Quotes and Sayings about Song
"Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death."
- Berenice Abbott
(Related: Death, Life, Positive, Act, Living, Photography, Song, Word)
"Idol has pretty much taken me out of my recording and out of my choreography. I have managed to slip in some choreography jobs. And I've been writing songs for other artists."
- Paula Abdul
(Related: Artists, Jobs, Pretty, Songs, Writing)
"If my life was a song it would be 'Who Let The Dogs Out'."
- Casey Abrams
(Related: Life, Dogs, Song)
"I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good."
- Casey Abrams
(Related: Love, Listening, Right, Song, Voice)
"There's a saying, 'It's easy to write songs, but very difficult to write great songs.' I'm going through that right now."
- Bryan Adams
(Related: Now, Right, Saying, Songs)
"I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Being, Garden, Songs, Value)
"If my life was a song the title would be 'Naima'."
- Naima Adedapo
(Related: Life, Song)
"I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good."
- Hasil Adkins
(Related: People, Pretty, Songs, Trying)
"It's great to be able to get up there now and do an hour or 75 minutes of songs they're familiar with."
- Trace Adkins
(Related: Now, Songs)
"People get passionate about a song. It's been my experience if you put out radio candy, something commercial, it doesn't sell records."
- Trace Adkins
(Related: Experience, People, Song)
"I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it."
- Shmuel Y. Agnon
(Related: Father, First, Longing, Old, Song, Years)
"The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital."
- Shmuel Y. Agnon
(Related: Home, Books, Fate, Fire, Heaven, Night, Songs)
"I wouldn't have made it past the first round of American Idol auditions. It was months before our first song was recorded. The guys were like, 'Just seeng!' And I was like, 'I don't know how to seeng! Can't I just play the triangle?'"
- Malin Akerman
(Related: American, First, Months, Past, Play, Song)
"Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free."
- Anna Akhmatova
(Related: Children, Songs, Word)
"I can't be bothered anymore about giving songs titles."
- Damon Albarn
(Related: Giving, Songs, Titles)
"Thinking about what songs are coming next instead of just relaxing, breathing and playing from my heart. Sometimes it can get to be almost like the enemy."
- Rick Allen
(Related: Heart, Enemy, Songs, Thinking)
"At the end of the day, they're happy if you do the obvious songs towards the end of the set and you've got to try and make yourself happy by doing certain songs at the front end of the set."
- Rick Allen
(Related: Day, End, Obvious, Songs)
"She danced a jig, she sung a song that took my heart away."
- William Allingham
(Related: Heart, Song)
"I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs."
- Mose Allison
(Related: Ideas, Songs)
"I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old."
- Mose Allison
(Related: Old, Songs, Years)
"I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa."
- Gregg Allman
(Related: People, First, Songs)
"I got tired of playing other people's songs."
- Gregg Allman
(Related: People, Songs)
"At the Muddy Waters thing, I played the first song by myself on an acoustic guitar. I thought that was great that y'all did that tribute to Muddy Waters. I had a real good time."
- Gregg Allman
(Related: Time, Thought, First, Guitar, Song, Tribute)
"Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process."
- Marc Almond
(Related: Music, Idea, Russia, Songs)
"For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar."
- Marc Almond
(Related: Guitar, Old, Play, Song, Songs)
"That's what I like to do, I like to make songs."
- Marc Almond
(Related: Songs)
"My next record I really just want it to be a collection of great songs, classic songs in a way."
- Marc Almond
(Related: Songs, Want)
"Selfishly, I make music for me. I like to make music. I like looking for songs. I like working with interesting musicians. I like producing records. It's something I will always do."
- Herb Alpert
(Related: Music, Musicians, Songs, Will)
"I don't think radio is selling records like they used to. They'd hawk the song and hawk the artist and you'd get so excited, you'd stop your car and go into the nearest record store."
- Herb Alpert
(Related: Car, Selling, Artist, Song)
"I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said."
- Jeff Ament
(Related: Song, Talking)
"To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song."
- Henri Frederic Amiel
(Related: Art, Music, Soul, Interest, Key, Song, Teaching, Will)
"Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs."
- Tori Amos
(Related: Songs)
"If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it."
- Namie Amuro
(Related: Song)
"I think some people found the production took away from the actual songs, which I can understand."
- Emma Anderson
(Related: People, Production, Songs)
"My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself."
- Maya Angelou
(Related: Life, Dance, Song)
"I just couldn't get anyone to sing my songs, so I had to sing my own tunes."
- Paul Anka
(Related: Songs)
"I had this talent for these stupid little teenage songs."
- Paul Anka
(Related: Talent, Songs, Teenage)
"When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Songs, State, Trying, Words)
"Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Talent, People, Songs, Writing, Years)
"It's always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It's more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Fiction, Moods, Songs)
"While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song."
- David Antin
(Related: Poetry, Music, Song, Speech)
"For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting."
- David Antin
(Related: Literary, Song)
"I know what my job is: I write the songs, I sing them, I play them on the piano."
- Fiona Apple
(Related: Job, Play, Songs)
"I'm not used to not having enough time to live with the songs. Usually, if I write something, I live with it for a little while."
- Fiona Apple
(Related: Time, Songs)
"I wanted to write a happy song. I didn't know how."
- Fiona Apple
(Related: Song)
"After that I didn't listen to music as much because '70s music just wasn't... I remember all the songs, but it wasn't because I was into them, you know what I mean?"
- Tom Araya
(Related: Music, Songs)
"I had to be at least 8 or 9; I was listening to everything on the radio. You name it, I heard every song."
- Tom Araya
(Related: Listening, Name, Song)
"I would have to work on the song and figure out how they wanted the song done, because they're such high-intensity songs. We figure that out first, then I go back and listen to it and go over and rehearse stuff with it and try to get a feel for the words."
- Tom Araya
(Related: Work, First, Song, Songs, Words)
"If it were bad songs, yeah, I'd speak up, but they're not bad songs."
- Tom Araya
(Related: Songs)
"Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!"
- Tom Araya
(Related: Song)
"That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together - for me to play bass and for him to play guitar."
- Tom Araya
(Related: Guitar, Learning, Play, Songs)
"Right from day one, you know when you've written a good song."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Day, Right, Song)
"One of them would definitely be the Nelson Mandela gig, when I played the tribute song for him. He was up and dancing, and he really enjoyed it. It was a really lovely occasion."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Dancing, Song, Tribute)
"My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Mother, Songs, Writing)
"I don't want to live in an ivory tower, being the songwriter who just turns inward."
- Billie Joe Armstrong
(Related: Being, Want)
"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."
- Louis Armstrong
(Related: Music, Folk, Song)
"This is my seventh decade... and every once in a while I get a hankering to re-visit these songs again... songs with which I have had a great relationship."
- Eddy Arnold
(Related: Songs)
"United Artists wanted to do records with me. I had no idea, what a rare thing that was... to make an album. And they put a guy with me working on songs, and I got busy with films. I just kind of let it slide. Isn't that amazing?"
- John Astin
(Related: Idea, Artists, Songs, United)
"I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could."
- John James Audubon
(Related: Birds, Day, Habits, Listening, Songs)
"Kids know me from their Grease DVD, so they instantly respond. You can hear a pin drop when I do my old songs."
- Frankie Avalon
(Related: Kids, Old, Songs)
"They look for the top note to end every song. They don't know what they are singing about. There is no style."
- Frankie Avalon
(Related: End, Singing, Song, Style)
"Artists don't always know. Almost every song I ever recorded that was a hit at the majors that the promotional people picked I didn't think it would be a hit. I was wrong every time!"
- Roy Ayers
(Related: People, Artists, Song, Wrong)
"Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk."
- Roy Ayers
(Related: Beginning, End, Musicians, Song, Talk)
"You must pass your days in song. Let your whole life be a song."
- Sai Baba
(Related: Life, Song)
"Life is a song - sing it. Life is a game - play it. Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a dream - realize it. Life is a sacrifice - offer it. Life is love - enjoy it."
- Sai Baba
(Related: Life, Love, Sacrifice, Dream, Challenge, Play, Song)
"So, it ended up being what you have there, seven songs brand new and ten live songs which is a good mix."
- Sebastian Bach
(Related: Being, Songs)
"To think that when they come out with these gigantic songs, it's pretty tough to top them, you know."
- Sebastian Bach
(Related: Pretty, Songs)
"Every single band in the world has these gigantic songs that people are obsessed with."
- Sebastian Bach
(Related: People, Songs, World)
"I recorded the song live in front of an orchestra, and yes, I was very moved, I was in tears."
- Burt Bacharach
(Related: Song, Tears)
"When you play all that as a body of work there are four great songs, four mediocre songs and four bad songs. I didn't know it at the time; I was just doing my best."
- Randy Bachman
(Related: Work, Time, Body, Play, Songs)
"My songs are like cheap Neil Young copies."
- Randy Bachman
(Related: Songs)
"Those two songs condense the two albums. They also show what the audiences wanted. I was desperate to keep the band together and find something that the public would like."
- Randy Bachman
(Related: Audiences, Public, Songs)
"I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears."
- Randy Bachman
(Related: Car, Time, First, Night, Project, Songs, Tears)
"I've made three studio albums and one live one with my brother. It's melodic singer-songwriter acoustic-rock music."
- Kevin Bacon
(Related: Music, Brother)
"It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page."
- Joan Baez
(Related: Nothing, Songs, Words, Writing)
"I like duos with percussionists. I like the songs that percussionists sing."
- Derek Bailey
(Related: Songs)
"It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear."
- Richard H. Baker
(Related: Music, Hope, Hearing, Joy, May, Now, Songs, Stars, Universe)
"We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs."
- Travis Barker
(Related: Thought, Songs)
"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
(Related: Time, Songs)
"We were concerned with having good songs, not just songs that go two hundred miles per hour."
- Travis Barker
(Related: Songs)
"I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band."
- Travis Barker
(Related: Songs)
"But there's actually a lot of punk bands out there that go out of the norm, use odd time signatures, or a lot of different tempo changes in a song."
- Travis Barker
(Related: Time, Punk, Song)
"I like songs that are simple."
- Syd Barrett
(Related: Songs)
"I think it's good if a song has more than one meaning. Maybe that kind of song can reach far more people."
- Syd Barrett
(Related: People, Meaning, Song)
"I'm very soulful. I grew up singing in church. When I sing a song, I like to feel what I'm singing."
- Fantasia Barrino
(Related: Church, Singing, Song)
"I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth."
- Lynda Barry
(Related: Dumb, Favorite, Song, Voice)
"The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French."
- Cecilia Bartoli
(Related: Living, Paris, Songs)
"Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers."
- Les Baxter
(Related: Imagination, Challenge, Musicians, Popular, Song)
"I aim my arrangements at what will fit and colorfully frame the song in the best way possible."
- Les Baxter
(Related: Song, Will)
"I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: Love, Music, Thought, People, Culture, Dancing, Name, Now, Old, Songs, Summer, Years)
"At the close of the day when the hamlet is still, and mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, when naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, and naught but the nightingale's song in the grove."
- James Beattie
(Related: Day, Forgetfulness, Song)
"There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released."
- Beck
(Related: Change, Evolution, Sea, Songs)
"There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy."
- Beck
(Related: People, Name, Songs)
"We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one."
- Beck
(Related: People, Cause, Play, Song)
"I don't care about the rules. In fact, if I don't break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I'm not doing my job properly."
- Jeff Beck
(Related: Care, Fact, Job, Rules, Song)
"I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound."
- Gerry Beckley
(Related: Age, Heart, America, Song, Sound, Will, Writing)
"It's not a bad problem to have because a lot of classic acts are known for one or two songs and in their show they basically hold those songs off until the end and you sit through an hour or so of lesser known material but in our case most of the songs are well known."
- Gerry Beckley
(Related: End, Songs)
"You can cage the singer but not the song."
- Harry Belafonte
(Related: Song)
"DUST includes rarities, demos, unreleased songs and instrumentals, live recordings, and more."
- Adrian Belew
(Related: Songs)
"For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live."
- Adrian Belew
(Related: Example, Song, Sound, Talk)
"I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs."
- Adrian Belew
(Related: Age, Guitar, Play, Songs)
"The first song that I wrote was when I was with The Del Rios. I was like 14 years old but I was always putting my thoughts down on paper even before then because it was like an escape - a way of unleashing all the stuff."
- William Bell
(Related: Thoughts, First, Old, Song, Years)
"Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming... So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it."
- William Bell
(Related: Music, First, Growing up, Listening, Song)
"It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them."
- Hilaire Belloc
(Related: Songs)
"We'll only be playing four new songs live, but all the material for the next album is basically finished."
- Daisy Berkowitz
(Related: Songs)
"We're playing the same songs, the same way, that we have for years."
- Daisy Berkowitz
(Related: Songs, Years)
"What you hear about the band is always going to be more disturbing than any particular song."
- Daisy Berkowitz
(Related: Song)
"Never hate a song that's sold a half million copies."
- Irving Berlin
(Related: Hate, Song)
"Listen kid, take my advice, never hate a song that has sold half a million copies."
- Irving Berlin
(Related: Advice, Hate, Song)
"It's just a bunch of songs. I'm not trying to cure any major disease."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Cure, Disease, Songs, Trying)
"Obviously the biggest change is that it's me by myself. When you don't have another band interpreting your songs or playing them the way that they have, it's bound to sound different."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Change, Songs, Sound)
"There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Song, Writing)
"I always imagine later on these songs I could've played with a band, but it never worked out that way."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Songs)
"I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco."
- Jello Biafra
(Related: Music, Songs, Writing)
"This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs."
- Jello Biafra
(Related: Home, America, Disease, Songs)
"I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Culture, Song)
"Throughout my life I have cared as deeply about the songs of all peoples as I have about the rights of all peoples."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Life, Rights, Songs)
"In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: History, Art, Language, Painting, Play, Song, World)
"For a person as obsessed with music as I am, I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, and that usually is my own tune. I've done that all my life."
- Bjork
(Related: Life, Music, Time, Song)
"The reason I do interviews is because I'm protecting my songs."
- Bjork
(Related: Reason, Songs)
"I love being a very personal singer-songwriter, but I also like being a scientist or explorer."
- Bjork
(Related: Love, Being)
"I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song."
- Clint Black
(Related: Christmas, Old, Song, Songs, Traditions, Writing)
"Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won't bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records."
- Frank Black
(Related: Age, Will)
"We are not a Zappa cover band. We only play Frank's songs that were recorded by the Mothers of Invention and I think a lot of those songs were complex."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Invention, Mothers, Play, Songs)
"When I was 20, I didn't give a damn about song construction. I just wanted to make as much noise and play as fast and as loud as possible."
- Ritchie Blackmore
(Related: Play, Song)
"I'd hate to be a songwriter starting a career today."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Career, Hate, Today)
"When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Interest, Songs, Writing)
"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
(Related: Politics, Artist, Songs, Want)
"I got behind that pencil and nothing happened for many years, but since they put me in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, I've turned around. I took a good look at myself and said, I think it's time to get back at work."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Time, Work, Fame, Nothing, Years)
"I like this town, it's really great. They've put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It's about the kind of music I like."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Music, Fame)
"The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city."
- Ruben Blades
(Related: Life, Mother, Songs)
"What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children."
- William Blake
(Related: Men, Wisdom, Wife, Dance, Experience, Children, Man, Song)
"I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs."
- Lionel Blue
(Related: Fear, Losing, Sentimentality, Songs, Suffering, Timidity, Want, Weakness)
"It's taken a long time but eventually when I had the songs in place and demos right and I found myself a manager, that's when everything started happening quickly but I think that's always the way it is."
- James Blunt
(Related: Time, Manager, Right, Songs)
"Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child."
- Andrea Bocelli
(Related: People, Opera, Song)
"I suppose any note, no matter how sour, sounds like a song if you hold onto it long enough."
