Songs As Quotes

#1. We'll set up a demo session and try to knock out eight or ten songs and make them sound as close as we can to a record with the money and time we have.

Shane McAnally

#2. For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.

John Darnielle

#3. There are very few songs about just liking someone as a friend.

Demetri Martin

#4. In ancient Jewish tradition, as far back as we can tell, the Song of Songs was not interpreted as a love poem or as an allegory of the individual soul; it was interpreted as an allegory of God's spousal love for the people of Israel.

Brant Pitre

#5. Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.

W. Somerset Maugham

#6. What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

Justin Townes Earle

#7. When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I'd write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I'd sit there writing songs with my guitar.

Paul Weller

#8. My favorite hobby is writing and recording songs at my studio. I like to surf, but I don't get a chance to do that as much as I'd like. I don't live close to the beach. I also like to ski, but I don't get to do that much, either.

Scott Weiland

#9. I can speak for most songwriters - those breakup love songs are so easy to write, as far as the inspiration and all that.

Lucinda Williams

#10. Sometimes when you have a song, you listen to it and say, 'It's OK. It's music to drive to.' But then there are songs where you can actually hear it as a movie.

Betty Wright

#11. I never thought of myself as a rock singer. I was interested in songs like 'Heart Like a Wheel,' and I liked the others for about 15 minutes.

Linda Ronstadt

#12. Growing up as a singer, and a cast member, and now as an adult, a songwriter, I get the luxury of choosing the kinds of songs that I want to sing, because I'll write, you know, hundreds of songs. Even though only 12 appear on the album. That's 12 that I've chosen to sing of my catalog.

Jason Mraz

#13. As time went on, we formed a number of different bands. We played in rival, neighborhood bands. We learned more songs and we learned how to play Chuck Berry music and we learned Ventures songs.

Wayne Kramer

#14. My audience is a huge part of my success, so I see us as a team. They send me tons of song requests every day. Some of the songs I've never heard before, but I listen to them and then pick the ones that I love.

Lindsey Stirling

#15. I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

David Bowie

#16. When I was writing 'Shotgun,' it's one of the first songs that's come to me as an image.

Valerie June

#17. The Ruts were a great punk rock band from England whose songs were as excellent as their time together was short.

Henry Rollins

#18. Before we started writing we did feel pressure because of the success of the first record. One of the first songs that we wrote was "Out Of My Heart" which is the first single. As soon as we wrote that, we knew we just set the standard and every other song had to be as good if not better.

Christian Burns

#19. I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

Peter Blegvad

#20. It was like those songs I'd heard as a child, each so familiar, and all mine. When i got older and realized the words were sad, the stories tragic, it didn't make me love them any less. By then they were already part of me, woven into my conciousness & memory

Sarah Dessen

#21. Knowing the songs - and I'm still learning - lets one envision birds you can hear but can't see. And as always, the ability to envision what is just out of sight is more important than merely seeing what's right in front of you.

Carl Safina

#22. Ever since I released my first album, I've tried not to use minor chords as the main element in songs. The way I sing is too melancholic.

Jose Gonzalez

#23. The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.

Alicia Keys

#24. As a producer you can be more objective about the songs because you didn't write them.

Eric Bachmann

#25. I'd want it to be really special to both of us, but I'm a huge fan of 'At Last' as a wedding song. But what's also really cool is songs that no one else would have at their wedding, like an obscure Radiohead song.

Mary Lambert

#26. What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as they're being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.

Bono

#27. As for hot songs ... there are five in Dhoom 3, and I hope they are all hot!

Katrina Kaif

#28. I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

P.J. Harvey

#29. He's written some great songs. I thought that 'Blues Man' was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.

Alan Jackson

#30. As long as you have those brilliant songs, it didn't matter how bad you played, or how bad he sang on 'em sometimes. It was one of those magical things that really worked, and I don't think could ever happen again.

Donnie Fritts

#31. As a young concert-going person, I was never enamoured with celebrities who would walk out to feature in certain songs and then walk off.

John Lydon

#32. I liked music that I didn't have to think about, and most country songs spelled it right out for the listener. The girl was mad because the guy cheated, the guy was mad his pickup got trashed, everyone was sad the dog died, and Taylor Swift had about as much luck with men as I did.

Jay Crownover

#33. We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

Chad Smith

#34. I didn't think I had a voice at all, and I still think of myself as an interpreter of songs more than a singer. I thought it was too deep; people thought I was a man. I had a very strong Jamaican accent, too; the accent really messed me up for auditions.

Grace Jones

#35. I don't know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that's on a t-shirt, I probably won't know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don't know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.

