Song Lyric Quotes

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

Julian Casablancas

#2. Everything stems from real experiences but I do also have a very vivid imagination. A song lyric gets easily carried away with itself and can end up somewhere I'd never have predicted.

Imogen Heap

#3. I knew there was something special between us, knew it as surely as a lyric that belonged in a song. But as with all good songs, I needed time to figure out the melody and chords.

Cari Quinn

#4. A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes.

Pete Townshend

#5. As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.

Richie Sambora

#6. When we feel, a kind of lyric is sung in our heart.
When we think, a kind of music is played in our mind.
In harmony, both create a beautiful symphony of life.

Toba Beta

#7. If some event happens and it seems really important to me and moving to me, I'll write it down in my lyric book knowing that it will come out in a song.

Amy Ray

#8. I remember coming in to the studio and meeting Barry Manilow . I was kind of star-struck. He said, "I want to play you this song." We get to the end of the song and I hear him actually sing my name as part of the lyric. I had to pick my jaw up from the floor!

Dave Koz

#9. I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.

Jill Scott

#10. I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#11. I get asked all the time, "What is a George Strait song?" I know it when I hear it. I don't seek a specific tempo or lyric or melody. It just has to make sense. Maybe it is natural because I was given the gift to sing.

George Strait

#12. Or you can just start speaking up...

-Brave

Sara Bareilles

#13. 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

#14. Sometimes it starts with a random lyric idea that sets the tone for the whole song. Chords and sounds build from the lyric and rhythm, kind of. Sometimes it's a track I fall I love with ... but writing my own songs, I rarely write on tracks.

Tove Lo

#15. The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#16. So wake me up when its all over

-Wake Me Up

Avicii

#17. I love to be in control of everything I do and everything around me. So that means, you give me a romantic lyric and I'll make the atmosphere, I will build on that. And then the song then becomes, it takes me to do the song, it's just a belief, it's just who I am.

Teddy Pendergrass

#18. What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#19. I'm no good at goodbyes

-50 Ways To Say Goodbye

Train

#20. Only know your lover when you let her go
And you let her go
-Let Her Go

Passenger

#21. I was inspired by people like Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Stevie and "Storytellers." People that could really change the world with their lyric, no matter who sung the song, they had still been the source of that message. So that's what I really aim for.

Emeli Sande

#22. A good song is like a mannequin - its form makes sense, but there's no life. There should be memorable melody, thoughtful lyric, appropriate arrangement.

Greta Salpeter

#23. In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

Joe Meno

#24. I don't spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself - and if other people like it, that's great.

Ben Gibbard

#25. Don't run

Stop holding your tongue

Sara Bareilles

#26. Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric.

Jon Foreman

#27. To share is precious, pure and fair.
Don't play with something you should cherish for life. Don't you wanna care, ain't it lonely out there?

Marvin Gaye

#28. When Blue sang, a lyric became a libation; a song became a sacrament.

Pearl Cleage

#29. What makes a great song - you don't put it into words. You feel it. The perfect lyric. The perfect melody. It makes you feel something.

Diane Warren

#30. love is but an echo in her head

David Cantor

#31. You'll be mine and I'll be yours.

Taylor Swift

#32. As the writer of the lyric of the song 'God's Country', I am outraged by the suggestion that somehow I am connected with, believe in, or am sympathetic with Communist or totalitarian philosophy.

Yip Harburg

#33. For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it ... Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.

Ben Gibbard

#34. Some songs started from a bass line, some started from having the full lyric and Jim, my drummer, who's also the first guy I've been in the studio with him since 16, sometimes he'd have an idea and I'd put a lyric to it and then the track evolves, there's no set way to write a song.

Paolo Nutini

#35. The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own.

Sheryl Crow

#36. That's really what was wonderful for me growing up, since I got to know so many of the songwriters who liked me and thought I had talent. They would then tell me how to read a lyric and sing a song, and challenge me to try and find a different end to a song.

Margaret Whiting

#37. Anything is food for starting a song. A song can start with a lyric idea or a melody or just a sound that inspires.

Alison Goldfrapp

#38. In the half light of morning, in a world between the sheets
I swear I saw her angel wing, my vision was complete
from TIGHTROPE - Stone Roses

Matt Squire

#39. I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.

Trey Anastasio

#40. I was the lead singer in a lot of the bands I was in. You have to be comfortable. You gotta get up there and sell the song. You have to get up there and sell the lyric. You gotta be able to feel it.

Richie Sambora

#41. I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

James Taylor

#42. Trouble, Troublemaker yeah that's your middle name

Ooh

Olly Murs

#43. And we dance all night to The Best Song ever!
-One Direction

One Direction

#44. The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.

Orianthi

#45. I'm conflicted about the lyric tattoo thing. I feel like that's a lifetime decision, and I always feel like, 'I hope you don't regret this a couple years from now when you get tired of that song.'

Sam Hunt

#46. I don't have any favourite lyrics. Honestly, all of them I love 'em to death - it's the same with songs. I don't have just one favourite lyric, I love them all.

ASAP Rocky

#47. I began thinking about the idea of a 24 hour concert. What if you tied songs to certain hours of the day - creating a 24 hour world of lyric and melody. So that was the inspiration for this project.

Jon Foreman

#48. The assholes took their toll." "Assholes often do." "That's a Billboard Top Forty song waiting to happen." "Sung to the tune of 'There'll Be Sad Songs,'" I suggested, then offered up a lyric. "'There'll be assholes, to make you cry.'" "'Assholes often dooo,'" Mallory sang.

Chloe Neill

#49. All you ever did was...WRECK ME...

-Wrecking Ball

Miley Cyrus

#50. 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

#51. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.

David Levithan

#52. I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.

Scott Walker

#53. I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?

Jim Capaldi

#54. Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them.

Bob Dylan

#55. It's like you know a lyric for a song by heart and suddenly you forget the words.

Cecelia Ahern

#56. When I listen to a song, I don't say, 'Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.' I'm thinking, 'That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.'

Taylor Swift

#57. In a song, you have to have a lyric that gives us new ideas on how to live, a lyric that makes us feel, and a melody that gives you some kind of body response and emotional response.

Jennifer Warnes

#58. The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.

Norman Mailer

#59. Soon the Boov was in the ghost suit and Pig was in the car, which would be a good lyric for a bluegrass song, now that I think of it.

Adam Rex

#60. Now I'm a warrior
Now i've got thicker skin
I'm a warrior
I'm stronger than i've ever been
And my amor
Is made of steel you can't get in
i'm a warrior
And you can never hurt me again

Demi Lovato

#61. I think the difference between a good song and a great song is ... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid track and everything is there but then the lyric is just okay, then you've got a good song.

Bonnie McKee

#62. Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.

Arthur Miller

#63. Pronouns really don't matter in a song - 'I' or 'he' or 'she' or even subscribing a lyric to an inanimate object.

Conor Oberst

#64. Musically, there's probably nothing better than, after spending weeks or months of grinding on a lyric or a song, when you play a good song from beginning to end for the first time - there's a moment there where all the pain and suffering is worth it.

Five For Fighting

#65. It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

Geddy Lee

#66. My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.

Ben Folds

#67. The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always ... first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it.

Frank Sinatra

#68. Usually now a song starts just in my head with a melody or a lyric idea coming first.Then typically I'll go to a guitar, unless it's a instrumental then I'll usually build it on a keyboard instrument.

Eliot Lewis

#69. My advice to singers is always the same: 'Don't sing the song, sing the lyric.'

Mitch Leigh