- Dewitt Bodeen
(Related: Song)
"I've written more songs for this record than I ever have in the past so I'm trying to give it a lot of special attention to be sure my ideas really get translated right."
- Suzy Bogguss
(Related: Ideas, Attention, Past, Right, Songs, Trying)
"One of the things that I think is such a constant in country music is that the song is so much a story. I believe it is supposed to be based around a story."
- Suzy Bogguss
(Related: Music, Country, Country music, Song)
"Considering the amount of information we're bombarded by, it's amazing if a song can transcend time."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Time, Information, Song)
"I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Songs, Years)
"I love songwriting. It's second to my love for singing in how I express myself."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Love, Singing)
"The whole industry evolves around a great song."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Song)
"Whoever best serves the song is going to be served by the song."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Song)
"When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Composers, Song, Songs)
"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
(Related: Business, Home, Artist, Career, Pursuit, Songs, Want)
"One song will launch you, but you don't want to be a one-song artist."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Artist, Song, Want, Will)
"We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs."
- John Bonham
(Related: Home, Months, Songs, Writing)
"What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop."
- Bono
(Related: Age, Now, Song)
"What is qualified? What have I been qualified for in my life? I haven't been qualified to be a mayor. I'm not qualified to be a songwriter. I'm not qualified to be a TV producer. I'm not qualified to be a successful businessman. And so, I don't know what qualified means."
- Sonny Bono
(Related: Life, Successful)
"People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records."
- Sonny Bono
(Related: People, Gold, Play, Songs)
"Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write."
- David Bowie
(Related: Songs, Want)
"Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in."
- David Bowie
(Related: Songs)
"However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums."
- David Bowie
(Related: Songs)
"There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Honesty, Personality, Reason, Relationships, Writing)
"I've had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: War, First, Letters, Listening, Saying, Soldiers, Songs)
"My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Theory)
"But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Love, Country, End, Now, Play, Song, Songs, Wind)
"So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Love, Time, Songs)
"I put myself into character for my songs."
- Michelle Branch
(Related: Character, Songs)
"I know for works for me - those wonderful sad love songs."
- Toni Braxton
(Related: Love, Songs)
"We gather for prayer, and reading the Bible, and singing the songs of David."
- William Brewster
(Related: Bible, Prayer, Reading, Singing, Songs)
"My son writes songs and plays. He sings like an angel."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Son, Songs)
"No matter how famous and established they were or however blessed they were with great songs or long careers, if they lived alone, they lived alone. That's not the way I wanted to live prior to the tour or after."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Careers, Famous, Songs)
"We didn't rehearse or play the songs to death before we recorded them, and that let us catch a freshness and energy level we've never really felt while making records."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Death, Energy, Play, Songs)
"A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the wheel, looking out at me."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Car, Guitar, Old, Songs, Woman)
"But when it came to jamming and writing songs like we used to, we realized Brandon was a huge spirit in the band. Who knew? It was just something we had to learn."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Songs, Spirit, Writing)
"And when I've been away from my family and friends, I have felt good hearing some of those old songs."
- Beau Bridges
(Related: Family, Friends, Hearing, Old, Songs)
"While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then."
- Garth Brooks
(Related: Music, Time, Baseball, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung."
- Phillips Brooks
(Related: Music, Soul, Heart, Angels, Burden, Care, Christmas, Earth, Old, Song)
"I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing 'em."
- Big Bill Broonzy
(Related: Folk, Songs)
"Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing."
- James Broughton
(Related: Being, Illusion, Nothing, Silence, Song)
"I'm 18 in this album. I'm not losing fans, and I'm not disrepecting women, but you reach the maturity of taking it to the next level with a girl. It was only necessary for me to have at least one song like that."
- Chris Brown
(Related: Women, Fans, Losing, Maturity, Song)
"With the song 'This Christmas' I wanted to do something that was kind of different. I mean, Donny Hathaway is an amazing artist. So I wanted to bring my flavor to the song so when people over the age of 45 or 50 hear it they'll be like 'OK, he did his thing with that record.' It's like I can appeal to everybody and not just a younger demographic."
- Chris Brown
(Related: Age, People, Artist, Christmas, Song)
"Girls are losing their virginity at 15, 16. I'm not promoting that. But my songs are talking... about me becoming a man."
- Chris Brown
(Related: Girls, Losing, Man, Songs, Talking, Virginity)
"You just went right in and just recorded songs and listened them, and if there were any mistakes, then we would correct them and just went on... one take or two take."
- Dennis Brown
(Related: Mistakes, Right, Songs)
"You always will be singing a song or humming a line or a melody."
- Dennis Brown
(Related: Singing, Song, Will)
"Certain songs by hearing the rhythm, it tells you that is either a love song or you might be heartbroken or the songs give you the vibes and you just know that certain songs are militant that you have to write."
- Dennis Brown
(Related: Love, Hearing, Song, Songs)
"I will have a song that I'm in love with for a couple of months and then I'll go to something else. That's just constantly changing. And sometimes I will go back to old one that I haven't heard for a long time."
- Ray Brown
(Related: Love, Time, Months, Old, Song, Will)
"If you are speaking about my own songs, I would think so because we were talking about that particular era and I was singing one of my songs that I recorded 50 years ago."
- Ruth Brown
(Related: Singing, Songs, Talking, Years)
"There was a time we decided that it was songs that were done especially from my background because of the things we were dealing with, but nowadays, anybody who has a need, and can find the need, they can sing the blues."
- Ruth Brown
(Related: Time, Songs)
"I think people are sick and tired of all the abuse songs, and drug addiction, we want to bring to world a big fat smile."
- Steve Brown
(Related: People, Abuse, Addiction, Smile, Songs, Want, World)
"I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies."
- Vanessa Brown
(Related: Love, Movies, Music, War, Film)
"I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Friend, Songs, Writing)
"I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Idea, Friend, Fire, Song)
"That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Business, Music, Time, Folk, Learning, Play, Song, Writing)
"I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Favorite, Song, World, Writing)
"So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Life, Love, People, Living, Play, Songs)
"The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Influence, Rules, Songs)
"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!"
- Robert Browning
(Related: First, Song)
"I have to choose songs that represent my personality."
- Peabo Bryson
(Related: Personality, Songs)
"T Bone is genius. The way they've recorded my voice and the instrumentation to these songs is really quite extraordinary."
- Betty Buckley
(Related: Genius, Songs, Voice)
"I love Mary Chapin Carpenter songs. I love her songs 'Come On, Come On' and 'I Am A Town', they're two of my favorite songs."
- Betty Buckley
(Related: Love, Favorite, Songs)
"The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Business, Music, Time)
"Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Performance, Instinct, Reading, Song, Years)
"There's something missing in the music industry today... and it's music. Songs you hear don't last, it's just product fed to you by the industry."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Music, Songs, Today)
"I want to write songs and play them for people - live."
- T-Bone Burnett
(Related: People, Play, Songs, Want)
"But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War."
- T-Bone Burnett
(Related: War, People, Country, Hatred, Nothing, Past, Songs, Today, Years)
"I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people."
- Kate Bush
(Related: People, Dancing, Lonely, Songs)
"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
(Related: Songs, Years)
"Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death."
- Geezer Butler
(Related: Death, Sabbath, Songs)
"However long the song is was how long it took us to write it."
- Geezer Butler
(Related: Song)
"We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song."
- Charlie Byrd
(Related: Play, Song)
"That jam was so much fun that by the end of the tour, we just jammed on all of the songs."
- Charlie Byrd
(Related: End, Fun, Songs)
"What is that song that Willie Nelson sang? 'Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few.' I think of that. No big deal. I've reached a stage in my life where I am content."
- Gabriel Byrne
(Related: Life, Content, Song)
"Fools are my theme, let satire be my song."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Fools, Satire, Song)
"The popular song is America's greatest ambassador."
- Sammy Cahn
(Related: America, Popular, Song)
"That's what my life is, writing songs."
- John Cale
(Related: Life, Songs, Writing)
"I cannot sing the old songs now! It is not that I deem them low, 'Tis that I can't remember how They go."
- Charles Stuart Calverley
(Related: Old, Songs)
"Some people have said that I can 'hear' a hit song, meaning that I can tell the first time a song is played for me if it has potential. I have been able to hear some of the hits that way, but I can also 'feel' one."
- Glen Campbell
(Related: Time, People, First, Meaning, Potential, Song)
"Being a songwriter, singer, and a great part of a unit is more important than being Joe Guitar Hero."
- Vivian Campbell
(Related: Being, Guitar)
"It's fun having songs about parties and gigolos, but I really wanted to use my music as a form of art. Art is supposed to spark conversation and make people think, and I wanted to do that with this song."
- Nick Cannon
(Related: Art, Music, People, Conversation, Fun, Song, Songs)
"Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper."
- Jim Capaldi
(Related: Fantasy, Song)
"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
(Related: Idea, Living, Lying, Now, Song, Wonder, Writing)
"But then you have to write a song, so at that point, I picked up the reins and started to write lyrics."
- Jim Capaldi
(Related: Song)
"If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Now, Song)
"My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Heart, Songs)
"Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Love, Nature, Now, Play, Song, Therapy, Want)
"But when you hear the complete album, it gets dark, really straight-up rock, with some really intimate moments with just me and the piano. It's not completely me because there are parts of me that aren't on that song, that are on the album."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Moments, Song)
"I had no album title, and the album is like a journey in that it's a complete body of work. It's not just a couple of catchy songs and filler, so I felt that I needed to capture the essence of the album."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Work, Body, Journey, Songs)
"I'm singing the music publisher's theme song - it ain't a commercial."
- Hoagy Carmichael
(Related: Music, Singing, Song)
"I've never... when I was having songs on the airwaves, and that sort of thing, I never felt a sense of pressure anywhere except from myself, to do things the way I wanted to do them; to feel authentic; to feel like I was presenting my true self to the world."
- Mary Chapin Carpenter
(Related: Pressure, Self, Sense, Songs, World)
"It's a marvelous feeling when someone says 'I want to do this song of yours' because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after."
- Mary Chapin Carpenter
(Related: Feeling, Song, Want)
"Dreamland is a book, but it's my song in book form. It's translated itself into a different medium."
- Mary Chapin Carpenter
(Related: Song)
"You know, that single girl life and that sense of isolation - that doesn't leave you just like that. And that's what that song is about. I remember that, and that is imprinted on me, that sense."
- Mary Chapin Carpenter
(Related: Life, Isolation, Sense, Song)
"The songs come from a vulnerable place, but expressing that part of yourself can also make you feel fearless."
- Deana Carter
(Related: Songs)
"I'm sure every song has some kind of undertone of what I was going through with Chris. It was my life."
- Deana Carter
(Related: Life, Song)
"I think the themes in my songs are very similar from the first album to the newest one. It's all about the human condition and how we are all trying to learn to live with each other and survive love and life."
- Deana Carter
(Related: Life, Love, First, Songs, Trying)
"The songs certainly have not made my fortune, but I am still grateful for the royalties when they come in."
- Sydney Carter
(Related: Fortune, Songs)
"When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!"
- Johnny Cash
(Related: Right, Song)
"I start a lot more songs than I finish, because I realize when I get into them, they're no good. I don't throw them away, I just put them away, store them, get them out of sight."
- Johnny Cash
(Related: Sight, Songs)
"This is the bunch of songs I did first, and it's just the type of thing I do. I am a Carter Family girl, so the record is book-ended with Carter Family songs."
- June Carter Cash
(Related: Family, First, Songs)
"I had all the material for a long time, but I was just too busy. Sometimes we'd sit around at home and sing some of these songs at family things, and everyone always said I should record them."
- June Carter Cash
(Related: Family, Home, Time, Songs)
"I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Songs)
"When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Dad, Songs)
"There are no rules to writing a song."
- Randy Castillo
(Related: Rules, Song, Writing)
"I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things."
- Nick Cave
(Related: Change, Pretty, Song)
"There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them."
- Eugene Chadbourne
(Related: Building, Folk, Songs)
"The thing I try to do the most is to play in terms of the song and play in terms of what I'm hearing."
- Jimmy Chamberlin
(Related: Hearing, Play, Song)
"My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between."
- Tom Chapin
(Related: People, Heroes, Old, Songs)
"Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated."
- Tom Chapin
(Related: American, Song)
"There's nothing like a good cheating song to make me want to run home to be with my wife."
- Steven Curtis Chapman
(Related: Home, Wife, Cheating, Nothing, Song, Want)
"Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Control, Nothing)
"My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Sister, First, Old, Songs, Years)
"Everyone is looking for connections between the songs. I don't usually approach a record as a concept. There's no overriding theme I'm trying to represent. It's all about the individual songs."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Songs, Trying)
"I see some recurring themes: things that feel threaded together, some symbolic references, and songs about some of the big questions, like death. There are a lot of references to weather, too!"
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Death, Questions, Songs, Weather)
"The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Life, Songs)
"My version of "Georgia" became the state song of Georgia. That was a big thing for me, man. It really touched me. Here is a state that used to lynch people like me suddenly declaring my version of a song as its state song. That is touching."
- Ray Charles
(Related: People, Man, Song, State)
"When I was singing Jamie's Cryin', people were going out of their mind because it was the first time they got to see Eddie, Michael and Alex play those songs. That was a thrill."
- Gary Cherone
(Related: Time, People, First, Mind, Play, Singing, Songs)
"I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs."
- Gary Cherone
(Related: Growing up, Listening, Mercury, Queen, Songs)
"You can tell the difference between songs that were created in a garage and songs that were created in the studio."
- Gary Cherone
(Related: Difference, Songs)
"There is nothing like singing a song that 20,000 people know and are singing back to you."
- Gary Cherone
(Related: People, Nothing, Singing, Song)
"Social topics may hit too close to home for people, but then again, if you pull a heartstring, then that's what country music is. It's not just songs about getting drunk and leaving your girl."
- Kenny Chesney
(Related: Home, Music, People, Country, Country music, May, Songs)
"First and foremost, I consider myself a songwriter."
- Kenny Chesney
(Related: First)
"They would wake me up when I was sleeping, and say sing a song for our friends. I had a sweet voice, I had a nice little tenor voice. God knows what I sang, but my whole family would admire me."
- Dominic Chianese
(Related: Family, God, Friends, Song, Voice)
"If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction."
- Alex Chilton
(Related: Conviction, Expression, Song, Spirit, Writing)
"I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well."
- Alex Chilton
(Related: Thought, People, Being, Pretty)
"The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song."
- Gene Clark
(Related: Song, Writing)
"There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is."
- Guy Clark
(Related: Rules, Songs, Writing)
"I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can."
- Guy Clark
(Related: Home, Day, Play, Reason, Songs, Writing)
"In some ways, I've always approached singing as acting, and the voice is just like a way of carrying the song."
- Petula Clark
(Related: Acting, Singing, Song, Voice)
"Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music."
- Terri Clark
(Related: Music, Artists, Songs)
"That's a song about reaching deep inside yourself where you can completely be who you are."
- Terri Clark
(Related: Deep, Song)
"After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure."
- Stanley Clarke
(Related: Music, Opportunity, Play, Song, Years)
"I started writing songs at age 15."
- Vince Clarke
(Related: Age, Songs, Writing)
"I'm a lover of songs."
- Vince Clarke
(Related: Songs)
"As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, 'I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don't know the song, but I know it was you on sax.'"
- Clarence Clemons
(Related: Compliment, Day, Song)
"I recorded a song called, I Fall to Pieces, and I was in a car wreck. Now I'm worried because I have a brand-new record, and it's called Crazy!"
- Patsy Cline
(Related: Car, Now, Song)
"I have gotten more than I asked for. All that I ever wanted was to hear my voice on record and have a song among the Top 20."
- Patsy Cline
(Related: Song, Voice)
"I think if you're a good songwriter, that's what you are first - not a star or celebrity."
