Quotes About Writing Lyrics

#1. I grew up with my older brother listening to hip hop, and Jay-Z was the main person I listened to. When it comes to his word play, he's just out of this world. That's my biggest inspiration when it comes to writing lyrics.

Tinchy Stryder

#2. I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.

Talib Kweli

#3. I try not get too self-aware when writing lyrics.

Win Butler

#4. Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.

Matt Berninger

#5. When you have four people writing lyrics instead of one person, the lyrics are going to be a little more broad.

Brendon Urie

#6. 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

#7. I carry around a little journal with me, a little notebook and a pen and just write all the time. Not necessarily actually sitting down and writing lyrics, just free-form writing, whatever's going on in my mind.

Mandy Moore

#8. I feel like I'm still learning a lot with writing lyrics. In the beginning, like the first record, I wasn't so aware.

Yukimi Nagano

#9. For me, naming bands was the forerunner to really writing lyrics, because I work off titles.

Jim Capaldi

#10. I started writing lyrics out of desperation. I was broke and wondering where my next job, my next meal was coming from, although I had had several successful revue songs on Broadway.

Sheldon Harnick

#11. I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

Abbie Cornish

#12. I actually find a lot of pleasure in writing lyrics.

King Krule

#13. After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

Jim Capaldi

#14. I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.

Jerry Harrison

#15. I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

Nikki Sixx

#16. I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than ... is where it all comes from.

Zachary Cole Smith

#17. I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.

Kim Gordon

#18. When I first started writing lyrics and stuff, I was writing it to garage, and obviously garage kind of progressed to grime.

Lady Sovereign

#19. You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to [the lyrics]; I wanted to squirm.

Yannis Philippakis

#20. It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff.

Lizzy Plapinger

#21. There have always been jokes all over our songs; I originally started writing lyrics to make my friends crack a smile, which is difficult.

Alex Turner

#22. Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.

John Darnielle

#23. I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

Ben Folds

#24. Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.

Ian Anderson

#25. I don't know why, but there's a certain element of panic in writing lyrics that I'm not sure I enjoy. I don't write lyrics first, ever. I've never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an afterthought - it's music first.

Mike Patton

#26. I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.

Rivers Cuomo

#27. When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.

Billy Wilder

#28. A lot of times when I'm writing lyrics, I just think about insecurities that I might have and turn them into a scene. Some things may be true, and some things may not.

Nate Ruess

#29. ... that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints.

Sere Prince Halverson

#30. The fact that I'm shouting that I have Gangnam style makes people crack up. Imagine if Brad Pitt was singing the song - would it be funny? A twist is important when it comes to writing lyrics.

Psy

#31. I carry around, like, a little journal with me and just write all the time. Not necessarily, like, actually sitting down and writing lyrics - just freeform writing, whatever's going on in my mind. I write a lot on airplanes, actually, because it's completely isolating.

Mandy Moore

#32. I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.

Avicii

#33. The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song ... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics ... and I find that quite inspiring.

Zach Condon

#34. One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

Stephen Sondheim

#35. You don't meet that many people that you can talk about Roots Manuva with, but that was my favorite in school, this record of his called 'Run Come Save Me.' When I first started writing lyrics, it came from that.

Alex Turner

#36. 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

#37. Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

Alanis Morissette

#38. I can't write - out of all the things it takes to make music, lyrics are the thing I'm by far the shittiest at.

Jay Watson

#39. Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.

Leon Bridges

#40. Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.

Richard LaGravenese

#41. You can find me in the melodies, the chord progressions, the song style and structure. The lyrical places you fine me most are in the lyrics that 'show' more than 'tell.' I like to describe what the listener is seeing and let them make up the middle rather than telling them.

Kristian Bush

#42. When I write lyrics, it's only when I'm angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it's never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.

Henry Rollins

#43. Todd and Tim [Tobias] write the music, and I come up with the melodies and lyrics. I call it the Ohio Rock Factory. Tim and Todd run the northern plant in Cleveland, and I've got the southern plant down here in Dayton. No tours permitted.

Robert Pollard

#44. I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff.

Oliver Sykes

#45. I'm proud of the lyrics because I take a lot of care in writing them. I try to make it so people will want to go in and get really into the lyrics. I hope there are different corners to them, with lots of levels-without sounding pretentious.

Andrew VanWyngarden

#46. When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds.

David Longstreth

#47. Maybe one day I'll write my rock album so I can use more obscure references and just be weird. If the lyrics are too crazy, though, then it's not pop anymore.

Chaz Bundick

#48. 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

#49. I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead

John Frusciante

#50. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones.

Pat Pattison

#51. The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

David Grubbs

#52. I don't write lyrics, the lyrics write Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke

#53. Eric Peters' music is at the top of what gets played around my house, in my car and while I am running. I am a big fan. He writes incredibly honest and poetic lyrics coupled with memorable pop melodies and I can think of no better combination.