FKA Twigs

#36. That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.

Jane Green

#37. 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

#38. I've always kind of been a little skeptical about bands that won't play their hits. That's really arrogant to me as a music fan. I do want to hear obscure songs, but like most people, I want to hear the hits, so we always play them.

Art Alexakis

#39. Yoga has had a profound effect on my songs and performances. I don't meditate in the traditional style of sitting and doing nothing. I prefer the zen of paying attention, such as the meditation of yoga flow, or walking meditations. I also consider singing, surfing and gardening to very meditative.

Jason Mraz

#40. As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

David Bowie

#41. I'd be hanging out in my bathrobe all day, stinky, just writing, and my mom allowed me to do this-as long as I was writing songs. She said, 'As long as you're seriously working on music, I'll support you. Don't get a job, because if you work, it will crush you.

Rufus Wainwright

#42. And it really is a good feeling to get up there and make that sound. I'm not stuck in a time warp, because I can use as many of the old songs as I want to, just the favorites.

Dan Hicks

#43. And it didn't matter how many songs or poems had already been written about them, because whenever he thought about the girl, the stars shone brighter. As if she were the one keeping them illuminated.

Stephanie Perkins

#44. Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively.

Scott Turow

#45. Stevie Wonder's 'Songs in the Key of Life' was on constant shuffle throughout my childhood. I remember my dad playing some stellar Max Roach albums as well.

Daniel Breaker

#46. Because as much as I love figuring out other people's puzzles, and love putting words together in ways that feel good to sing and sound good together and suit the melody, I think most of the best songs in the world are fairly clear about what they mean to say.

J. Robbins

#47. My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.

John Legend

#48. I feel that people spend as much time skipping songs as they do listening to them in their library.

Jacob Bannon

#49. You do try to write songs that you feel like people can relate to and you try to be as honest as you can so that people hear your records and they feel like, "Oh, my god. This is exactly how I feel. I went through this."

Sevyn Streeter

#50. In life you can get a feeling which is part of a person, the same as in the songs. Music is almost our representation of our fantasies and so our songs are representations of our fantasies.

Steve Winwood

#51. Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures.

Vera Nazarian

#52. There are so many reasons to mark the passing of the great Joe Cocker - as many songs as he wrote, recorded and performed in his remarkable concerts. For me, Cocker was also the only performer who successfully covered and even improved on The Beatles.

Andrew Rosenthal

#53. When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs. A Frank Sinatra album sets a certain mood, just as a Clash record sets another.

Mark Hoppus

#54. When I did get married and then had children, it was Beatles' songs I sang to them at night. As one of the youngest of 24 cousins, I had never held an infant or baby-sat. I didn't know any lullabies, so I sang Sam and Grace to sleep with 'I Will' and 'P.S. I Love You.'

Ann Hood

#55. We all love to sing along with our favorite songs. We sing in the car, in the shower, and at the karaoke bar. The problem is that half the time we don't know what we're singing. We're making up lyrics as we go along and hoping no one will notice.

Shawn Amos

#56. I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#57. People take worship (bhakti) into the relative plane. They consider singing religious songs as worship. Worship [bhakti] can never be without knowledge (gnan). Worship will make one become the one who he worships.

Dada Bhagwan

#58. It's so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust, but poetry and songs.

Jim Morrison

#59. Songs will always become a story in some way. I think it's my strongpoint as a writer musically. I don't shy away from it. It's not really an effort. It's how I write songs.

Mike Stud

#60. I've never really been nervous about any concerts. I enjoy it so much. All that matters is getting the songs played well, trying to get them to sound as close to the record live, which isn't easy, because my music is quite complicated to play.

Adam Ant

#61. If part of the purpose of making an album is to get some radio play, then you might as well think about that. But that's not really how we picked the songs.

Mike Gordon

#62. I've been through almost every type of obsession as far as music genres go, so I usually say I just like a good song, but the songs that are the most universal that a person on the other side of the world knows and can relate to is a very powerful entity.

Mark Salling

#63. He'd heard many songs in his life, sang thousands of them himself, but the sweetest music imaginable played for him in that moment: the sound of Sophie - the woman of his dreams - calling out his name, over and over again as together they reached their peak.

Jess Dee

#64. Writing that sort of [songs like "Let is Roll"]made me try to almost sort of ingrain it in my own head every time I sing it live as well. It's like therapy. It's like "Move on, Pip! Come on. You can do this! You can do this."

Ladyhawke

#65. In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.