- Tom Cochrane
(Related: Celebrity, First)
"As a songwriter, if you can touch people and make them feel a little less alone in the world, then you've done your job."
- Tom Cochrane
(Related: People, Job, World)
"I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Body, First, Songs, Writing, Years)
"I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Time, Thought, People, Play, Songs)
"The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week."
- Jarvis Cocker
(Related: Life, Day, Songs)
"Some of the songs I do once in a while that I kinda... my set list is basically like my hits, there is a good reason why they are there; people really like them."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: People, Reason, Songs)
"Well, over the years, I've developed a stable of songs of which I'm known for and never get tired of singing."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: Singing, Songs, Years)
"Yeah, one of the main ways is for songs that make me want to move."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: Songs, Want)
"I would like to be able to do a song with Ray Charles, before we both get too old."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: Old, Song)
"I love songs that have a rocking and grooving feeling."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: Love, Feeling, Songs)
"For me, the focus are songs, which really get the audience moving."
- Joe Cocker
(Related: Focus, Songs)
"I've written songs about things that nobody else has ever written about."
- David Allan Coe
(Related: Songs)
"There aren't reasons why you like this song or this piece of music, or don't like it. It's just, it's either right or wrong, you know?"
- Ethan Coen
(Related: Music, Right, Song, Wrong)
"It's great to hear from people who have been touched by these songs. It has been good to know that the Lord is using this in ways I am not even aware of."
- Jim Cole
(Related: People, Songs)
"I want to be as honest as I can about the things I've been through - the sorrows and joys, victories and defeats - and to use those experiences as a well to draw from. Hopefully, the songs that result from that kind of writing will be songs that mean something to others."
- Jim Cole
(Related: Result, Songs, Want, Will, Writing)
"Since I was the solo artist as well as the writer for the songs, I figured I had enough credits on it already."
- Cy Coleman
(Related: Artist, Songs, Writer)
"The big thing that everyone forgets, you're famous and on TV and everything, but I think there's something very rewarding to be able to write a song, record it, and have it turn out as you heard it in your head, or even better."
- Phil Collen
(Related: Famous, Song)
"If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Day, Now, Song, Songs, Writing)
"Music is always occurring. It is just a matter of marketing, attention, and many other factors, that determines whether people will hear these songs or not."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Music, People, Attention, Marketing, Songs, Will)
"I may like the Blizzard best, of all the songs I have written."
- Judy Collins
(Related: May, Songs)
"I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Poetry, Feelings, Heart, Deep, Songs, Writing)
"I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Songs)
"I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Dreams, Prose, Song, Songs, Will)
"In Genesis we saw ourselves as song-writers. After Peter Gabriel left I was the first to say: 'It's OK - we can just do instrumentals.'"
- Phil Collins
(Related: First, Song)
"You know, a song is like a kid. You bring it up. And sometimes something you thought was going to be fantastic, by the time it's finished, is a bit of a disappointment."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Time, Thought, Disappointment, Song)
"'Urban Renewal' was sweet because I've been - unfairly, I would say - plonked in the middle of the road because of a handful of songs. It came at a good time for me, because you do take a bit of a browbeating and, as you get older, you become better at accepting it and realizing why it happens."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Time, Road, Songs)
"I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Brother, Guitar, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music."
- Shawn Colvin
(Related: Music, Successful, Song, Trying)
"I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people."
- Shawn Colvin
(Related: People, Sensibility, Songs, Writing)
"History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird."
- Joseph Conrad
(Related: Art, History, Song, World)
"For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."
- Joseph Conrad
(Related: Love, Man, Prose, Sea, Song)
"I like Fisher Price music, nursery rhymes, and the alphabet song."
- Tre Cool
(Related: Music, Song)
"Universal was absolutely marvelous about sitting down with me and listening to my input. It wasn't something where they chose a bunch of songs that were best sellers. They did a marvelous job on the packaging. It's a beautiful tribute."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: Job, Listening, Songs, Tribute)
"My grandmother passed at 104. She sang and wrote songs until she passed."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: Songs)
"When I sang that song, I felt it was almost as if some force had moved into my body. Things like that have only happened to me singing jazz. It doesn't happen when singing pop. I get so deeply into the music, it feels like I've become someone else."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: Music, Body, Force, Jazz, Singing, Song)
"I was kind of known as a ballad singer. People would send ballads. Some of them would go over my shoulder and float off the top of my head, and I just didn't feel anything. Then I would hear a song that would absolutely shake me."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: People, Ballads, Song)
"It's a big flash of all these things and whatever you take out of that statement's one statement, one mind, one statement, one act, one show, and all the songs are one."
- Alice Cooper
(Related: Act, Mind, Songs)
"It's great when you play to an audience that knows the words to all your songs, and sings them back to you."
- Chris Cornell
(Related: Play, Songs, Words)
"We play our Irish songs a bit more loosely."
- Caroline Corr
(Related: Irish, Play, Songs)
"A lot of the songs are written on piano or guitar, so I contribute, and I have done so since the beginning. So it's been good to be involved completely musically as well."
- Caroline Corr
(Related: Beginning, Guitar, Songs)
"You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights."
- Elvis Costello
(Related: Opportunity, Fact, Reputation, Summer)
"Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock'n'roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I've done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back."
- Elvis Costello
(Related: Songs)
"You know, all my songs are relatives, brothers, sisters, cousins."
- David Coverdale
(Related: Brothers, Relatives, Sisters, Songs)
"The only one I really like is a song called Saccharine."
- David Coverdale
(Related: Song)
"Not necessarily, a lot of my songs are firmly tongue in cheek."
- David Coverdale
(Related: Songs, Tongue)
"With Whitesnake it would have been inappropriate for me to have played Deep Purple songs, although I did at the beginning because I didn't have enough Whitesnake songs."
- David Coverdale
(Related: Beginning, Deep, Songs)
"My opinion is that music is music. As long as you approach doing a remix with truth, I don't see the dance remixes being any different than an hip-hop remix- it's really a different version of the song."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Music, Truth, Dance, Being, Opinion, Song)
"The opportunity to record the song came when Phil Collins' record label, Atlantic, was doing a tribute album to him and they asked all these different artists to do renditions of his songs."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Opportunity, Artists, Song, Songs, Tribute)
"The record was only released in the UK, and then when the idea for the remixed album came about, which was an idea that I've had for the longest time, I said this would be great song to remix as well, and so we did it."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Time, Idea, Song)
"The song came out to be a gem, just came out to be a really, really interesting rendition of it."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Song)
"We've never performed the song live outside of recording it in the studio. That was a dream come true because Whitney, she's an icon and she's been one of my main mentors in this business."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Business, Dream, Mentors, Song)
"When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: First, Song)
"I've done that I was touring a couple of years ago with R. Kelly and the Lillith Fair, I would do the late night underground gigs as well because it's always around those times that there was a hot song, either on the radio or in the clubs, it would just be simultaneous."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Night, Song, Years)
"The second song is called 'Easy As Life,' which really describes the complete conflict of the whole story, her struggle of being in love with the enemy and also being in love with her people."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Love, Life, People, Being, Conflict, Enemy, Song, Struggle)
"Both songs are really, really intense when it comes to performing them, and very draining at the same time."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Time, Songs)
"I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Thought, Dance, Dream, Acting, Artist, Being, Song, Theatre)
"I have two favorite songs. My first is called 'Dance of The Robe' and it's a very powerful number where she is feeling the pressure from her people to take on the responsibility of leading them."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: People, Favorite, Feeling, First, Leading, Pressure, Responsibility, Songs)
"I think differently, I think it's about reaching everybody on every different plane and every different level, and if I could remix the song and do a dance remix, that's great. If I could do a classical version, that'll be great too. It's all just about expression."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Dance, Expression, Song)
"I think it's his perception of knowing how to make a record build, keeping the integrity of the song in the music and really adding a lot of musical elements to compliment my voice and to compliment the song."
- Deborah Cox
(Related: Music, Perception, Compliment, Integrity, Song, Voice)
"I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences."
- Ronny Cox
(Related: Funny, Time, Audiences, Now, Song)
"When we went to cover it I thought we would change it to a song of loving and longing instead of the sex machine song Kylie turned it into. I've met Kylie and told her we were covering her song and she was pleased."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Change, Sex, Thought, Longing, Machine, Song)
"Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Song, Songs)
"Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Legal, Argument, Beginning, Song)
"There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Songs, Sound)
"If you have a song that you think sounds like another song you should contact the publishing company and say I have a song here, let's cut a deal that lets everyone walk away feeling good."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Company, Feeling, Publishing, Song)
"Normally when we go in and write the songs we write, we think about doing a cover, but never a covers record. That would be, for us, a concept. We don't want to have a concept!"
- Robert Cray
(Related: Songs, Want)
"My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it."
- David Crosby
(Related: Music, Business, Father, Thought, People, Actor, Being, Folk, Singing, Songs)
"The people who run record companies now wouldn't know a song if it flew up their nose and died. They haven't a clue, and they don't care. You tell them that, and they go, Yeah? So, your point is?"
- David Crosby
(Related: People, Care, Now, Song)
"Sometimes you sing songs about the way you want to feel more than the way you actually do feel."
- Jon Crosby
(Related: Songs, Want)
"Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes."
- Jon Crosby
(Related: Being, Feeling, Fish, Pain, Song, Songs, Water)
"So I think it was a good thing It was a little surreal watching Leo scream 'I'm not going to die today!' with our music playing - that was the last thing on my mind when I wrote the song."
- Jon Crosby
(Related: Music, Mind, Song)
"You can lose people without them dying, and I have, from moving, from traveling. The emotion is real, it just doesn't actually have to do with death. I'm singing about what I know, and it's a song about longing for somebody who's disappeared in your life."
- Jon Crosby
(Related: Life, Death, People, Dying, Emotion, Longing, Singing, Song, Traveling)
"I've never really had anybody close to me die. I think the song is about a feeling that I have that, it still applies. It's a feeling of longing, once again."
- Jon Crosby
(Related: Feeling, Longing, Song)
"If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song."
- Christopher Cross
(Related: Guitar, Play, Song)
"I think MTV put a huge dent in the songwriting craft."
- Christopher Cross
"The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs - I really wanted to make a record like that."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Songs)
"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
(Related: Ability, Song)
"When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Guitar)
"A song that sounds simple is just not that easy to write. One of the objectives of this record was to try and write melodies that continue to resonate."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Objectives, Song)
"I don't set goals for myself too much, but I'm always trying to write that one great song."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Goals, Song, Trying)
"Beck said he didn't believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Open, Song, Theory)
"I have yet to write that one song that defines my career."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Career, Song)
"I have been around for a long, long time. I didn't make it 'til I was older. I went through the period when women were not getting signed, particularly if you were writing songs that were lyrically propelled."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Women, Time, Songs, Writing)
"Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home."
- Cameron Crowe
(Related: Home, Music, Challenge, Song)
"Yeah, I came in at the end of the Notorious album, played on about five tracks and then we went on a tour. Then we did another album, Big Thing, and then we started writing songs together in 1989."
- Warren Cuccurullo
(Related: End, Songs, Writing)
"When you do have songs where you're going to say something, some kind of statement about cultural or social stuff, that in general people love it. People love to be challenged in that way."
- Catie Curtis
(Related: Love, People, Songs)
"I'd stop in the middle of a gun fight and sing a song."
- Ken Curtis
(Related: Fight, Song)
"Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint."
- Tony Curtis
(Related: Opera, Song)
"People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that."
- John Cusack
(Related: People, Past, Song)
"The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation."
- Billy Ray Cyrus
(Related: God, Life, People, Inspiration, Purpose, Company, Desperation, Song, Songs)
"I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs."
- Miley Cyrus
(Related: Dad, Songs, Writing)
"I wanted to put a sheet in explaining what all the songs are about, but they didn't do it."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Songs)
"Some guys record an album with songs that are filler. I recorded this album like it was my last."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Songs)
"Every song is like a painting."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Painting, Song)
"I always wanted a guitar. I always wanted to be a cowboy singer because I also listened to Hank Williams, and he would always sing these neat romantic songs."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Guitar, Romantic, Songs)
"As a little kid I had a girlfriend, and her boyfriend used to beat me up, so then I used to sing these songs, and that's what it's all about. Country music is all about your heart and your people and things like that."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Music, People, Heart, Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Country, Country music, Songs)
"When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that."
- Jim Dale
(Related: Comedy, Singing, Songs)
"I love Sell Out, I think it's great. I love the jingles. The whole thing as an album is a wonderful piece of work. The cover. Everything about it. It's got humor, great songs, irony."
- Roger Daltrey
(Related: Love, Humor, Work, Irony, Songs)
"For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again."
- Matt Damon
(Related: Play, Songs)
"The little song and dance number at the end - that's me, my voice, howling out. It was a new experience for me. I've never sung before and I've certainly never sung on screen. I think I sung on stage when I was 13 and for some reason nobody's asked me to try it again since."
- Hugh Dancy
(Related: Experience, Dance, End, Reason, Song, Voice)
"I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything."
- Evan Dando
(Related: Books, Memory, Right, Songs)
"When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later."
- Evan Dando
(Related: First, Song, Words)
"The best songs I write in 20 minutes."
- Evan Dando
(Related: Songs)
"I think I was perceived in one fashion. A video is based on a song. I think you can get glimpses of people's presence within that. There's some people you enjoy watching more than others."
- Taylor Dane
(Related: People, Fashion, Song)
"Singing and being truthful to a song... I've developed that skill, and I know how to do that real instinctively, that's all I've been doing for the last 25 years."
- Taylor Dane
(Related: Being, Singing, Skill, Song, Years)
"My next project will be a Christian album, another one. I wrote the songs for the ones you're referring to, but I want to do some of my old gospel favorites. That's what my next album's going to be."
- Charlie Daniels
(Related: Christian, Old, Project, Songs, Want, Will)
"You put a song on the record or on tape and you stop singing it. You just don't sit around and sing it anymore unless you're performing. That's kind of sad."
- Rick Danko
(Related: Singing, Song)
"But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story."
- Glenn Danzig
(Related: Song, Words)
"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
(Related: Song, Writing)
"Sweet as sweetest Grecian honey will my song be when I sing, O Beloved, in the season of the Spring!"
- Ruben Dario
(Related: Song, Will)
"It's not just a revue where one song is done, then another. There are concepts and ideas at work."
- Hal David
(Related: Work, Ideas, Song)
"I don't know why people are so surprised by my live performances. My approach is so simple; every song I sing, every story I tell, every move I make, must move the audience to laughter, tears or inspiration. Otherwise, why should I do it?"
- John Davidson
(Related: People, Inspiration, Laughter, Song, Tears)
"I don't like people telling me what to do, or trying to MAKE me write songs."
- Dave Davies
(Related: People, Songs, Trying)
"When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey."
- Ray Davies
(Related: Beach, Fishermen, Mind, Sea, Song)
"I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio."
- Ray Davies
(Related: Time)
"I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere."
- Ray Davies
(Related: Songs)
"A song is the most intangible thing in the world."
- Jimmie Davis
(Related: Song, World)
"The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death."
- Jonathan Davis
(Related: Death, Kids, Songs, Want)
"There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories."
- Mac Davis
(Related: Chance, Memories, Old, Song)
"One of my real goals was to hear someone whistling a song I'd written."
- Mac Davis
(Related: Goals, Song)
"I had always wanted to write a song called, The Vicious Circle. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there."
- Mac Davis
(Related: Thought, Kids, Song)
"Don't Cry Daddy is a pretty sad song. He got to the end of it and it was just real quiet and Elvis says, I'm gonna cut that someday for my daddy. And, by God, he did. He lived up to his word."