Jill Phillips

#54. Usually when I write lyrics I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of other stuff. Some of my favourite lyricists are like Lou Reed, kind of the classics - Bob Dylan and stuff like that.

Andrew VanWyngarden

#55. There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there.

Rosanna Arquette

#56. I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.

Joanna Newsom

#57. Songwriters might write cynical, world-wise lyrics and constantly talk about money, but most of us are downright naive when it comes to business.

Willie Nelson

#58. I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.

Billy Joel

#59. 'Float On' was a fine song, but I was still writing the lyrics on the last day we were working on it and deciding if it was something we wanted to put on the record.

Isaac Brock

#60. I saw an interview with Jay-Z where he said he didn't write down any of his lyrics, so I tried that.

Travis Morrison

#61. At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.

Kami Garcia

#62. I didn't even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.

Benji Madden

#63. Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

Valerie June

#64. 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

#65. Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#66. Sometimes melody and sometimes lyrics. It depends on the tempo and feel of the song. Slower pieces usually begin with melody and faster ones with lyrics. I write for the song and it leads me to my conclusion.

Ronnie James Dio

#67. It takes more talent to write music, but it takes more courage to write lyrics.

Johnny Mercer

#68. A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.

St. Lucia

#69. I like to write my lyrics on clay tablets.

Randy Newman

#70. Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day.

Anita Diament

#71. I write my songs usually while I'm walking around. Or in a car. Or in a bus, a plane, something like that. I jot down lyrics wherever I am. Usually it's on a vomit bag on an airplane or something. I just look for a pen.

Joshua Radin

#72. I've finally decided to write about profit for a change
But before I really started I already started to feel lame
Baby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed

Criss Jami

#73. The songs I was writing still had lyrics or sentiments that didn't match what I was feeling. It was old, negative energy coming out of me still, but it needed to all get out so I could trash those songs and put them in the bin. And then I was able to let the new songs out.

Damien Rice

#74. My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

Esperanza Spalding

#75. I don't feel any kind of a responsibility (other than to myself) to write "weighty" lyrics. In fact I sometimes wish I could learn to write in a simpler form, to be more direct and I'm going to be experimenting with this.

Stuart Adamson

#76. We all decided that from the start, me and Richey can't write music but we can write lyrics and look pretty tarty.

Nicky Wire

#77. I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

Eliza Doolittle

#78. I listen to some of the lyrics I used to write and I say, "Where was my head at when I wrote that?"

Ozzy Osbourne

#79. I think there are some songwriters who are just brilliant who can write and then I think there are some songwriters who can like me I have a problem writing chorus lyrics but I can write a song in a story like that.

Charles King

#80. To all companies please stop using Xmas songs and inserting your own lyrics. Write your own music. I am boycotting you until you stop.

Bill Engvall

#81. I've also been writing for other artists, producing other artists, doing some country stuff. Those lyrics I tend to leave more universal.

Meredith Brooks

#82. Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising.

St. Lucia

#83. Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.

Jason Robert Brown

#84. I love writing for dancers. You don't have to worry about the lyrics. I think to write words without music must be so frustrating. It must be always be so good, so perfect.

Nellie McKay

#85. Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write.

Yannis Philippakis

#86. I try to write in a way where the lyrics have many meanings and you won't really know what's behind it.

Taylor Momsen

#87. Writing music and lyrics that mean something personal to me. It's an exciting, intense, cathartic, this-is-who-I-am experience.

Mark Hoppus

#88. 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

#89. The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

Trent Reznor

#90. The nature of making music and making art, what motivates me is that it's interesting. It's interesting to listen, to really listen to other people's point-of-view. Take in their work. Listen to the way they sing. Listen to the way they write lyrics. What they are trying to express.

Emily Haines

#91. If I learned to play guitar it was so that I would have something to sing to, if I learned to write a song it was so that I would have something to sing. So the gut feeling you're talking about comes from singing and communicating the lyrics and what it is that we feel.

Brandi Carlile

#92. Since I write the lyrics, I don't want to be pigeonholed into a person who's out there preaching these songs. If you read the lyrics, there isn't a story being set up for you. You have to use your imagination to get the best out of the songs - if you choose to do that.

Linda Perry

#93. I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.

Margaret Cho

#94. I write my own lyrics completely on my own. Sometimes I have people helping me with concepts or like choruses and stuff sometimes, but mostly I write all my own songs by myself, especially the verses and a lot of the choruses.

Big Sean

#95. 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

#96. The lyrics came out of necessity. When we started writing the record, we started in a more fusion environment and that got boring really quick and that wasn't what we were about on an organic level.

Jimmy Chamberlin

#97. Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes.

Cole Porter

#98. You ask me why I don't speak
Not a word at will
But write so much worth well over a mill'
Well I value words like I value kisses
A sober one, a closer one penetrates the heart
Darling it's how it mends it

Criss Jami

#99. The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.

Criss Jami

#100. I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics.

Paul McCartney