want to make a record of music that I would listen to, that is lyrically rich and has songs that people can relate to - more along the Jakob Dylan route: people who create for the art of it and not necessarily the monetary rewards of it.

Crystal Bowersox

#76. They wanted to manipulate our songs - our fantastic, well-written songs with a soulful drive - beautiful English R&B - and turn them into pop rubbish. We might as well have been writing children's lullabies for all that did for me. We had to get away from that asshole.

Diane Rinella

#77. 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

#78. Starship was a whole different thing. It was pop rock. It made more money and had more hit songs than Airplane. There was no cultural or social ethic behind it. For me, it was like selling out. I was the only one selling out. The rest enjoyed doing what they were doing.

Grace Slick

#79. I was always into pop music, Destiny's Child, songs with catchy music. Even when I was writing when I was younger, it wasn't all about expressing myself; it was just about making fun music.

Eliza Doolittle

#80. 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

#81. If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

Van Morrison

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

Avril Lavigne

#83. Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let's put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like to hear something poppy, and sometimes I don't.

Eddie Van Halen

#84. When the songs pop out, that's like the climax of us building.

John Otto

#85. I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

Danny Boyle

#86. 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

#87. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

Nick Hornby

#88. 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

#89. Whitney Houston, one of my biggest inspirations, also had that same mindset because her songs vary from R&B, hip hop, pop, and gospel.

Heather Headley

#90. I've done a lot of movies that don't have any music in them, and I've always sort of had a kind of wary attitude about music because it can be so manipulative, and also because with pop music, I feel like everybody kind of has their own relationship to songs.

Joe Swanberg

#91. When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop.

Alex Goot

#92. Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.

Tori Amos

#93. If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

Jon Secada

#94. I listen to all kinds of songs. There's something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it's pop or jazz or hip-hop.

Brian McKnight

#95. Songs like Reach and S Club Party are pop classics. I'm really proud that I had a part in them.

Rachel Stevens

#96. You can get really left of centre influences in mainstream pop. Michael Jackson and Prince are some of the most progressive artists ever if you actually dissect their songs there's some crazy stuff going on.

Kimbra

#97. I like Sam Smith and Taylor Swift. I love pop music, but I also like Sam Smith's slow songs. That would be more to dance to. I think dancers like different genres of music, compared to just a regular person.

Maddie Ziegler

#98. Stylistically speaking I would put us in the pop/rock vein. Although our songs tend to have a darker or moodier current running through them than usual pop/rock. I would say our music is very honest. We're not trying to be anybody or anything for anyone

Sherri DuPree

#99. Hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture. I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations.

Kim Gordon

#100. I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.

Julian Casablancas