Graham Parker

#66. We Black people cannot outrun our demons. Nor should we ever want to. We will embrace them as our lost Beloveds, and listen to the songs they sing to bring us through the darkness. - Walidah

Walidah Imarisha

#67. I get really affected by songs as a music listener - they mean so much and they feel so significant.

Dee Dee Ramone

#68. When I started The Shins, it really was just me, alone, but it was still The Shins. I was totally recording stuff and writing songs as The Shins and all of that. So the beginning inception of the whole thing was some sort of a lie, I guess.

James Mercer

#69. You find your preferred resolutions and harmonic intervals and what-have-yous, and then you either keep writing the same thing until everybody is as bored with your songs as you are, or you try with all your might to get out of those patterns. This is what a lot of the work is all about.

Bent Saether

#70. I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

Billy Joel

#71. I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.

Leonard Cohen

#72. There were a lot of songs during my MCA years that I thought should have been singles but were not. You can't worry about what wasn't - I was very lucky to have as many hits as I had.

George Jones

#73. We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#74. I always try to give my songs as gifts.

Dan Fogelberg

#75. People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

Jennifer Egan

#76. Yeah, but on the U.S Tour we threw a new song into the set almost every night. Ofcourse, you can't do too many new songs every night as they've never heard it.

Glenn Tipton

#77. There are certain songs that are sacred. People want to hear them just as they are in their head; they don't want you messing around with them. And then there are some other songs, if they've been around a long time in our set list, that I think we can take some creative liberties with.

Keith Urban

#78. Knights die in battle," Catelyn reminded her. Brienne looked at her with those blue and beautiful eyes. "As ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.

George R R Martin

#79. I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.

Randy Bachman

#80. I'm in a difficult position in the sense that, preposterous as this might sound, I don't like being the centre of attention. I get up on stage every night and play songs, but I almost feel the songs are the centre of attention. I don't like opening my birthday presents in front of people, either.

Alex Turner

#81. I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.

James Taylor

#82. As a kid in Africa, you were so connected to nature itself because you went farming, watched the moon out at night, observed how the sky was different, and how the birds chanted different songs in the evening and the morning.

Ishmael Beah

#83. Probably my two biggest musical influences were the Everly Brothers and the Beatles, in chronological order. Both of them have had a very simple-sounding musical style that's actually quite complex as far as popular songs are concerned.

Arlo Guthrie

#84. There was a time that I was only known for being a plagiarist. It used to hurt at times because there was so much effort I was putting into music. And instead of that, it was a couple tunes that I had reproduced from folk songs to remake as film songs, which were being written about.

Pritam Chakraborty

#85. It was a very bizarre experience for me, to get the songs together, go in there, and try to deliver them as I would perhaps in a live setting. But I realized that I couldn't take on that coffeehouse style that I came from and go in there and burn it up.

Jason Mraz

#86. Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I've had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery ... I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it's how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that's a wonderful thing.

Patrick Ness

#87. I had equal opportunity to touch God sitting in my room, singing Him songs, as I did on a stage in front of twenty thousand people.

Anna Blanc

#88. As much as I appreciate people putting me in the category of these very acrobatic belters, I feel like my strength is my ... interpretation and my truthfulness with songs, and I don't want young people to think it's all about the high notes that they have to hit.

Idina Menzel

#89. With Kevin [Drew], as I said, in his own way just told me "You gotta find that person that talks to you in your songs." I think we succeeded. I feel relief, to be quite honest with you.

Andy Kim

#90. An album doesn't mean as much to a lot of people now, compared to just songs.

Craig Finn

#91. As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

David Friedman

#92. Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist.

Michael Bolton

#93. With Whitney she has such a unique sound and powerful instrument that she made those songs her own. She might as well have written them because she brought such a power and passion to them that were very unique. She has a great gift.

Justin Guarini

#94. Would Eric enjoy being a Sooner? As I navigated through Shreveport, I wondered if Oklahoma vampires wore cowboy boots and knew all the songs from the musical.

Charlaine Harris

#95. I truly believe that my songs bring the answers and the solutions, as opposed to just talking about the problems. My music at its core is joyful.

Yolanda Adams

#96. My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.

Justin Hayward

#97. Sam loved to listen to music and make his own songs, to wear soft velvets, to play in the castle kitchen beside the cooks, drinking in the rich smells as he snitched lemon cakes and blueberry tarts. His passions were books and kittens and dancing, clumsy as he was.

George R R Martin

#98. I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.

Colin Hay

#99. I thought the '60s was the most exciting time and the most vital music, and we were really together as one mind then. Then afterwards, the songs and the bad drugs, that took its toll.

Mickey Hart

#100. I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I've also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you've squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.

Boots Riley