Songs In Quotes

#1. My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song.

Junior Kimbrough

#2. Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Taylor Swift

#3. The shade melted away as the sun climbed into its zenith. All colors were now covered in stone dust. The only vigorous activity came from the bushes, where cicada songs pulsed like alien hearts.

Aleksandr Voinov

#4. I like songs that make me feel tough. Like 'Back in Black.' You want to hear it again and get in a fight.

Chris Stapleton

#5. I can understand why guys wouldn't be into 'Glee.' You know, that's a pretty heavy musical show. That show does, like, six songs in an episode.

Katharine McPhee

#6. In real life, I'm such a dorky, happy person. I express myself in three ways: I talk a lot, I write songs and I get tattoos.

Christina Perri

#7. Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.

Sting

#8. Ozzy wanted to get us back together. It's been 20 years. We did a couple of songs during his farewell in 1992 and that got the ball rolling.

Geezer Butler

#9. I have a natural instinct to feel guilty and that I've let people down. I've apologized in more songs than 'Back to the Shack.' Going back to our second record, the closing lines are 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' It's definitely part of my personality.

Rivers Cuomo

#10. If I said in one of my songs that my English teacher wanted to have sex with me in junior high, all I'm saying, is that I'm not gay, you know? People confuse the lyrics for me speaking my mind. I don't agree with that lifestyle, but if that lifestyle is for you, then it's your business.

Eminem

#11. There's still injustice happening in my world. I sing my songs at concerts and I'm so grateful that the people are ready to hear them.

Mavis Staples

#12. No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula ... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

Lauren Mayberry

#13. What makes us human is not only the fact that we suffer, but also because we aspire to be happy." - Ashutosh in the Book "Songs of the Mist

Shashi

#14. In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.

Claire Tomalin

#15. Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.

Bernard Cornwell

#16. With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild 'wanderess' ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I saw her, fires were alight. It was a spicy night in Barcelona. The air was fragrant and free.

Roman Payne

#17. Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.

Wynton Marsalis

#18. I will always believe in love and I don't care what happens to me or how many times I get my heart broken, or how many breakup songs I write, I'm always going to believe that someday I am going to meet somebody who is actually right for me and he's going to be wonderful and it's going to work out.

Taylor Swift

#19. What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

Steve Earle

#20. Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell.

Emily Giffin

#21. So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

Trevor Nunn

#22. The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

Paul Weller

#23. If a man, in a lifetime of 50 years, can point to six songs that are immediately identifiable, he has achieved something. Irving Berlin can sing 60 that are immediately identifiable. Somebody once said you couldn't have a holiday without his permission.

Sammy Cahn

#24. I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes.

Tom Hodgkinson

#25. My little brother and I took piano lessons at a young age and played music together later on in life just to play around at home until we decided to make a record. Eventually we started having more and more songs.

Josephine De La Baume

#26. The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them ... and royally squander their lives with her.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#27. A lot of my songs are about death and the fleetingness of life. It just feels good to remind myself about that a lot. For whatever reason. And it's a beautiful thing, actually. It seems to me like it's a beautiful way to live in the world and to relate to things, with an awareness of temporality.

Phil Elvrum

#28. 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

#29. When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.

Erin McKeown

#30. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.

Ketch Secor

#31. I remember making up songs in my head.

Kenny Chesney

#32. I love entertaining Korean people with traditional songs from Ecuador . It has been an exceptional, new experience for me to perform in Korea and I enjoyed so much.

Jose Gonzalez

#33. I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.

Alan Cohen

#34. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.

A.R. Rahman

#35. To take part in the African revolution, it is not enough to write a revolutionary song. You must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves.

Ahmed Sekou Toure

#36. I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.

John Legend

#37. 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

#38. I just write songs from the heart, and you never know who'll like the songs. I try to make sure that I don't allow anybody's expectation to weigh on me. I have my own expectation of life. I believe in letting people be free.

Ester Dean

#39. I try to choose the songs that really are basically coming from my heart. I think that through the songs that I select, people know what's going on in my life.

Diana Ross

#40. One of my favorite songs from the album is a song called 'For Better or Worse,' and it's basically about unconditional love, which is, I'd say, an ongoing theme in my personal life.

Debbie Gibson

#41. Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.

Joanna Newsom

#42. I play songs that have only the pattern of my self in them and you hum along suporting me. You are the companion to myself. The mirror with my mother'e eyes.

Karen Hesse

#43. Sometimes you fall in love with a song 'cause it's new, it's exciting and you just birthed it. Then you fall out of love sometimes. But the strongest songs always survive and you come back and you fall in love all over again.

Jared Leto

#44. Very talented people make some very bad songs so that people with a fourth grade reading level can sing along. Sure, corporate worship is good- but for me, I get very bored in Church trying to worship.

Reese Roper

#45. I was in the ensemble and also covered the parts of Dee Dee and Mary!! I had a fantastic time doing this show especially when we performed in places like Cardiff and Glasgow where the audiences were just so enthusiastic, joining in with all the songs and up on their feet dancing at the end!!

Francesca Jackson

#46. I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

Billy Joel

#47. The romantic stuff comes a lot easier when you're experiencing true love. It feels better, it feels more natural to record love songs when you're in love.

Aaron Tippin

#48. I always sang when I was little-bitty girl. I sang all the time. And then I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee, so I sang in a show at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. You know, they have all those variety shows where Dollywood is. And I sang there and yodeled and clogged, but I never wrote my own songs.

Ashley Monroe

#49. Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Autumn Mist in a land called Honah Lee, little Jacky Paper loved that rascal Puff, and gave him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.