- Mac Davis
(Related: God, End, Pretty, Quiet, Song, Word)
"I met the Colonel when Elvis was recording some song I'd written for one of his movies. Elvis was just having fun with the gang and all the Memphis boys and Colonel Parker was sitting over here in like a theater seat."
- Mac Davis
(Related: Movies, Boys, Fun, Song, Theater)
"I don't have many easy songs."
- Sammy Davis, Jr.
(Related: Songs)
"Our albums just tend to be collections of songs really, because we all write in the group, all four of us."
- John Deacon
(Related: Songs)
"I went along and basically learned a few of the songs they were doing at the time, which were quite a few of the songs we ended up doing on our first album."
- John Deacon
(Related: Time, First, Songs)
"I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song."
- Gavin DeGraw
(Related: Popular, Song, Writer, Writing)
"I like to write songs about what's happening, what I see around me and what I hear. Everyday life. Someone may be talking to me and I may take it from that."
- Desmond Dekker
(Related: Life, May, Songs, Talking)
"Recently, I've been working on anew album of material, which should be out in the new Millennium. I'm not sure which song will be put out as a single, but I'm still hoping to get another record in the charts."
- Desmond Dekker
(Related: Song, Will)
"I feel like my music is just an extension of my acting. I treat the songs like scenes that tell a story... it's very similar. My favorite thing is when cartoon fans show up to my live gigs! They are always the most kick-butt audience members 'cause they're not trying to act all cool like a lot of the music fans do! It's refreshing!!"
- Grey DeLisle
(Related: Music, Act, Acting, Fans, Favorite, Songs, Trying)
"Somehow, it seems that the sadder a song is, the happier I feel. The release of emotions that many would label as "negative" is actually a liberating process for me."
- Grey DeLisle
(Related: Emotions, Song)
"Once at the White House I was asked to conduct the Drum and Bugle Corp. The man just handed me the baton and I finished the song. It was great. I got to keep the baton."
- Dom DeLuise
(Related: Man, Song)
"I never set out to write songs about the world around me... it just kind of came about as a result of paying more attention to things."
- Iris DeMent
(Related: Attention, Result, Songs, World)
"We have the capacity to receive messages from the stars and the songs of the night winds."
- Ruth St. Denis
(Related: Night, Songs, Stars)
"We must begin to make what I call "conscious choices," and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs."
- John Denver
(Related: Heart, Choices, Songs)
"We played all of the songs on the first Johnny Winter AND every day before we recorded them, so that when we got in the studio, it was totally easy, as we knew exactly what we wanted to do."
- Rick Derringer
(Related: Day, First, Songs, Winter)
"For me, I go in and play a few Christian songs for an audience, and now I have people come up and not tell me I'm great, but tell me that my music is helping save their lives, helping them in the Lord, and helping them end their vices."
- Rick Derringer
(Related: Music, People, Christian, End, Now, Play, Songs, Vices)
"There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Song, Songs, Writers)
"No, I got my web site going and said I have the record out. People were just falling on the floor - they couldn't believe it - after all that time. You know, it wasn't a compilation, it was new songs."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Time, People, Songs)
"I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Fact, Guitar, Songs)
"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
(Related: Idea, Hope, Day, Light, Now, Play, Right, Song, Will, Writing)
"Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest."
- Neil Diamond
"Songs are life in 80 words or less."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Life, Songs, Words)
"Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Music, Now, Theory)
"Songwritng is what I do."
- Neil Diamond
"The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Saying, Song, Songs)
"If it can affect me, if it has meaning to me, if I feel I can do it well, I will do it and record it and thats why I recorded these songs."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Meaning, Songs, Will)
"Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Musicians, Song, Training)
"Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Favorite, Song)
"Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Life, Perspective, Song)
"When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don't do songs from outside people."
- Bruce Dickinson
(Related: People, Songs)
"Rather, I believe that it is very good, if, with the aid of his songs, we can be reminded, among other things, of the social conditions under which Schubert had to work."
- Dietrich Fischer Dieskau
(Related: Work, Songs)
"If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief."
- Dietrich Fischer Dieskau
(Related: Opportunity, Mind, Songs)
"My songs are just little letters to me."
- Ani DiFranco
(Related: Letters, Songs)
"The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding."
- Willie Dixon
(Related: Life, Inspiration, Facts, Feeling, Song, Understanding, Words)
"So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top."
- Thomas Dolby
(Related: Guitar, Song)
"But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry."
- John Drinkwater
(Related: Art, Poetry, Connection, Song, Words)
"I don't think Ed Sullivan had anything to do with Carib Song."
- Katherine Dunham
(Related: Song)
"They keep the song as street as it needs to be. It's got a good catchy hook where it can do what it needs to do on the radio, but they keep the song street where it will keep credibility in the hood."
- Jermaine Dupri
(Related: Credibility, Needs, Song, Will)
"We played a gig and we had a song that was offensive to people of the Jewish persuasion, and we led off with it, and they were offended by it, and that was that."
- Santiago Durango
(Related: People, Persuasion, Song)
"If my life were a song it would be called 'Don't Stop Believing'. Yeah."
- James Durbin
(Related: Life, Song)
"Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs."
- Adam Duritz
(Related: Truth, Successful, Career, Reason, Songs, Years)
"For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic."
- Adam Duritz
"All my songs are where I am."
- Adam Duritz
(Related: Songs)
"The film is a romance with songs and dances, aimed at a family audience."
- Sanjay Dutt
(Related: Family, Romance, Film, Songs)
"I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that."
- Bob Dylan
(Related: Song, Songs, World)
"A song is anything that can walk by itself."
- Bob Dylan
(Related: Song)
"It's a little gross to put yourself in every song. I mean, how interesting do people really think you are?"
- Jakob Dylan
(Related: People, Song)
"Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
- Steve Earle
(Related: Coffee, World)
"Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited."
- Steve Earle
(Related: English, Song, Writing)
"Prince used to call me up 3am in the morning and invite me to hear some of his new songs."
- Sheena Easton
(Related: Songs)
"Thus we have at least a national song that unites all Germans, and is the symbol of our sixty-million nation."
- Friedrich Ebert
(Related: Nation, Song, Symbol)
"I think a song that's got something to say. I'm not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don't last. But I like a song that tells a story and has some meat to it, you know, that means something."
- Billy Eckstine
(Related: Song)
"Let's have the music that will open the door to millions of people... the kind of music that will not make people think only of the song or even of the singer... not music that is confined to the merely personal."
- Nelson Eddy
(Related: Music, People, Open, Song, Will)
"I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way."
- Dave Edmunds
(Related: Compliment, Now)
"I've been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!"
- Zac Efron
(Related: Future, Theater, Want)
"There's so much talk about the drug generation and songs about drugs. That's stupid. They aren't songs about drugs; they're about life."
- Cass Elliot
(Related: Life, Drugs, Songs, Talk)
"How do I tell people who I am? Not being a writer, the only way is to sing songs that reflect my opinions."
- Cass Elliot
(Related: People, Being, Opinions, Songs, Writer)
"When we try to write a pop song, we go for standard pop arrangements, even to the point where we will go to the key change at the end, which is really cheesy."
- Joe Elliott
(Related: Change, End, Key, Song, Will)
"Even Crazy Horses is a good song, by the Osmonds. I've known many bands who have covered that. It's just a great song. I bought it in a brown, paper bag because I didn't want anyone to know I had it."
- Joe Elliott
(Related: Horses, Song, Want)
"If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something."
- Eminem
(Related: Life, Drama, Negativity, Songs, Will)
"In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter."
- Brian Eno
(Related: People, Song, Trying)
"People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words."
- Brian Eno
(Related: People, Meaning, Song, Songs, Words)
"I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper."
- Brian Eno
(Related: Song)
"The first eight songs we were using someone else's monitors and it is hard to follow the changes when you are jamming if you can't hear those who you are jamming with."
- John Entwistle
(Related: First, Songs)
"I got a couple on per album but my problem was that I wanted to sing the songs and not let Roger sing them."
- John Entwistle
(Related: Songs)
"There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you."
- Enya
(Related: First, Formula, Journey, Song, Writing)
"I know every note in every song, the whole history of it, even parts that were there and are gone."
- Enya
(Related: History, Song)
"The songs are inspired by my experiences. Sometimes they are more than my real-life and, conversely, my life is more than just my songs."
- Melissa Etheridge
(Related: Life, Songs)
"Who cares about the clouds when we're together? Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather."
- Dale Evans
(Related: Clouds, Song, Weather)
"I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically."
- Donald Fagen
(Related: Time, Songs)
"So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why."
- John Fahey
(Related: Country, Right, Songs, Writing)
"I love to sing old Motown songs to myself, or some Patti Smith Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. That gets me in the mood for singing."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Love, Holiday, Old, Singing, Songs)
"I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?"
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Peace, Love, Right, Songs)
"There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Song)
"The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs."
- Marianne Faithfull
(Related: Feelings, Songs)
"Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs."
- Marianne Faithfull
(Related: Songs)
"But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Art, Career, Painting, Songs, Writing)
"The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Quality, Feelings, Song, Songs, Words, Writing)
"I mean, there are so many of his songs that I like that I could easily do that one day."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Day, Songs)
"The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Love, Song)
"There aren't more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren't more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Time, Women, Careers, Doctors, Lady, Lawyers, Reason)
"A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Song)
"I don't care how good a song is - if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Care, Song, Will)
"I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Men, Women, Talent, Poets, Song, Writing)
"A song must move the story ahead. A song must take the place of dialogue. If a song halts the show, pushes it back, stalls it, the audience won't buy it; they'll be unhappy."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Song)
"A rhyme doesn't make a song."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Song)
"A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Work, Friends)
"Hollywood and the recording industry argue that current law permits the copying of songs and movies, and sharing them on the Internet. This enables young people to grow up learning how to steal."
- Suzanne Fields
(Related: Movies, People, Hollywood, Internet, Law, Learning, Sharing, Songs)
"But actually just yesterday we raised the key of one of my songs two steps up, so my voice is obviously responding. It's a muscle, and the more you use it, the more you use it right, the more you should get out of it. So yes, I sing."
- Harvey Fierstein
(Related: Key, Right, Songs, Voice, Yesterday)
"But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs."
- Harvey Fierstein
(Related: Idea, Play, Song, Songs, Will)
"I'm sure there's going to be some material from This Is Not Going To Be Pretty. I usually use that song to just introduce myself to the audience, although the patter in between the song is always different."
- Harvey Fierstein
(Related: Pretty, Song)
"In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things."
- Harvey Fierstein
(Related: Character, Failure, Colors, Song)
"I think a good song is a good song is a good song."
- Tim Finn
(Related: Song)
"Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom."
- Geoffrey Fisher
(Related: People, Enemies, Freedom, Limits, Press, Song, Will)
"The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer."
- Robert Fitzgerald
(Related: Guitar, Invention, Songs, Tradition)
"I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song."
- Grandmaster Flash
(Related: Press, Song, Songs)
"Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records."
- Grandmaster Flash
(Related: Music, Play, Song, Sound, Worth)
"One of my theme songs is that if you can't do it in a test tube, don't do it."
- Martin Fleischmann
(Related: Songs)
"I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want."
- Renee Fleming
(Related: Pretty, Song, Want, World)
"One of the reasons we survive as a band is that we are seen as a band of today. We don't want to be seen as a band that tours and plays old songs. We feel that we are making the best music of our careers."
- Andrew Fletcher
(Related: Music, Careers, Old, Songs, Today, Want)
"People know me for up-tempo songs because of my hits."
- Eddie Floyd
(Related: People, Songs)
"I always try to give my songs as gifts."
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: Gifts, Songs)
"I love to rock 'n roll. But my finest suit, of all the things I do, is as a songwriter."
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: Love)
"That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all."
- John Fogerty
(Related: Song)
"I'm now comfortable playing a lot of the old songs, and I've gotten out a lot of the old equipment."
- John Fogerty
(Related: Now, Old, Songs)
"I wrote that song for my wife, and it's what some guy who's sitting under a tree would be singing to the woman of his life, telling her how wonderful she is. To me, that's more lasting than something that sounds like it belongs on a movie soundtrack."
- John Fogerty
(Related: Life, Wife, Singing, Song, Woman)
"I work hard at that, but the fact that there are a lot of good songs means there are also a lot of really bad songs I've written that you never hear."
- John Fogerty
(Related: Work, Fact, Songs)
"I don't know that all the demons have been beaten, but I'm very, very proud of those songs."
- John Fogerty
(Related: Songs)
"I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs."
- Steve Forbert
(Related: Play, Songs, Trying)
"But I'm able to just keep going, and that's the challenge. It's the next song. And then just enjoying the shows and people who come out to the shows. It's pretty organic, really."
- Steve Forbert
(Related: People, Challenge, Pretty, Song)
"You can keep rummaging around until you find a song you like, but you can't predict whether it'll hit or not."
- Tennessee Ernie Ford
(Related: Song)
"I mean a song that's specifically for the girls. It's saying you know we talk about them night and day, we're constantly pondering on men and what they've done good and what they've done bad and all these things in our lives."
- Willa Ford
(Related: Men, Day, Girls, Night, Saying, Song, Talk)
"I was never encouraged to do it and I played the accordion, which I hated. I wish I had taken piano because I definitely would have written more songs of my own, but I didn't."
- Connie Francis
(Related: Songs)
"I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English."
- Connie Francis
(Related: Day, English, Songs, Word)
"If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. Because that's what soul is all about."
- Aretha Franklin
(Related: Soul, Song)
"A lot of times, I played bass on songs. Gene plays guitar on some songs."
- Ace Frehley
(Related: Guitar, Songs)
"I think the fans really wanna hear the songs the way they sound on the record."
- Ace Frehley
(Related: Fans, Songs, Sound)
"My songs grow on people - like warts."
- Glenn Frey
(Related: People, Songs)
"There is no seam between my songs and myself-they really are me. It's not like I'm performing; I'm just singing stuff that I really believe."
- David Friedman
(Related: Singing, Songs)
"I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time."
- David Friedman
(Related: Time, War, Horses, Old, Singing, Thinking)
"I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there."
- David Friedman
(Related: Projects, Song, Theater, Writing, Years)
"I've written several deeply personal songs this year, which I really love. Some of them came out of intense sadness. This has been an extremely difficult year for me."
- David Friedman
(Related: Love, Sadness, Songs)
"It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well."
- David Friedman
(Related: Cause, Crisis, Songs)
"Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there."
- David Friedman
(Related: Heart)
"As a person, I'm not that hopeful, but somehow the hopeful part of me reveals itself through my songs."
- David Friedman
(Related: Songs)
"As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself."
- David Friedman
(Related: Time, Trust, Songs, Wind)
"I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that."
- David Friedman
(Related: Time, Famous, May, Song, World)
"I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent."
- David Friedman
(Related: Music)
"I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally."
- David Friedman
(Related: People, Songs)
"I was talking to my spiritual advisor. I got a letter from somebody who said that they were about to kill themselves, but they listened to a song of mine and it saved their lives."
- David Friedman
(Related: Song, Spiritual, Talking)
"These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable."
- Kinky Friedman
(Related: People, Books, Songs, World)
"We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Music, Play, Songs)
"We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Business, Gravity, Old, Songs, Writing)
"If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Idea, Songs, Sound)
"And this whole period of time of gradually working at being a better guitar player and songwriter have gradually led me to the point where I feel I'm doing a clearer representation of the thing that I've been feeling inside me since I was four years old."
- John Frusciante
(Related: Time, Being, Feeling, Guitar, Old, Years)
"I just feel like the songs that come out are the songs that come."
- John Frusciante
(Related: Songs)
"Sinatra was pretty astute - he used the best songwriters around, he used all the resources, he covered every song from the era basically."
- Martin Fry
(Related: Pretty, Song)
"Just because people play songs with great technique doesn't mean the records are better."
