Writing A Song Quotes

#1. I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it.

Christopher Owens

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.

Joe Elliott

#5. I didn't want to be a big record mogul and all that stuff. I just wanted to write songs and make people laugh.

Berry Gordy

#6. If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - Well, I'm going to write about a thing.

Charlie Daniels

#7. You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Nick Cave

#12. Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.

Jacques Villeneuve

#13. I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Jim Sturgess

#14. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.

Bob Dylan

#15. I don't really care about how good a song is, I only want them to reflect what I felt when I was writing them

Lana Del Rey

#16. The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

Chris Stapleton

#17. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.

Wednesday 13

#18. Writing songs about it is a really useful way for me to love New York more, and stay observing it, and not just zone it out.

Frankie Cosmos

#19. 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

#20. I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house ... love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.

David Byrne

#21. I think you want to write a song that's like the songs you are into.

Craig Finn

#22. If there's something that I really need to say that I can't say by speaking to someone, I usually write it in a song or a letter to someone.

Joshua Radin

#23. I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.

Mitch Albom

#24. He starts to hum, a haunting melody. No words ride the music, only the familiar notes of a forgotten song.

A.G. Howard

#25. If prolific is writing a lot of songs, I'm that. If it's writing a lot of good songs, I'm something else.

Five For Fighting

#26. I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

Kurt Cobain

#27. Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I'm going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It's always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.

Bruno Mars

#28. If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

Otis Redding

#29. As much as you don't want to say you are a vengeful person, when someone drags your name through the mud and plays press games and puts things out there like that, you are kind of like, alright. US Weekly will be gone next week, the songs I am writing won't.

Kid Rock

#30. I'm very parasitic, from my own experiences. I just go and mine my dirty laundry, you know, and go through it until I find something that's interesting enough to me to write a song about.

Nikki Jean

#31. The Hank Williams Syndrome: Come to Nashville, write some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of a sudden die.

Waylon Jennings

#32. Song-writing is therapy for me. I'm a very moody person, very difficult to live with. There's a lot going on and a lot of contradictions. My life is always one step away from disaster.

Gary Numan

#33. I go to restaurants and the groups always play "Yesterday." I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us "Yesterday." He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing "I Am The Walrus.

John Lennon

#34. From very early on, I've realized that and I have a mission statement with my songs to entertain, to encourage and to challenge the Body of Christ. That's always kind of the focus of the songs that I write for myself.

Jonny Diaz

#35. Every time I write a song it feels like it could be the last one I do, or it always feels like a fluke.

Courtney Barnett

#36. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

David Byrne

#37. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.

Patti Smith

#38. The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.

Nick Cave

#39. I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.

Patty Griffin

#40. What rare days were those, When my chief duty was to write a song.

George Arnold

#41. I care about the records I make and I love writing songs and some songs are really dear to me and they mean something. But the memory of making the records and the activities surrounding the records, the people involved in them is actually a bigger thing to me.

Joel Plaskett

#42. If you're asking if I would be foolish enough, or insulting enough, to write about people in my life that I respect and sell it to the masses as a "break-up song," I can't imagine doing that to people I love.

Jack White

#43. 'Victorious' for me was a chance to write a song exactly how I was feeling - I was feeling triumphant, I was feeling like I could do anything as long as I've got the people that I love by my side. We're gonna go out and conquer it, and party, and just be awesome.

Brendon Urie

#44. I like to make up songs. And it's my opinion that all these songs mean a lot to me, but that doesn't mean I think everything needs to leave the house. If it helps me through my life and doesn't bore anybody in theirs.

Todd Snider

#45. I'd always thought that if I could get sober and stay sober, I would be able to have a career making music. My drug and alcohol addiction was the one thing holding me back. I had finally gotten the tools to stay sober, and it was just a matter of writing the songs.

Macklemore

#46. I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about. The first song I wrote was called "Kitten." It was about a boy named Liam, who I was just crazy about.

Bonnie McKee

#47. I can imagine moving out to the seaside at some point. I like Brighton, my sister lives there. I'm a seaside boy and whenever I go there, I find myself writing songs about it.

Marc Almond

#48. But I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.

Suzanne Vega

#49. So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

Glenn Danzig

#50. Love may be nothing more than a complex interaction of hormones, conditioned behavior, and positive reinforcement, but try writing a poem or song about that.

Rick Yancey

#51. In itself, I spent a year writing, you know all these different songs and when it came to recording the record, I just pulled out all the tracks I liked the most.

Wednesday 13

#52. Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

Boots Riley

#53. I write songs very quickly, so the 20 minutes of joy I get out of writing a song doesn't compare to the two months of joy I get engaging with the people who like my music.

Halsey

#54. Sometimes I write a song and I'm down with it but I'm like yeah, whatever, and then everybody loves it and then it blows up. I'm like: "Okay! I didn't see that coming."

Bonnie McKee

#55. I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.

Nick Cave

#56. When I'm writing a song, it's just me and the songwriters. Then when the song is done, there are publishers that hear it, then people in my management, then my wife and my boys and my friends, and if they're all lovin' it, it's kind of withstanding all the criticism I need.

Luke Bryan

#57. The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.

Gene Clark

#58. Sometimes I'll write a song. When I've gone through something really hard in my life, sometimes it's other people's music. Other times it's actually writing the songs and getting out of mind and into the song.