Peter Yarrow

#50. Great demons lived between the stars, and in them, beings immense in power and size, who sucked the marrow from suns and sang songs that drove galaxies mad. There

Max Gladstone

#51. In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation ... the essence of minstrel.

John Trudell

#52. These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I'm washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles. The ones that you sing when you're driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

Al Jarreau

#53. 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

#54. Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent.

David Lee Roth

#55. My buddies worked with me for weeks, and I went up to take my test, and started crying because I couldn't remember the words. I can remember songs. If you put it to a melody, I would have sung it to 'em in a minute.

Barry McGuire

#56. DJ-ing itself is not just about playing songs. The art of DJ-ing is presenting new songs to the crowd that they haven't heard before and creating a party vibe that's different than just listening to anybody's playlist. It's the only way to truly be big and respected in your craft.

TyDi

#57. We just wrote songs that seemed good to us. We wrote the album in like two weeks. We could have had more time, but we accomplished what we needed to in the two weeks.

Travis Barker

#58. I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

Richard Thompson

#59. My task is set before me, girl
My mission clear and true
There'll be black knights and dragons, girl
But I will always come for you ...

Emme Rollins

#60. You know, the songs that are self-conscious or jerky, they are that way, but the other ones aren't, so that's a good thing. Some of the songs are Beck-jokey, but the others, they have heart in them.

Stephen Malkmus

#61. I'm very lucky that people are able to say, 'Oh, that's that Moody Blues guy!' I'm very fortunate with that. That's all. Without the songs, I think, I'd just be a pretty average karaoke singer. In the end, it comes down to the songs: the strength of the songs.

Justin Hayward

#62. I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.

Francesca Lia Block

#63. Gospel music was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

Johnny Cash

#64. Out of all the R&B artists that have come out, I think my name has been used most in hip-hop songs.

Keith Sweat

#65. I met will.i.am in the studio and played him a couple of songs and he liked them. We're similar but there's nobody in my lane doing what I'm doing.

B.o.B

#66. I've been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-'80s, I'd begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.

Bernie Leadon

#67. I think I have a hard time expressing myself in my relationships. I use songs to tell people how I'm feeling. If I can't say 'I love you,' I'll write a song about it and hope that the person figures it out.

Jenny Lewis

#68. Many of the songs were written as a way of paying tribute to specific people, but in the end the songs took on a life of their own and I didn't worry about accuracy or biographical truth, so it's not a problem.

Michael Gira

#69. I like the fact that I can rep New York, but my style does not - I'm not trapped in a New York thing. I can do art songs with other artists and it's seamless.

Talib Kweli

#70. I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.

Angel Olsen

#71. When you play the bars, you pay your dues. It does matter that you know those things [songs]. And the great thing for me, too, is that I draw on that stuff as influences. It's also stuff that you put in the tank that you pull from to make records.

Eric Church

#72. We made basement practice songs.To have them presented in such a huge fashion today - like at Primavera, where it's thousands of people in a festival environment - is surreal. I never thought some of the songs would ever need to be projected at such a volume or to such a wide span of people.

David Pajo

#73. I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that.

Otis Blackwell

#74. 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

#75. I think you can hear the struggles and hear a realness in Theocracy songs, a human element that you don't get from a lot of the typical Christian stuff.

Matt Smith

#76. I wanted to have more songs with religious backgrounds. The Christmas record has strong, traditional hymns, but it also has a song called 'Christmas in Heaven' about missing someone that you love that's passed on, and wondering what's going on up there on Christmas.

Scotty McCreery

#77. There are certain songs, and books, and films that are like points of high ground in the memory. Like they are even larger than your own experiences. They never go away.

Graham Joyce

#78. Just seeing the things on TV and the things in front of you, the amount of information coming in, and the lack of information not coming in, how could you not help but write songs about it.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#79. Sometimes, I make 50 songs and pick out the best 10. I've been in the studio all day, all night, making the beat, writing the raps. You never know what's gonna be a hit.

Juicy J

#80. As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices.

Mike Stoller

#81. I was brought up in many different cultures, moving around all the time, and I find my identity in my songs. I project the identity I want to have throughout the songs that I write.

Mika.

#82. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

Roger Kahn

#83. I love not being in charge of writing all the songs, and being the front person - the whole thing is cool.

John Britt Daniel

#84. There's no doubt that there's certain songs and arrangements of music that release a chemical reaction in my brain. This sounds a little goofy, but I really believe that. It's such a euphoric experience that I sort of want to chase that experience as often as possible.

McG

#85. I've written 90 percent of the songs in my career, on all my albums.

Toby Keith

#86. I realized at a young age that sequence in an album is almost as important as the songs that are on the album.

Dr. Dre

#87. Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

Charles Duhigg

#88. With the Rhythm Kings, I can involve myself in arranging and producing the music as well as the choice of songs.

Bill Wyman

#89. 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

#90. Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.

Shakira

#91. They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs.

Rue McClanahan

#92. When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

Patrick Carney

#93. She'd done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny.

Joe Hill

#94. Danny and I wrote 10 songs in seven days, which I thought might be close to the record until you probably look at some of the Beatles statistics.

Jerry Only

#95. I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.

Loudon Wainwright III

#96. The people in my songs are all me.

Bob Dylan

#97. In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it as if you were.

Bob Dylan

#98. Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#99. Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'

Chuck Palahniuk

#100. In life, you will find two things. The quiet beauty of Darkness, and the bright songs of Light. The choice is yours to decide which will be you, and which will be your shadow.

Taylor Chackowsky