- Kenny G
(Related: People, Play, Songs)
"I don't think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing."
- Jean Gabin
(Related: Singing, Song)
"I think that you get the mood of a song stronger if you get it right that way. On the other hand, you put some songs out live and they don't catch flight. They just flop. It is hard to tell until they are out there."
- Peter Gabriel
(Related: Right, Song, Songs)
"I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song."
- Peter Gabriel
(Related: Road, Song, Writing)
"With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles. The thing is, they only got there before me. If I'd been born at the same time as John Lennon, I'd have been up there."
- Noel Gallagher
(Related: Time, Song)
"In an attempt to amuse my friends and family, I would do impressions of Dean Martin, singing Everybody Loves Somebody. I secretly really enjoyed singing the song."
- Peter Gallagher
(Related: Family, Friends, Martin, Singing, Song)
"We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces."
- Richard Le Gallienne
(Related: Faces, Flowers, Road, Song, Spring, Winter)
"I was a student at Columbia College, actually, in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens, showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out."
- Art Garfunkel
(Related: Architecture, College, School, Songs)
"I would start seeing, in just the sense I was saying now, the kind of record it was going to be and what the arrangement demands, and what my vocal part should be in the record. This was all emerging as the song was emerging."
- Art Garfunkel
(Related: Now, Saying, Sense, Song)
"We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation."
- Art Garfunkel
(Related: Appreciation, Song)
"I've always written songs, even when I wasn't doing anything with my personal life in music."
- Leif Garrett
(Related: Life, Music, Songs)
"Each song is a lifetime, it begins and ends, and there's a journey taken within the songs."
- Leif Garrett
(Related: Journey, Song, Songs)
"I guess for me what is more significant than success is the nature of each of the songs and of the words."
- Peter Garrett
(Related: Nature, Success, Songs, Words)
"Those songs are about getting out; they're not about getting out of family. It wasn't about how family life was curtailing because I didn't know family life."
- Bob Geldof
(Related: Family, Life, Songs)
"A song without music is a lot like H2 without the O."
- Ira Gershwin
(Related: Music, Song)
"Best of all is it to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song."
- Konrad von Gesner
(Related: Heart, Song, Thanksgiving)
"Songs don't just come out of the air. They take time, but it's good fun, too. Maurice gave me encouragement."
- Andy Gibb
(Related: Time, Encouragement, Fun, Songs)
"Before, I was terrified on stage. I only play guitar during the acoustic songs. After a while, you can elicit certain responses from the crowd, like Elvis."
- Andy Gibb
(Related: Guitar, Play, Songs)
"I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around."
- Andy Gibb
(Related: People, Now, Right, Songs, Writing)
"When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it."
- Barry Gibb
(Related: Work, Idea, Song)
"I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs."
- Barry Gibb
(Related: Love, Music, Songs, Writing)
"I will always have my songs and I don't think I will ever dry-up."
- Barry Gibb
(Related: Songs, Will)
"I would be content if I had nothing but a tape-recorder. I could still write songs and record them."
- Barry Gibb
(Related: Content, Nothing, Songs)
"When we write, we complement each other. We wrote six songs, Barry and I, while Robin was ill during the American tour, and they were terrible until Robin came back, and then everything worked out."
- Maurice Gibb
(Related: American, Songs)
"We don't mind being ripped apart, but don't rip the songs apart. They're like our kids."
- Maurice Gibb
(Related: Being, Kids, Mind, Songs)
"It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together."
- Maurice Gibb
(Related: Song)
"Jim Morrison's very good looking, but I don't like this version of the song. The Feliciano version is better."
- Maurice Gibb
(Related: Song)
"I'm really happy that I got to work with such fresh talent. In a day when record companies are not particularly good at encouraging young, talented songwriters to come forward and get exposure, I think it's important to give tomorrow's songwriters the opportunity."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Work, Talent, Opportunity, Encouraging, Day, Tomorrow)
"The Bee Gees were always heavily influenced by black music. As a songwriter, it's never been difficult to pick up on the changing styles of music out there, and soul has always been my favourite genre."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Music, Soul)
"I try to imagine how we would live if we didn't know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around."
- Beth Gibbons
(Related: Song)
"I've just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover."
- Beth Gibbons
(Related: Soul, Heart, Song)
"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
(Related: Life, Love, Favorite, Song, Songs)
"When I wrote those two songs, I couldn't have been any closer to the bottom."
- Don Gibson
(Related: Songs)
"It's about giving the people what they want. So many people have told me that they've made love to my records so what I've delivered this time is an album about sex. Pretty much every song has that theme. Straight no chasers, it's booty music!"
- Tyrese Gibson
(Related: Love, Time, Sex, People, Giving, Pretty, Song, Want)
"So I didn't have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Thought, Collaboration, Songs)
"The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Funny, Time, People, Majority, Perceptions, Song, Want, Wrong)
"I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Journey, Songs, Writing)
"I had just lost my dad and I remembered all the songs we used to go and hear at concerts, and the records around the house and sometimes we'd play together."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Dad, Play, Songs)
"I had seventeen No. 1 songs and I didn't see anything like that kind of money."
- Mickey Gilley
(Related: Money, Songs)
"I didn't have a lot of overtly political songs. I think it was more the actions of the group that were threatening to the authorities, and also our political philosophies apart from the music."
- Greg Ginn
(Related: Music, Actions, Songs)
"I wrote the Brotherhood song for no money out of my deep feelings about humanity, and because I was flattered that whatever talents I had, had been recognized."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Money, Feelings, Brotherhood, Deep, Humanity, Song)
"A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Purpose, Composers, Mind, Word)
"When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Music, Literary, Pleasure, Sense, Writing)
"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
(Related: Career, Songs, Will, Writing, Years)
"Technically, I've been retired for some time now. All I ever do is occasionally write songs for friends, such as one, for a friend who had just turned 80. I wrote a song for him called, The First 80 Years are The Hardest."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Time, Friend, First, Friends, Now, Song, Songs, Years)
"Just this morning, out of a large memory for songs, and having been obsessed by them since childhood, suddenly, at the age of 84, I thought of a song I hadn't thought of in over 50 years. It came into my head unbidden."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Age, Thought, Childhood, Memory, Song, Songs, Years)
"I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Men, Women, Brotherhood, Passion, Song, Words)
"For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: People, Inspiration, Artists, Song, Waiting, Years)
"We are rich in the quantity of songs rather than in the quality. The singer has to go through hundreds of compositions before he finds one that really says something."
- Alma Gluck
(Related: Quality, Quantity, Songs)
"The sincerity of the art worker must permeate the song as naturally as the green leaves break through the dead branches in springtime."
- Alma Gluck
(Related: Art, Sincerity, Song)
"When the student has her voice under complete control, it is safe to take up the lyric repertoire of Mendelssohn, Old English Songs, etc. How simple and charming they are!"
- Alma Gluck
(Related: Control, English, Old, Songs, Voice)
"You get a letter from her agency embracing you into the family that says, 'It is our goal now to help you achieve your dream of being a songwriter, in John's memory.'"
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Family, Dream, Goal, Being, Help, Memory, Now)
"I liked the way they treated the first, second, and third place finishers equally. It was an amazing year. I only entered two song contests this year; I won one and placed second in the other. And I entered each of them a day or two before the deadline."
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Day, First, Song)
"He asked if I was a songwriter, and I said yeah, that I was in town because I'd won this contest. He said, okay, then he was gonna play me his hit, and started singing 'When it's time to relax, one beer stands clear... '"
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Time, Beer, Play, Relax, Singing)
"I really believe in myself. I'm the hardest worker I know, and one of the best songwriters. There's a craft to it, and it takes a long time to hone it, and I work really hard at it."
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Time, Work)
"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
(Related: Day, Song, Words)
"I'd just recorded it in Mariah Carey's studio. THey thought the song was perfect for Nina, because she's so shy, so it was nice to have that connection with Nina in the song. It was special."
- Delta Goodrem
(Related: Thought, Connection, Song)
"Well, Neighbours wanted to do a song on the show, and they asked me what songs I had. I told them I'd just written this song, called Born to Try, and I had just gone overseas and spoken to some people from Song about it."
- Delta Goodrem
(Related: People, Song, Songs)
"And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice."
- Kim Gordon
(Related: Art, Music, People, Play, Song, Thinking, Voice)
"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
(Related: Purpose, Play, Songs)
"We have been trying to play a lot of different kinds of music, and probably the next album will go back more towards the direction where you couldn't classify each song as a certain kind of music. This album you can."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: Music, Direction, Play, Song, Trying, Will)
"There's no way we could play a country song as well as a country band or a Latin song as well as a Latin band. We could never expect to do that. We just keep doing what we do, what we know how to do. We sound like ourselves."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: Country, Play, Song, Sound)
"Last tour my bass rig was breaking down every other night. That was a pain. We would get on stage and Trey would count off the song, and I'd play the first note and nothing would be there. Those guys would just roll their eyes."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: Eyes, First, Night, Nothing, Pain, Play, Song)
"I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: Songs, Want)
"I haven't written enough songs to be able to say that I have a system. I've only written a handful."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: Songs)
"A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: History)
"Actually, the funny thing is, after all these years, I've got all these new songs to learn for the show we're doing at Joe's Pub, so it's kind of fun to get down and rehearse new things, and also rethink some of the older songs, how we're going to do them."
- Lesley Gore
(Related: Funny, Songs, Years)
"I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster, and I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it."
- Lesley Gore
(Related: World)
"It creates a conflict of interest - what songs would I use for me, and what would I use for the band."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Conflict, Interest, Songs)
"Once I'd chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it's a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Question, Songs, Trying)
"People are People still gets played to death on '80s stations. It was our first big break in America. It's not exactly my favorite song."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Death, People, America, Favorite, First, Song)
"I tend to like songs that are very emotional, that strike a chord with me emotionally."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Songs)
"I always hate explaining away songs, because for me they mean something, and for other people, they'll mean something absolutely different."
- Martin Gore
(Related: People, Hate, Songs)
"I didn't write songs for a very long time."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Time, Songs)
"I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and they were one of the most important bands, for me."
- Martin Gore
(Related: Song)
"And I look forward to the time when I can become more indulgent with my songwriting. But this band is a family, and it's a process that we have to grow with together."
- Stone Gossard
(Related: Time, Family)
"I can tell jokes. I can talk to the audience. I can relax. I can change my songs whenever I want. I can change the tempos. I can change the mood, because I'm in charge."
- Robert Goulet
(Related: Change, Jokes, Relax, Songs, Talk, Want)
"When you sing a song the way I sing it, you have to use your whole body. It's almost like working out."
- Robert Goulet
(Related: Body, Song)
"In high school, I was Mr. Choir Boy. I had solos, I was helping out the tenors with their parts and our choir teacher would ask me what songs we should do."
- Lucas Grabeel
(Related: School, Songs)
"I'm a song and dance girl. I can act enough to get by. But that's the limit of my talents."
- Betty Grable
(Related: Dance, Act, Song)
"We still play Foreigner songs. I play the songs that I was involved in writing."
- Lou Gramm
(Related: Play, Songs, Writing)
"I find singing some of Foreigner's older songs are a little reckless and not exactly who I am now."
- Lou Gramm
(Related: Now, Singing, Songs)
"But to make a holiday record that involves favorite American songs and then also get to sing about Jesus birth, it just seemed like a real easy, subtle way to combine a couple of things that I love."
- Amy Grant
(Related: Love, American, Favorite, Holiday, Songs)
"The independent role of morphology in mate choice is revealed by the rare instances where the usual association between song and morphology is disrupted."
- Peter R. Grant
(Related: Choice, Song)
"Thus mating of females was strictly along the lines of paternal song."
- Peter R. Grant
(Related: Song)
"To summarize, the particular song a male sings, and the behavioral responses of females to song and morphological signals, are not genetically inherited in a fixed manner but are determined by learning early in life."
- Peter R. Grant
(Related: Life, Learning, Song)
"The divergence of songs in the new population away from those in the progenitor population would only be prevented if these processes were balanced by repeated immigration and subsequent breeding: song flow."
- Peter R. Grant
(Related: Population, Song, Songs)
"Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs."
- Peter R. Grant
(Related: Songs)
"It's unfortunate we've never been just songwriters."
- Adolph Green
"Presented with a song like Exit Music, It's impossible to know what to add without actually making it worse. How can you play along when It's already there?"
- Jonny Greenwood
(Related: Music, Play, Song)
"It's what the Pixies always said about music - they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it."
- Jonny Greenwood
(Related: Music, Motivation, Reading, Songs, Thinking, Trying, Writing)
"Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments, and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved - and while the reverence given to guitars annoys me, I shall miss it."
- Jonny Greenwood
(Related: People, Day, Doubt, End, Fate, Guitar, Mind, Now, Right, Songs, Will)
"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."
- Germaine Greer
(Related: Love, Mother, Song)
"Steve produced Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys and one more. Then he and I wrote a few songs together and became good friends. He was a talented producer."
- Jimmy Griffin
(Related: Boys, Friends, Girls, Songs)
"I produced a song for Bobby Vee called Get The Message."
- Jimmy Griffin
(Related: Song)
"Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers."
- Jimmy Griffin
(Related: Guitar)
"Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!"
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Attention, Being, Song)
"Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener."
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Life, Fantasy, Fiction, May, Songs, Sound, Writer)
"I decided it was time to pay tribute to my own songs, to give them the opportunity to mature and be adult."
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Time, Opportunity, Songs, Tribute)
"Live well. Sing out, sing loud, and sing often. And God bless the child that's got a song."
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: God, Song)
"Our songs touch people, and take them back to a time when there was no threat of terrorism, when you didn't have to lock your doors and when Mom and Dad took care of everything."
- George Grove
(Related: Dad, Mom, Time, People, Care, Songs, Terrorism)
"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
(Related: Power, Passion, Songs, Sound)
"Even though other people wrote my songs I put my stamp on them. I have a connection, but there is no truer connection than an artists and their own song."
- Justin Guarini
(Related: People, Artists, Connection, Song, Songs)
"We would turn everything into songs in those days."
- Arlo Guthrie
(Related: Songs)
"Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'"
- Buddy Guy
(Related: Music, Play, Song)
"I am going to sing lesbian love songs and support gay rights no matter what. The rest is public relations."
- Jasmine Guy
(Related: Love, Rights, Gay, Lesbian, Public, Rest, Songs, Support)
"I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally."
- Steve Hackett
(Related: Music, Language, Mind, Song)
"I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect."
- Charlie Haden
(Related: American, Composers, Respect, Songs)
"I had written lyrics to a song called The Silent Extreme, which Alex later renamed Humans Being."
- Sammy Hagar
(Related: Being, Extreme, Song)
"It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car."
- Merle Haggard
(Related: Car, Song)
"Sometimes if you get 'em too drunk they don't pay no attention to what you're doin' anyways, so you might as well just do old songs. But if you get one that's paying attention, sometimes we'll do some new material."
- Merle Haggard
(Related: Attention, Old, Songs)
"I think I'm most proud of my family right now. I'm more into that then I've ever been. It also gives a new area to draw from in creativity with my songs."
- Merle Haggard
(Related: Family, Creativity, Now, Right, Songs)
"I play keyboards and sing. I've written a couple of songs too."
- Corey Haim
(Related: Play, Songs)
"David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music."
- Eddie Van Halen
(Related: Music, Home, Idea, Successful, Feeling, Song, Songs)
"The same music is playing on the radio in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and Annapolis. Everywhere you go there's the same artists and same songs by them, over and over again. At some stations they play the same songs 50 to 60 times a week."