Jack Johnson

#59. 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

#60. It was Rick's Rubin idea to have the 'Brooklyn' verse repeat. It already was a story, but having that made it a folk song. Instead of this rambling march of verses, Rick understands that music needs hooks. You need that repeated chorus, that everyone can sing along to.

Scott Avett

#61. My goal is to think of nothing when I'm writing a song because too many influences could sabotage a potentially amazing song.

Ricky Martin

#62. I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.

Brie Larson

#63. We played more rock music when we were writing the script. 'Renegade'. All of the Styx songs. All of the old '70's and '80's music, that's the stuff that's pounding in the background while we were doing this stuff. It's a part of those movies.

Todd Farmer

#64. I am the entertainer, I've come to do my show You've heard my latest record, it's been on the radio It took me years to write it, they were the best years of my life It was a beautiful song but it ran too long If you're gonna have a hit you gotta make it fit So they cut it down to 3:05.

Billy Joel

#65. I very rarely sit down with a guitar and try to write a song. I usually think about it a lot and then I'll try to re-create what was in my head at the time.

Sune Rose Wagner

#66. If I'm not writing about myself, then I sit down with people I really dig writing with and throw 'em out and see if something sticks. Their brain plus mine hopefully will make something interesting and cool and it will just snowball and we'll have a unique song by the end of it.

Kacey Musgraves

#67. Don't be afraid to write bad songs and then start over and re-evaluate. Songs are like plants, in that you grow them. Some grow really fast, and others need pruning and care ... And, finally, a song needs to move you. If it doesn't move you, it will never move anybody else.

Corey Harris

#68. There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

Maxim Gorky

#69. I write in my sleep. I don't know how, but I'll work on a song, go to sleep and it's finished when I wake up.

Miley Cyrus

#70. I was fascinated to think about a place where men could be the mothers and I thought of my own song-writing and I decided to have a relationship with their daughters.

Tori Amos

#71. I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.

Robbie Robertson

#72. I was probably about fourteen I think, and probably like every boy who's fourteen that writes a song, it was about a girl. It was about a girl who I really liked, but she didn't like me as much as I liked her. I think most guys go through that.

Billy Boyd

#73. We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.

Travie McCoy

#74. I started writing songs when I was a little kid actually. I wrote a song about Catwoman and I wrote a song about Leprechauns, as a little kid.

Bonnie McKee

#75. I don't have a problem baring my emotions in music. That's one of the reasons I'm glad to have music in my life. I'm pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

Shelby Lynne

#76. Even before I started writing songs, that was one of my goals to be a writer, and I still have that goal. I've just gotten sidetracked.

Jason Reeves

#77. Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.

Mick Jagger

#78. When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.

Jason Reeves

#79. She's blonde with all the hits. Taylor Swift. She's hot. More than that, she's beyond talented. I have to write a song with her.

Steven Tyler

#80. For all of my life, I've had this one song in my head, and I'm still trying to write it. I'm still trying to get that song out. I'm getting closer, every record I get a little bit closer to saying it the way I want to say it.

Torquil Campbell

#81. I usually write from my own experience, and that's definitely a true statement for me. I think having a song about desiring to live and wanting to get it right, which many of my songs do, often I have to clarify that I haven't figured it out yet.

Jon Foreman

#82. When I think about my career and how it all started, it really started with me getting to a point where I understood how to write songs that resonated with people.

Corey Smith

#83. I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.

Jason Mraz

#84. You don't need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.

Stevie Nicks

#85. I suppose that being moved to write a song is more applicable to me, I have to be moved, I have to have a reason to write a particular song.

Neil Diamond

#86. Your goal is to write that masterpiece. Yello's masterpiece was "Oh Yeah." Whatever I say about the song doesn't matter, because it has a huge impact on how we remember the era.

Margaret Cho

#87. A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I've never been able to find on any record, but that I've always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn't hearing yet.

Ryan Adams

#88. When I write, I don't really focus on duets or anything like that, or whether I'm going to feature this or that rapper. I just focus on just making a great song and figure out the rest later.

John Legend

#89. It's easiest to write songs when I'm either really in love or really mad at a guy. It's just always best when I'm feeling superemotional.

Avril Lavigne

#90. I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.

Marty Robbins

#91. People try to be more edgy, or write about that first explosive meeting between two people in a club, but not so much the long-term issues; I don't know how to write a song about teenage heartbreak anymore.

Joe Goddard

#92. I think one artist to another artist, the best compliment you can pay one another, because the part of you that is inspired or creates something, to write a joke or a song, that's like the God-like part of a person.

Dave Chappelle

#93. 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

#94. If you covered a broom handle with oil and shoved it up my arse, then put me on a trampoline, in a lift, I could write a better song on the walls.

Dylan Moran

#95. Nobody can tell you you're wrong for writing a song about how you feel - even if you don't really feel that way.

Norah Jones

#96. Often I have to move my body in a certain way, like exercising, to begin to get into the right rhythm for writing a song.

Patty Griffin

#97. If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

Neil Young

#98. My favorite song to write was a song called "Always" I wrote it about a girl who, at the time, I had feelings for her for a long time but she never really felt the same back. So it's one of my more personal songs and I'm very proud of it.

Riker Lynch

#99. Right now I feel so inspired, it's hard to believe. I've written about 20 songs in the last two days. I'd gone about four months without writing a thing.

Tommy Bolin

#100. I sit and I write automatically. I don't really try to write. My subconscious mind takes over and writes the songs for me. Songs come very easily for me. When I'm inspired, it takes me 20 minutes to write a song.

Brian Wilson