- John Hall
(Related: Music, Artists, Play, Songs, Washington)
"It used to be that you'd have a song recorded by a major country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Car, Artist, Country, Now, Song)
"My best album is called In Search Of A Song. That was my best shot right there. My finest hour, as they say. I could listen to the whole thing all the way through. There's nothing really crammed into it."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Nothing, Right, Song)
"The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn't been any such thing."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Compliment, Day, Song)
"The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Life, Songs)
"I have never sung a whole song on my own before and I am not the best dancer in the world, but I would rather try and fall than not not try at all."
- Geri Halliwell
(Related: Song, World)
"I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful."
- Pete Hamill
(Related: Meaning, Song, Sun)
"Each time I've gone to the studio, the songs have got better and I've got more confident."
- Natasha Hamilton
(Related: Time, Songs)
"A bell's not a bell 'til you ring it, A song's not a song 'til you sing it, Love in your heart wasn't put there to stay, Love isn't love 'til you give it away!"
- Oscar Hammerstein II
(Related: Love, Heart, Song)
"Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs."
- Peter Hammill
(Related: Being, Songs, Theory)
"Marc Almond has done a couple of covers, a few people in Europa have done them. I own all the publishing. It's never really been addressed, as I haven't had the time to go out and tout the songs."
- Peter Hammill
(Related: Time, People, Publishing, Songs)
"I continue to believe, contrary to the given wisdom, that it's more interesting to have an album - or, indeed, an individual song - which has variety rather than homogeneity."
- Peter Hammill
(Related: Wisdom, Song, Variety)
"Whenever I heard the song of a bird and the answering call of its mate, I could visualize the notes in scale, all built up within my consciousness as a natural symphony."
- William Christopher Handy
(Related: Consciousness, Song)
"Working with Yahoo! allows us to give our fans a chance to listen to our songs, check out the video, purchase our new album, win tickets to our show, and chat with us all in one place."
- Isaac Hanson
(Related: Chance, Fans, Songs)
"Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought."
- E. Y. Harburg
(Related: Music, Thought, Feeling, Song, Words)
"So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Attention, Songs, Voice)
"The music is in the lead here, and a large part of this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel a closer bond with the craft of songwriting, stronger than I ever have."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Music, Idea)
"We went for the best overall feel on each song. There are no musical overdubs at all. It's a true live record; it's one of the few true live records out there."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Song)
"As long as the songs are strong, I think you can express yourself in any style and have it be soulful and have it be your own voice."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Songs, Style, Voice)
"I really feel there's no limitation on what this band can do in the studio or on the stage. That's an empowering feeling - that we can bring a song to life."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Life, Feeling, Song)
"I like to think about stringing songs together like a string of pearls, or a string of beads, but ultimately it has to be stuff that really works with the band, and gives a spin to the older material."
- Emmylou Harris
(Related: Pearls, Songs)
"Richard Chamberlain on The Slipper and the Rose was lovely to work with. He wore the clothes so beautifully and sang his songs so well."
- Julie Harris
(Related: Work, Clothes, Songs)
"I loved Rent when I first heard it, but it grew on me and so did Tick, Tick... Boom. Some songs are more interesting than others and sometimes the ones that never stood out at first end up being the best to perform."
- Neil Patrick Harris
(Related: Being, End, First, Songs)
"Much responsibility rests upon the shoulders of the song leader; it is not infrequently within his power to make or break a meeting."
- Paul Harris
(Related: Power, Leader, Meeting, Responsibility, Song)
"I remember seeing the song in some diners on the selection gadget that plays records at the table while you were eating. We were never told if the songs ever got on any charts."
- Phil Harris
(Related: Eating, Song, Songs)
"He asked my girlfriend if we could come over and sing some of the songs that we had written, which we did. After he heard the songs, he said that he knew someone in the record business by the name of Bob Shad."
- Phil Harris
(Related: Business, Girlfriend, Name, Songs)
"The skit was very successful based on the applause. After that show, the three of us decided to get together and try and come up with some songs that we could all participate in."
- Phil Harris
(Related: Successful, Applause, Songs)
"Honestly, when I got to Hollywood I was trying to sell my songs."
- Gregory Harrison
(Related: Hollywood, Songs, Trying)
"But I always held my music up and protected it from compromise. So I just do it for my friends. I've written hundreds of songs, and I'm sure I have a few albums worth of songs."
- Gregory Harrison
(Related: Music, Compromise, Friends, Songs, Worth)
"I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs."
- Gregory Harrison
(Related: Age, Guitar, Play, Poems, Songs)
"The vocals are what immediately draw people in and sell the song."
- Jerry Harrison
(Related: People, Song)
"My other advice is to start writing songs and singing right away."
- Jerry Harrison
(Related: Advice, Right, Singing, Songs, Writing)
"I really, really like writing songs."
- Debbie Harry
(Related: Songs, Writing)
"I'm singing background on one of Blondie's songs on her new album."
- Melissa Joan Hart
(Related: Singing, Songs)
"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
(Related: Time, Music, Thought, Drugs, Mind, Songs)
"Some people come to our shows and think they're gonna spend the night just listening to love songs, and they're pretty much surprised cause we do a lot of rock and roll."
- Bobby Hatfield
(Related: Love, People, Cause, Listening, Night, Pretty, Songs)
"Some of the songs are so crazy, the words are so crazy... it's hard to believe I was so crazy."
- Juliana Hatfield
(Related: Songs, Words)
"Although I'm a huge fan of Ben Kweller, I don't think I'd cover one of his songs, simply because there's just so much of my own stuff I wanna do."
- Juliana Hatfield
(Related: Songs)
"There's a lot of people out there who have seen us once somewhere in a pub or heard our songs late night on radio. We'd done four years of it before we'd even released a single. It's put us in good stead."
- Dan Hawkins
(Related: People, Night, Songs, Years)
"I spent ninety percent of my money on wine, women and song and just wasted the other ten percent."
- Ronnie Hawkins
(Related: Money, Women, Song, Wine)
"Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that? Well, he gets it from the landlady once a month."
- John Michael Hayes
(Related: Inspiration, Man, Song)
"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
(Related: Life, People, Heart, Biography, Songs)
"I sometimes don't know what songs are about for several years after I've written them."
- Justin Hayward
(Related: Songs, Years)
"If you feel like you're getting into a rut with a song, a night off usually fixes it."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Night, Song)
"Lord, when the song wants to pick up and go a little faster towards the end, it's hard for me to resist."
- Levon Helm
(Related: End, Song)
"You can either make it come around or you can't. By the time we would be ready to record a song, we would know for sure that it was the best way we could do it."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Time, Song)
"My dad and I played music. He teaches me a song or two every time I'm home."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Dad, Home, Time, Music, Song)
"If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Heart, Performance, Energy, Play, Song, Will)
"The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Life, Song)
"There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Fun, Play, Rules, Song, Sound)
"Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Error, Play, Song)
"Forever Young, by Dylan, is one of my favorite songs."
- Levon Helm
(Related: Favorite, Songs)
"I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around."
- Jimi Hendrix
(Related: Guitar, Hate)
"Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true."
- Don Henley
(Related: Forget, Will, Wind, Word)
"I don't mind doing two or three Eagles songs and playing the drums. I'm not one of those artists who's going to sit here and deny the past."
- Don Henley
(Related: Artists, Eagles, Mind, Past, Songs)
"I could stand out front and sing Eagles songs that I sing in my set, but I think people enjoy watching me sing and play the drums. It seems to fascinate people. I don't know why."
- Don Henley
(Related: People, Eagles, Play, Songs)
"Between each album I try to gain a new insight that I didn't have before and perhaps write a song about something that I've written about before, but from a fresh viewpoint."
- Don Henley
(Related: Gain, Song)
"When we were making vinyl records we had a lot of time limitations for each record so songs were left off for a number of reasons. Now, with CDs, much more music can be included."
- Ken Hensley
(Related: Music, Time, Limitations, Now, Songs)
"The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion."
- Kristin Hersh
(Related: Love, Religion, Songs, Writing)
"The songs become the show, which is how it should be."
- Kristin Hersh
(Related: Songs)
"That's my dream job, to be able to mail songs out to people who want to hear them. Paste my face on them and not travel all over the world trying to sell them."
- Kristin Hersh
(Related: Travel, People, Dream, Job, Mail, Songs, Trying, Want, World)
"Men are allowed to write songs about people and women are allowed to write songs about women."
- Kristin Hersh
(Related: Men, Women, People, Songs)
"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
(Related: Time, Feeling, Old, Songs, Sound, Want)
"Since I was doing all of it myself, I had to decide where I wanted to go with the songs, how to proceed with the chords, if the sound was alright, and all that detail on my own."
- Utada Hikaru
(Related: Detail, Songs, Sound)
"The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody."
- Utada Hikaru
(Related: English, Song)
"I love TV. I know all the theme songs from the shows I watch. I'm not one of those who'd rather be a movie star. I prefer TV because of the rushed way of working-on a movie set, you sit around and wait and wait to do a scene because they're adjusting the lights."
- Dana Hill
(Related: Love, Songs)
"The song This Kiss was definitely my breakthrough song. After that, Breathe was my breakthrough album."
- Faith Hill
(Related: Kiss, Song)
"I'm still proud of what I've done, even if it hasn't been the biggest song on the radio or hasn't gone to number one."
- Faith Hill
(Related: Song)
"Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town."
- Faith Hill
(Related: Family, World)
"Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors."
- Ken Hill
(Related: Selling, Being, Song, Tools, Writing)
"Sometimes I will click on a random sequence of notes- not to actually use it in a song, but to see if I can find maybe a simple pattern that I can build off of."
- Ken Hill
(Related: Song, Will)
"Sometime I write a song off a central idea, instead of emotion."
- Ken Hill
(Related: Idea, Emotion, Song)
"Location is a very important aspect to songwriting."
- Ken Hill
"I have come up with very creative ideas that really didn't work with the song I was currently composing."
- Ken Hill
(Related: Work, Ideas, Song)
"This is my story, this is my song, praising my Saviour all the day long."
- Jerome Hines
(Related: Day, Song)
"An un-named song is like an un-named child, it has no identity."
- Robyn Hitchcock
(Related: Identity, Song)
"Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception."
- Robyn Hitchcock
(Related: Love, Death, Songs)
"In this world of doubt, one thing is certain for me; that I will go on writing songs up to and - I hope, through heavenly means or diabolical - beyond the day I die."
- Robyn Hitchcock
(Related: Hope, Day, Doubt, Songs, Will, World, Writing)
"Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song."
- Joel Hodgson
(Related: Friend, Song)
"One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head."
- Billie Holiday
(Related: Day, Song)
"Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck."
- Billie Holiday
(Related: Love, Work, Eating, Man, Singing, Songs)
"Then when Gladys Knight came in to do my songs that was the straw that broke the camel's back."
- Brenda Holloway
(Related: Knight, Songs)
"The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV."
- Rupert Holmes
(Related: Truth, Earth, Songs, Writing)
"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
- Lou Holtz
(Related: Song)
"There are seven songs finished and on par with any that are on Siren's."
- Peter Hook
(Related: Songs)
"I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song."
- John Lee Hooker
(Related: Idea, Song)
"I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want."
- John Lee Hooker
(Related: Music, Baseball, Play, Song, Want)
"I really enjoy the therapeutic value of writing songs."
- Shannon Hoon
(Related: Songs, Value, Writing)
"I don't think of them as teenage songs. The things that happen to you in high school are the same things that happen your entire life. You can fall in love at 60; you can get rejected at 80."
- Mark Hoppus
(Related: Love, Life, School, Songs, Teenage)
"When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country."
- Bruce Hornsby
(Related: People, Civil rights, Country, Song)
"I've always said it took me 20 years to find out how to write a song in 20 minutes."
- Bart Howard
(Related: Song, Years)
"A lot of songs you write are just for exercise - just pencil sharpeners."
- Harlan Howard
(Related: Exercise, Songs)
"I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs."
- Glenn Hughes
(Related: Art, Love, People, Songs, Will)
"We'd have to suck away at oxygen canisters between songs just so that we could keep playing."
- Michael Hutchence
(Related: Songs)
"I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that - stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders."
- Chrissie Hynde
(Related: Film, Songs)
"I don't think any of our lyrics have ever been erotic in a sexual term, because I haven't really written, touched on, that subject too often. But, uh... I mean, I suppose they could point the finger at us for violence maybe in certain songs."
- Scott Ian
(Related: Songs, Violence)
"Music and songs are written at different periods of time, at different times in your life. They reflect the feelings you have and to be honest, I quite like having positive emotions."
- Scott Ian
(Related: Music, Life, Time, Feelings, Positive, Emotions, Songs)
"To me, the musical is best when it's a musical comedy. So if you have a very, very funny show, and very good, funny songs, that's what the musical does best."
- Eric Idle
(Related: Funny, Comedy, Songs)
"It's hard enough to make a good song and a good recording of that song. But to try to tailor it to some outside force is just like - It's never been a factor in what I've done or what the band's done."
- James Iha
(Related: Force, Song)
"The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot."
- James Iha
(Related: Song)
"If you put all the songs together that I've written on band records, and put it up next to my solo record, there's definitely a different kind of feel than Billy's songs."
- James Iha
(Related: Songs)
"Happy songs are very difficult to write. How many truly great upbeat songs are there?"
- Natalie Imbruglia
(Related: Songs)
"I mean Gorilla was really our first sort of goes at songwriting."
- Neil Innes
(Related: First)
"Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes."
- Neil Innes
(Related: Song)
"So we used to look for funny songs, and learn them and play them. And we used to play them in pubs."
- Neil Innes
(Related: Funny, Play, Songs)
"In many ways, Viv and I were the only ones who were really songwriters."
- Neil Innes
"But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs."
- Neil Innes
(Related: Songs)
"But we used to go to flea markets and things, and look for old 78 records that had silly song titles."
- Neil Innes
(Related: Old, Silly, Song, Titles)
"I think I'm in a really nice position, where I'm sure I could do another show if I wanted to do one, but right now the main thing in my mind is writing songs."
- Chris Isaak
(Related: Mind, Now, Right, Songs, Writing)
"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
(Related: Fiction, Songs, Writer, Writing)
"If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Connection, First, Songs)
"My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: People, Friends)
"I could have done a hundred songs, really. It was hard to narrow them down, because I tried to pick songs for the most part that actually did have some effect on me or influenced me in the past."
- Alan Jackson
(Related: Effect, Past, Songs)
"He's written some great songs. I thought that "Blues Man" was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute."
- Alan Jackson
(Related: Thought, Song, Songs, Tribute)
"Probably some of the songs I never even really listened to the lyrics. Half of them I'd hear off the radio and was probably singing the wrong words and didn't even know it."
- Alan Jackson
(Related: Singing, Songs, Words, Wrong)
"All those songs reflect all the people that live within me."
- Janet Jackson
(Related: People, Songs)
"When I finally decided to do the show, I only had two weeks to learn the choreography and the songs in French."
- LaToya Jackson
(Related: Songs)
"If you want me to sing this Christmas song with the feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Christmas, Feeling, Meaning, Song, Want)
"I hope to bring people to God with my songs."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: God, People, Hope, Songs)
"Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?"
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Sadness, Songs)
"Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Hope, Despair, Songs)
"I close my eyes when I sing so I can feel the song better."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Eyes, Song)
"Without a song, each day would be a century."
- Mahalia Jackson
(Related: Day, Song)
"I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965."
- Wanda Jackson
(Related: Language, Song, Titles)
"I must be careful not to get trapped in the past. That's why I tend to forget my songs."
- Mick Jagger
(Related: Forget, Past, Songs)
"A lot of times songs are very much of a moment, that you just encapsulate. They come to you, you write them, you feel good that day, or bad that day."
- Mick Jagger
(Related: Day, Songs)
"Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't."
- Etta James
(Related: Feeling, Songs)
"My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that."
- Etta James
(Related: Mother, Song)
"This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish."
- Etta James
(Related: Time, Control, First, Songs, Years)
"You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them."
- Etta James
(Related: History, Music, Nothing, Songs)
"That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out."
- Etta James
(Related: Songs)
"I sing the songs that people need to hear."
- Etta James
(Related: People, Songs)
"It's not about battling the original artists when I record these songs, it's about paying tribute to them."
- Etta James
(Related: Artists, Songs, Tribute)
"It took me 29 years to finish that song. That's a typical Jardine move."
- Al Jardine
(Related: Song, Years)
"I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet."
- Al Jarreau
(Related: Jazz, Project, Saying, Songs, Years)
"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
(Related: Car, Driving, Friends, Old, Songs, Walking)
"My songs are really never titled. Sometimes I call it one thing. then I change it."
- Wyclef Jean
(Related: Change, Songs)
"I never have any problem getting enthusiastic with a good song and a good band."
- Waylon Jennings
(Related: Song)
"And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music."
- Joan Jett
(Related: Music, People, Company, Fight, Help, Key, Song)
"I think there's nothing better than seeing a three-chord straight up rock 'n' roll band in your face with sweaty music and three minute good songs."
- Joan Jett
(Related: Music, Nothing, Songs)
"In an age of incompetence, I've been able to last in this crazy business. I actually know how to play my ax and write a song. That's my job."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Age, Business, Incompetence, Job, Play, Song)
"My songs are like my kids."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Kids, Songs)
"I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Music, Women, Now, Reason, Songs, Writing)
"I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Opinion)
"I did write a letter to the archdiocese who'd banned the song, Only the Good Die Young, asking them to ban my next record."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Song)
"Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience."
- James Weldon Johnson
(Related: Experience, Heart, Emotions, May, Old, Religious, Songs)
"As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs."
- James Weldon Johnson
(Related: Old, Songs)
"I've never worried about how long the song is."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Song)
"I listen to Helmet - and I love Helmet, they're a great band - but every song sounds the same."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Love, Song)
"Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Time, Songs)
"My approach is to be part of a band that makes music, not hit songs."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Music, Songs)
"We wanted to take as much time and effort making the video as we did the song."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Time, Effort, Song)
"When we played with the Rollins Band, we'd keep songs going until we felt like ending it."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Ending, Songs)
"I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other."
- Adam Jones
(Related: Songs, Sound, Style)
"The story behind every song is individual to itself."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: Song)
"The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: First, Guitar, Paris, Pretty, Quick, Reason, Song)
"Revising a screenplay is much more frustrating than revising a song because you have to read through the entire work again while you are changing stuff. It is a lot easier to edit a song."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: Work, Song)
"I heard the Bloc Party record Japan before it came out in the UK as they are on the V2 record label. I think it has a great vibe and has great songs. I also think the Kings of Leon are right up my street."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: Kings, Party, Right, Songs)
"I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: Idea, Ritual, Road, Songs, Writing)
"In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?"
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: Work, Birds, Children, Day, Night, Song)
"I've always been crazy for the American songbook."
- Ashley Judd
(Related: American)
"And of course there's so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it's obviously useful through the season. There are so many people, songwriters, who are around."
- Ashley Judd
(Related: Music, Family, People, Christmas)
"In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Love, Argument, Nothing, Songs)
"We sing these songs for the everyday occasions of life, and they are very close to the hearts of our people."
- Kiri Te Kanawa
(Related: Life, People, Songs)
"Interestingly, songs used to be short, then they became longer, and now they're getting shorter."
- Casey Kasem
(Related: Now, Songs)
"Songs used to be short, then they became longer, and now they're getting shorter. But otherwise, music is about a beat and a message. If the beat gets to the audience, and the message touches them, you've got a hit."
- Casey Kasum
(Related: Music, Now, Songs)
"I mean, I could just go round and use session musicians for every song, but I don't find that helps when it comes to setting up a band for live. Derrick has been with me for donkey's years."
- Jay Kay
(Related: Musicians, Song, Years)
"My place in Scotland is in the middle of nowhere, so you've just got a keyboard, guitar, a little drum machine and you know if you can work stuff out like that, if you can hammer out songs that sound good just with those three things and a voice, you're on your way."
- Jay Kay
(Related: Work, Guitar, Machine, Scotland, Songs, Sound, Voice)
"And he was going to give me a song, because I'm a singer and I wanted to sing in everything."
- Sally Kellerman
(Related: Song)
"I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away."
- Nik Kershaw
(Related: Fighting, Right, Song)
"Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?"
- Francis Scott Key
(Related: Heart, Country, Song)
"It's not until I hear songs that I've done, that I realize how much of an inspiration music from the '60s and '70s has been."
- Alicia Keys
(Related: Music, Inspiration, Songs)
"A Minor is one of my all-time favorite keys to play in. It's a very moody key, and also 'A' is the first letter of my name. It just represents the songs through my eyes."
- Alicia Keys
(Related: Eyes, Favorite, First, Key, Name, Play, Songs)
"If I love a song, I make it mine."
- Chaka Khan
(Related: Love, Song)
"One of the album's songs features Mary J. Blige, but I don't want to talk too much about it yet. I think you will hear the music that's been playing in my head when it comes out."
- Chaka Khan
(Related: Music, Songs, Talk, Want, Will)
"Everyone in my family sang, and we would always sing these songs."
- Chaka Khan
(Related: Family, Songs)
"But then when he left, I realized that it was harder to write songs and feel spiritually connected to art and music as a band. When he came back I felt it again, instantaneously."
- Anthony Kiedis
(Related: Art, Music, Songs)
"I sang the songs in 'The Doors'."
- Val Kilmer
(Related: Songs)
"Yeah. I'm amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don't play well at all. I wouldn't even attempt for a second to play in public."
- Ben E. King
(Related: Guitar, Play, Public, Song)
"Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist."
- Ben E. King
(Related: Artist, Kids, Name, Song)
"It doesn't take me long to write songs."
- Ben E. King
(Related: Songs)
"I'm a songwriter first."
- Carole King
(Related: First)
"You know when I really realized like "wow" what a gift this is was when I sang at camp and a girl wrote me a letter and said the song that I sung kept her from committing suicide."
- Charles King
(Related: Song, Suicide)
"You can fill this table up with people who are racist, homophobic, Satanist worshippers, sexist and we can be arguing but if you put on a song, I guarantee that people will stop and listen and that's what I love about music, it can bring people together."
- Charles King
(Related: Love, Music, People, Song, Will)
"We influence singing but never really songwriting."
- Charles King
(Related: Influence, Singing)
"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
(Related: Song, Writing)
"The gift of song is just like... I think music is one of those true things in this world that is universal."
- Charles King
(Related: Music, Song, World)
"Even though there's these songs and whoever the hell put it in the internet, if there's any good riffs in them, we raped the songs and put in the new ones."
- Kerry King
(Related: Hell, Internet, Songs)
"I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal."
- Kerry King
(Related: Idea, Song)
"When we play "Angel of Death", it's actually a 2 and half minutes sing 'til our party starts. That song is pretty much been played traditionally in the end."
- Kerry King
(Related: End, Party, Play, Pretty, Song)
"You kind of have to become a song so to speak and we wanted to make sure that Tom did them with the best abilities he had and captured all that what the song is all about."
- Kerry King
(Related: Song)
"John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London."
- Ben Kingsley
(Related: London, Songs)
"While listening, to things like western swing, for instance, I'd work something out in my head, then play it on my National; not the same song, but one that captured the feeling of the original tune."
- Mark Knopfler
(Related: Work, Feeling, Listening, Play, Song)
"What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory."
- Mark Knopfler
(Related: Song, Theory)
"Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing."
- Mark Knopfler
(Related: Life, Laws, Song)
"After a while, though, the group just wasn't a good vehicle for the songs I'd written."
- Mark Knopfler
(Related: Songs)
"Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song."
- Zoltan Kodaly
(Related: Time, Action, Singing, Song)
"You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Experience, Heart, Intimacy, Now, Song)
"You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Life, Songs, Writing)
"The album is a definite departure. I haven't written original material before, except for one song on my first album, but Elvis and I did six songs together on this one."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Departure, First, Song, Songs)
"That's why these songs have lasted as long as they have because they're just about feelings that don't change. They are love songs, they are not specific, those kinds of feelings don't change."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Change, Love, Feelings, Songs)
"I like to interpret 'Call me a River', as if I'm saying, 'Now you're telling me you love me after all that, and I'm telling you to shove off.' That's my interpretation. But I would never 'say' that because somebody else might interpret the song in another way."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Love, Saying, Song)
"But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Imagination, Music, People, Song, Want)
"When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people."
- Wayne Kramer
(Related: People, Idea, First, Play, Songs, Writing)
"You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking."
- Wayne Kramer
(Related: Thought, Being, Play, Songs, Writing)
"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
(Related: Music, Time, Play, Songs)
"That's a big gift when people say to you that a song helped them or brought them to some place in their life where they needed to be."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Life, People, Song)
"If I had to associate myself with one song, it would probably be Let Love Rule. It's so simple and to the point. It speaks for itself."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Love, Song)
"I don't think about the styles. I write whatever comes out and I use whatever kind of instrumentation works for those songs."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Songs)
"I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Dreams, Listening, Song)
"The flattery is nice, but awards don't add up to writing quality songs."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Quality, Awards, Flattery, Songs, Writing)
"Once I got a record contract, and I took my songs which weren't quite finished, or maybe they were a good idea, maybe they weren't. I took them into the studio and developed them. They came to life and they evolved... and they're great."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Life, Idea, Songs)
"I think it's important to really press on with the song writing and just go with it. There's no code, there's no craft... it's just let yourself shine through your music. If it's meant to be loved and heard, it'll happen."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Music, Press, Song, Writing)
"If certain songs become popular enough to the point where I'll be playing them the rest of my life, I don't want them all to dwell on the same down moment that I'll have to keep reliving."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Life, Popular, Rest, Songs, Want)
"The only song I can sing is "Lady in Red" so that must tell you how great it must have been."
- Diane Kruger
(Related: Song)
"The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with."
- Talib Kweli
(Related: Music, Song)
"Hi-Tek is on three or four songs on the new record."
- Talib Kweli
(Related: Songs)
"My son - and what's a song? A thing begot within a pair of minutes, thereabout, a lump bred up in darkness."
- Thomas Kyd
(Related: Son, Darkness, Song)
"I'm 60, and I did 60-year-old women songs. I'm not trying to be the Hip-Hop Queen, although I am the original Hip Hop Queen."
- Patti LaBelle
(Related: Women, Queen, Songs, Trying)
"I can't do some of the songs that younger girls like Mary J. Blige and Beyonce are doing. They have their own place and I have my own place."
- Patti LaBelle
(Related: Girls, Songs)
"There's a lot of reflection that goes on whenever I write a song - it's been a wild whirlwind last couple of years and there's a lot to talk about, and hopefully that's evident in the music."
- Nick Lachey
(Related: Music, Reflection, Song, Talk, Years)
"I translated Beatles songs for my English class."
- Christian Lacroix
(Related: Class, English, Songs)
"The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity."
- Steve Lacy
(Related: Song, Voice)
"The Siren waits thee, singing song for song."
- Walter Savage Landor
(Related: Singing, Song)
"If my life were a song the title would be 'The Comeback Kid.'"
- Stefano Langone
(Related: Life, Song)
"It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle."
- Christine Lavin
(Related: Business, Time, Goals, Losing, Sight, Songs, Struggle, Trying, Writing)
"I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song."
- Chris LeDoux
(Related: Idea, Song, Songs, State, Want)
"They were so good that you just had to sing the song to them once and they got it. It's amazing. Sometimes it didn't come out the way you wanted, but it was good."
- Chris LeDoux
(Related: Song)
"When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song."
- Chris LeDoux
(Related: Idea, Song, State)
"I've had this song in a drawer for a long time, maybe seven or eight years. Every time I'd do an album, I'd take it out and listen to it, and always liked what it had to say. Plus when Garth came in and sang on it, that made it really special."
- Chris LeDoux
(Related: Time, Song, Years)
"He saw us play a few times in fact. I did this song called I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes, and Jimi loved it. He paid me a huge compliment when he told me that he was thinking of doing something similar himself!"
- Alvin Lee
(Related: Compliment, Fact, Play, Song, Thinking)
"They really can't imagine what my voice is like. Every time I sing a song, they are very surprised."
- Coco Lee
(Related: Time, Song, Voice)
"Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Song)
"That is what intrigues me; songwriting and song structure and expression."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Expression, Song)
"I feel safe and comfortable to do that once I know that the song structure around the bass part is very interesting and it satisfies me in a compositional sense."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Sense, Song)
"Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Soul, Being, Nothing, Song, Years)
"For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Song)
"I am moved more by melodies, song structure, and evocative textures."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Song)
"I remembered their songs but I had never owned a Beatles album."
- Sheryl Lee
(Related: Songs)
"The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world."
- Lotte Lehmann
(Related: Music, Song, World)
"I'm not claiming divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can... But I still believe in peace, love and understanding."
- John Lennon
(Related: Love, Life, Peace, Soul, Answers, Divinity, Purity, Questions, Songs, Understanding)
"Songwriting is kind of like a craft. It's not something that just comes in a dream. You've got to work at it."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Work, Dream)
"For me, songwriting is something I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Inspiration, Day)
"I like songs and film because you can turn your life into a sort of myth or dream."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Life, Dream, Film, Myth, Songs)
"I like songs that go to different places and then come back."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Songs)
"I like songs that have lots of different parts in them, an intro, an outro and a bridge."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Songs)
"We sing a little song before we eat, a little blessing before we eat, and it's really - we're thanking the Lord and the Earth for the food that we eat, and it really brings you together in a profound kind of way."
- Phil Lesh
(Related: Food, Earth, Song)
"And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation."
- Phil Lesh
(Related: Songs, Words)
"My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs."
- Philip Levine
(Related: Poetry, Mother, Ambition, Songs)
"Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio."
- Huey Lewis
(Related: Songs, Today)
"I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas."
- Abbey Lincoln
(Related: War, Brothers, Chicago, Hearing, Song, World, World war)
"We were interested in this notion of compression- a lot of the songs were really short so that you'd absorb them in memory rather than when you're actually hearing them."
- Arto Lindsay
(Related: Hearing, Memory, Songs)
"In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques."
- Art Linkletter
(Related: Teen, Light, Songs, World)
"Inspiration is enough to give expression to the tone in singing, especially when the song is without words."
- Franz Liszt
(Related: Inspiration, Expression, Singing, Song, Words)
"In Hungary all native music, in its origin, is divided naturally into melody destined for song or melody for the dance."
- Franz Liszt
(Related: Music, Dance, Song)
"I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I'd play bass on one song, we'd switch on the next song; I'd play piano... we'd play mandolin."
- Bob Livingston
(Related: Being, Play, Song)
"I don't wanta do any Blues or any sad songs."
- Bob Livingston
(Related: Songs)
"When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs."
- George Lloyd
(Related: Old, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"My overnight success was really 15 years in the making. I'd been writing songs since I was 6 and playing in bands and performing since I was 14."
- Lisa Loeb
(Related: Success, Songs, Writing, Years)
"A friend of mine once told me that I can't screw up when I play my own music. I also take voice lessons, play other peoples' songs out of music books, and occasionally figure out how to play other people's music from records. This keeps my ears, fingers, and mind working."
- Lisa Loeb
(Related: Music, People, Friend, Books, Mind, Play, Songs, Voice)
"Dweezil and I are going on tour with the band probably starting in the middle of February for a month probably playing a few songs from my new record and then I'll continue on after that tour."
- Lisa Loeb
(Related: February, Songs)
"Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, no winter in thy year."
- John A. Logan
(Related: Song, Sorrow, Winter)
"I write most of my own lyrics for my album and I am helping to produce some of the songs as well."
- Lindsay Lohan
(Related: Songs)
"The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species."
- Alan Lomax
(Related: Ballads, Satire, Song)
"I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music."
- Alan Lomax
(Related: Music, American, Folk, Saying, Songs)
"He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that."
- Alan Lomax
(Related: Father, Audiences, Country, Songs)
"My brother is an excellent songwriter, and I play guitar and drums."
- Jeremy London
(Related: Brother, Guitar, Play)
"Puffy produced four of the tracks on the album. Those are the four songs that are collaborations between Puffy and me. And he gives me my space to work even when we work together, like with my producer and my vocal coach."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: Work, Coach, Songs, Space)
"I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter, and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: Movies, Time, Progress, Want)
"I'm not going to hurt anybody other than that dick who keeps writing songs about me."
- Courtney Love
(Related: Hurt, Songs, Writing)
"Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end."
- H. P. Lovecraft
(Related: End, Journey, Song)
"I've been lucky to be able to make the records I've wanted to make. The record company has never pressured me to cut certain songs."
- Lyle Lovett
(Related: Company, Songs)
"Singing your own songs is all about individual expression."
- Lyle Lovett
(Related: Expression, Singing, Songs)
"Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music."
- Lyle Lovett
(Related: Life, Music, Difference, Song)
"I enjoyed hearing people do their own songs. I became attracted to singer-songwriters. I became interested in them as people; was curious about what they wanted to say."
- Lyle Lovett
(Related: People, Hearing, Songs)
"We'd have made more, but I kept forgetting to write songs down."
- Chris Lowe
(Related: Songs)
"I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio."
- Nick Lowe
(Related: Work, Songs)
"They tell me I produced songs. I just stood in the back, wore a good suit and said, Yeah, that's happening."
- Nick Lowe
(Related: Songs)
"You've got to really know your song, inside and out."
- Nick Lowe
(Related: Song)
"We have always wanted to write songs and be experimental in that way."
- Mike Lowry
(Related: Songs)
"We wanted to sit down and conceptually work out songs."
- Mike Lowry
(Related: Work, Songs)
"There are so many songs that we just don't play anymore."
- Mike Lowry
(Related: Play, Songs)
"I think a lot of it is that we used to tour so much that we never really had time to write songs."
- Mike Lowry
(Related: Time, Songs)
"It was awesome because we were doing Ramones songs."
- Mike Lowry
(Related: Songs)
"I made my first complete song when I was 9."
- Ludacris
(Related: First, Song)
"I'm always in that mode - whenever I have a little free time, I'm always recording songs, writing, whatever I gotta do. It's like my job is my vacation."
- Ludacris
(Related: Time, Job, Songs, Vacation, Writing)
"If my life was a song it would be, 'It ain't that easy being green' from Sesame Street."
- Jacob Lusk
(Related: Life, Being, Song)
"The type of music I like to sing is really those classic songs, those Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra, classics."
- Jacob Lusk
(Related: Music, Songs)
"When something is bothering me, I write a song that tells my feelings."
- Loretta Lynn
(Related: Feelings, Song)
"Every battalion has its marching songs."
- Patrick MacGill
(Related: Songs)
"When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself."
- Shane MacGowan
(Related: Pleasure, Song, Writing)
"Yeah, if someone's selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they're trading it I don't mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand."
- Ian MacKaye
(Related: Money, Selling, Mind, Songs)
"So I wanna see all of you making out during this song."
- Joel Madden
(Related: Song)
"I was just in the middle of singing a song about how broke we were and now my cell phone rings."
- Joel Madden
(Related: Now, Singing, Song)
"The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative."
- Stephen Malkmus
(Related: Songs)
"Well, yeah, I sang to some songs on the radio or in the shower."
- Stephen Malkmus
(Related: Songs)
"Lou Reed is something like a personal favorite of mine, but you could always put me into that drawer of singers who can't really sing, who speak their songs."
- Stephen Malkmus
(Related: Favorite, Songs)
"Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be."
- Stephen Malkmus
(Related: Idea, Vision, Song)
"I was totally involved in Bobby's World from the time we started the idea to sitting with the artists on how he would look, to the script meetings, the music, the lyrics, the songs."
- Howie Mandel
(Related: Time, Music, Idea, Artists, Meetings, Songs, World)
"I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people."
- Chuck Mangione
(Related: People, Joy, Key, Mind, Play, Song)
"I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses."
- Aimee Mann
(Related: People, Play, Songs, Want)
"I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor."
- Aimee Mann
(Related: Songs)
"I looked through our catalog year by year, and I saw that there were pockets of time when we wrote some terrific songs. Then all of a sudden, we'd go for another two or three months and there weren't great songs."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Time, Months, Songs)
"I've written songs sober and I've written songs high."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Songs)
"It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Harvest, Song)
"One other thing, if it's possible, as songwriters, you should also develop yourself as record producers."
- Barry Mann
"Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Successful, Ability)
"The real danger of writing a great song when you're on something is that it might get you thinking that the only way to repeat that is by only writing when you're high."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Danger, Song, Thinking, Writing)
"There's so much fear involved in trying to do something you don't know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Life, Fear, Alcohol, Drugs, Personality, Trying)
"We became the songs we wrote."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Songs)
"We lived, ate, and breathed pop songs."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Songs)
"We've written something like 900 songs in all."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Songs)
"If I waited for inspiration every time I sat down to write a song I probably would be a plumber today."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Time, Inspiration, Song, Today)
"One of my side strange abilities is to hear a good song, no matter how it's being performed. Even if you get a bad performance, I can still hear that there's a good song."
- Manfred Mann
(Related: Performance, Being, Song)
"We wanted to write a whole song about partying and then taking Yellow Cabs home. That's the weirdest topic we've ever thought of centering a song around."
- Taryn Manning
(Related: Home, Thought, Song)
"The Wreckoning is a darker song. But the record is positive."
- Taryn Manning
(Related: Positive, Song)
"It's actually harder to write a fun song."
- Taryn Manning
(Related: Fun, Song)
"I just think it's a blessing that I was able to have the gift of words and to be able to put them into music. I was given a great gift all the way around. I didn't ever have to really go out and look for songs, you know."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Music, Songs, Words)
"I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Artist, Machine, Needs, Song)
"I write in all keys. I've always written in all keys. I've probably written a lot of songs in A."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Songs)
"There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him."
- Teena Marie
(Related: Music, Friends, Guitar, Songs, Sound)
"People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people."
- Bob Marley
(Related: Leader, People, Songs, Want, Word, Words)
"In my songs, the sex is all subliminal. It's subliminal, spiritual."
- Ziggy Marley
(Related: Sex, Songs, Spiritual)
"If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: Love, People, Musicians, Now, Popular, Songs)
"There's not one Tin Pan Alley song on my record."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: Song)
"You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: Work, Sense, Songs)
"We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: Play, Songs)
"There's a certain kind of motion and pacing that our music has, and this just doesn't have that. We just kind of rushed to the conclusion of most of the songs. I just would've preferred to done them over."
- Branford Marsalis
(Related: Music, Songs)
"I keep a lighter in my back pocket all the time. I'm not a smoker, I just really like certain songs."
- Demetri Martin
(Related: Time, Songs)
"I love when people get songs wrong. I love when people take something from a song that's totally not what I intended!"
- Richard Marx
(Related: Love, People, Song, Songs, Wrong)
"But I'm just having fun playing and giving Botox injections to the older songs."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Fun, Giving, Songs)
"I don't think I've ever laid out a batch of songs that pick myself apart the way that these do."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Songs)
"I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Love, Songs, Want)
"I can't wait to front my band with these new songs and play for fans, but I've decided to keep my day job too."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Day, Fans, Job, Play, Songs)
"People take songs so literally."
- Richard Marx
(Related: People, Songs)
"It's funny; Luther and I have written many songs together, but we've never written songs in the same room."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Funny, Songs)
"So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Enemy, Result, Songs, Writing, Years)
"I've never written a song that I thought was a hit."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Thought, Song)
"As a songwriter, there's nothing better than winning Song Of The Year. But I couldn't really celebrate, because it wasn't right. Luther wasn't standing next to me, to receive the award."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Winning, Nothing, Right, Song)
"The only thing that's a little tricky about it is sometimes people assume that if it's a new song, it's a reflection of what you're feeling or going through now."
- Richard Marx
(Related: People, Feeling, Now, Reflection, Song)
"My songs always speak of love, that's the way I like them."
- Mireille Mathieu
(Related: Love, Songs)
"I also met, early on Ella Fitzgerald. Her songbooks are some of the most amazing bodies of work."
- Johnny Mathis
(Related: Work)
"I've come to understand my role. On some level, I provide the context for them to shine. I also know my role is the steward of the songs, and the center point, the artist that the stuff all revolves around. But I really try to honor that."
- Kathy Mattea
(Related: Artist, Honor, Songs)
"You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on."
- John Mayall
(Related: Time, Challenge, Right, Songs)
"I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine."
- John Mayall
(Related: Songs)
"I write songs about real things... The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really."
- John Mayall
(Related: Songs)
"I really just tried to make a record full of great songs, which is the goal I always have."
- Martina McBride
(Related: Goal, Songs)
"I am happy that women can relate to my songs, and hopefully men can too."
- Martina McBride
(Related: Men, Women, Songs)
"I knew the words to 25 rock songs, so I got in the group. Long Tall Sally and Tutti-Frutti, that got me in. That was my audition."
- Paul McCartney
(Related: Songs, Words)
"I used to think that all my Wings stuff was second-rate stuff, but I began to meet younger kids, not kids from my Beatle generation, who would say, We really love this song."
- Paul McCartney
(Related: Love, Kids, Song)
"I had this song called Helter Skelter, which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise."
- Paul McCartney
(Related: Song)
"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
(Related: Music, Home, First, Songs)
"Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through."
- Susannah McCorkle
(Related: God, Despair, Feeling, Songs)
"If I love a song I hope to find a way to get other people to love it too."
- Susannah McCorkle
(Related: Love, People, Hope, Song)
"I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now like the old Irish minstrel, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung."
- John McCormack
(Related: Success, Dream, Career, Irish, Night, Now, Old, Songs)
"If my life were a song it would probably be titled 'Roller Coaster', up and down all the time."
- Scotty McCreery
(Related: Life, Time, Song)
"There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
- Carson McCullers
(Related: Existence, Nothing, Old, Song)
"If my life were a song, what would it be? 'A Never Ending Road of Musical Good Times'."
- Paul McDonald
(Related: Life, Ending, Road, Song)
"My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me."
- Paul McDonald
(Related: Music, Favorite, Songs)
"I've got CDs in my car, listening all the time for that next song, because everybody's looking."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Time, Car, Listening, Song)
"You know, I get a lot of people pitching songs to me."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: People, Songs)
"To me, there's two types of songs, good and bad. And I just like to stick with the good ones."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Songs)
"For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Darkness, Healing, Hurt, Light, Open, Singing, Songs)
"I was singing a lot of waltzes. And I was with Jerry Kennedy, my producer, and he was playing me some songs, and he said, hey, I want to play you this song that I'm going to get Jackie Ward to record."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Play, Singing, Song, Songs, Want)
"But I like to listen to demos. I like to hear the finished product. It's like listening to a song - I mean, a story. If you're going to sit here and tell me a story, I just like to listen. I don't want to make them up."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Listening, Song, Want)
"It's not that I don't love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible."
- Bobby McFerrin
(Related: Love, College, Song, Songs, Want)
"I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece."
- Bobby McFerrin
(Related: Jazz, May, Quiet, Song)
"I prepared five songs, I sang them, and he hired me. I started working about a month later at the piano bar."
- Bobby McFerrin
(Related: Songs)
"Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them."
- Brownie McGhee
(Related: Folk, Guitar, Songs)
"Of course, we wrote the songs accordingly and performed and recorded them that way. At that time, we really thought it was right, but you know, seen in retrospect, it made the album sound forced, and not really great."
- Mark McGrath
(Related: Time, Thought, Right, Songs, Sound)
"But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there."
- Roger McGuinn
(Related: Imagination, People, Folk, Old, Songs)
"Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them."
- Roger McGuinn
(Related: Song)
"I play a couple basic folks songs and break them down. I did that on a six string. I can't recall all the songs on it. There's some finger picking on it."
- Roger McGuinn
(Related: Play, Songs)
"There's only one drummer. We all travel to his beat. Well, I couldn't sing his song. Because for me, it wasn't a truthful statement. Well, Linda sang it, and it was a monster for her."
- Barry McGuire
(Related: Travel, Song)
"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
(Related: Songs, Words)
"I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions."
- Barry McGuire
"To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it."
- Barry McGuire
(Related: Actor)
"It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs."
- Barry McGuire
(Related: Folk, Fun, Guitar, Play, Rest, Songs)
"The process depends on the situation, and I don't think there are any two songs that have gone exactly the same way... well, actually, that's not true."
- Michael McKean
(Related: Songs)
"Sometimes we drop in and do an acoustic set somewhere, and that's really fun to take all these insanely loud songs, and to do them quiet. It's really a sight to see... or to hear!"
- Michael McKean
(Related: Fun, Quiet, Sight, Songs)
"Whenever I fill out the job description I put 'songwriter,' never 'singer' or 'artist.' Singers come and go."
- Brian McKnight
(Related: Job)
"Stevie didn't use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don't use my work to further the tools."
- Brian McKnight
(Related: Technology, Work, Song, Tools)
"You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and it would sell."
- Brian McKnight
(Related: People, Children, First, Hurt, Songs, Ugly, Want)
"I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it's about feeling more than being perfect."
- Brian McKnight
(Related: Being, Feeling, Mistakes, Singing, Songs, Sound, Will)
"They are very personal, emotional songs - people react to them very strongly."
- Sarah McLachlan
(Related: People, Songs)
"'Time after Time' is one of the best pop songs ever written, in my opinion. It's an incredible, beautiful, timeless song."
- Sarah McLachlan
(Related: Time, Opinion, Song, Songs)
"I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from."
- Sarah McLachlan
(Related: Sadness, Songs)
"American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has."
- Don McLean
(Related: American, Loss, Song)
"In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful."
- Don McLean
(Related: Sense, Song)
"Nowadays it seems to me nobody takes trouble about anything, especially writing songs."
- Marian McPartland
(Related: Songs, Trouble, Writing)
"Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes."
- Christine McVie
(Related: Songs)
"My songs are self-explanatory... somebody pointed out to me that... my songs pretty much speak for themselves."
- Christine McVie
(Related: Pretty, Self, Songs)
"There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs."
- Christine McVie
(Related: Books, Song, Songs)
"I find it hard to get excited by just a sound. I have to have a song there, then I'll find what used I can make of that sound within the song."
- Christine McVie
(Related: Song, Sound)
"For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song."
- Christine McVie
(Related: Importance, Song, Words)
"Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance."
- Margaret Mead
(Related: Love, Dance, Energy, Fossil fuel, Prayer, Song)
"If my life were a song it'd be called 'Here I Am' because here I am - I mean, I'm Thia and I'm here to me me, I'm here to express myself musically which I find is the best way to express myself."
- Thia Megia
(Related: Life, Song)
"The type of music that I love to sing would have to be more bluesy and jazzy and more soul-like 'cause I love to belt when it comes to singing, so I guess bigger songs are what I lean more towards."
- Thia Megia
(Related: Love, Music, Soul, Singing, Songs)
"This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Opera, Songs)
"It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: News, Responsibility)
"In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Song, Today)
"A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Song, Songs)
"Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: First, Songs)
"I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Sensibility, Songs, Worry)
"I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Age, People, Songs, Want)
"I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?"
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Authority, Song)
"I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: Songs, Voice, Years)
"I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs."
- Freddie Mercury
(Related: Music, Press, Songs)
"I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me."
- Ethel Merman
(Related: First, Songs)
"I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none."
- Olivier Messiaen
(Related: Cities, Colors, Jazz, Military, Songs)