Quotes About Lyrics

I used to do more melodic stuff, and I used to do more actual rap - like traditional hip hop vocals. I think my method of storytelling has led me to this point, at which I want to pare down my style. I think I give the lyrics more thought, and then when I try to perform the lyrics over the track I'll try it over and over again, and eventually the lyrics will sink into the track by the way I project them.

[Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.

I'm particularly attuned to lyrics, and very often a bad set of lyrics will ruin a song for me, while my friends will be just grooving on the music. I don't mean that it has to be about anything in particular, but there has to be some art applied to it, simple or otherwise.

So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last. Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

I've stolen music before, I don't know anyone who hasn't. But if you're gonna do that, I want you to be able to have an opportunity to know the real lyrics because I really hate it when people put up wrong lyrics online.

Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.

I want to say my life inspires my lyrics, but I also try to abstract them as much as possible because I don't want to refer to my life explicitly. I'm definitely really embarrassed by my lyrics.

It's crazy to see people having tattooed my lyrics on their body, and quite frankly writing is just an outlet for my voice and getting it out there.

I'm glad that the lyrics reach people and make them understand that we're all the same, really.

People pay attention to lyrics, and the race matter was delicate.

A lot of people heard 'Murda Business' and thought it was about killing people, trying to be tough and hardcore. If you actually listen to the lyrics, it's kind of silly and playful.

Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.

I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

If you read about a tree, and there is a description, you have to grow that tree in your mind. So that's an active way of looking at media, whereas a movie or a TV will be passive, because they are showing you the tree. In the same way, when somebody sings a song for you, those words get so much in the foreground, that even if you take a minor key of music and then put like happy lyrics to it and people think it's a happy song. So, in a song, you are told what to feel, whereas, in an instrumental music, you get as much out of it as you are willing to put into it.

A lot of times when I'm writing lyrics, I just think about insecurities that I might have and turn them into a scene. Some things may be true, and some things may not.

The only thing I can think of is my favorite album at the moment by this guy called Father John Misty, and the album is called I Love You, Honeybear. It's just brilliant. It's the album I'm currently obsessed with. It is original, and the lyrics are fantastic and [it's] brilliant. So that's blowing me away.

Lyrics are coming to you all the time. I get inspiration in the middle of the night.

We had to sit in this courtroom in Reno for six weeks. It was like Disneyworld. We had no idea what a subliminal message was - it was just a combination of some weird guitar sounds, and the way I exhaled between lyrics. I had to sing 'Better by You, Better Than Me' in court, a cappella. I think that was when the judge thought, 'What am I doing here? No band goes out of its way to kill its fans'.

Even at the time, I realised this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.

Music is first, lyrics are secondary.

I had this perverse gravitation towards using a terrible cliché sandwiched in between absurd non-clichés because I thought it gave the cliché a new resonance. It kills me when my lyrics are misquoted, but as long as people are quoting them right, I don't care what anybody has to say about them.

It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave.

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important.

Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.

Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it's a tribal thing - country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

I never really liked the lyrics or the sameness of the music. It always seemed to have the same rhythm or whatever. But when it turned a little more rock, I kind of liked it. I like what Kid Rock did to country. I like all the modern, new stuff that's coming out, and it just so happens that my boyfriend is not a country player, but he was a rock musician.

I get even more nervous singing when everyone's fallen silent, but I really try to communicate the meaning of the lyrics, and there's people there listening to that, and if they're moved by it, then I'm moved as well.

I saw "Follies" again at thirty, and you know, I had this great appreciation for [Stephen] Sondheim's brilliance, his lyrics.

Now who is the king of these lewd, ludicrous, lucrative lyrics; who could inherit the title, to put the youth in hysterics; using his music as spirit

People have no discrepancy for me or my lyrics or the song.

Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

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.

Rachael Sage is a marvelous young artist- and I am a fan!! 'Haunted by You' has a beauty that shines through her lyrics and melodies-- poignant, tender and tough. These are stories from the heart that will lift you up and carry you to places you had never dreamed.

"The River" [song] is also, yes, very metaphorical. Rivers are cleansing. As long as human beings have been on the Earth we've used rivers to cleanse ourselves. And, for me, the lyrics "something in the river," I think is - well, the river is a metaphor for where I was at the time.

A good song is a nice set of chords and some good lyrics; a great song is a song that reinvents itself over time. That you can always find something interesting in the more you listen to it - it keeps revealing something to you.

I like to make people dream and think and imagine and learn and study. Nowadays, music is so literal - it's telling you, "This is how it is," and my music's the opposite. I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know.

I've never been a fan of getting someone to sing the generic, love song lyrics and sticking on top of the feature. If I'm gonna collaborate at all, it has to be in a way that makes the track a whole and not two parts.

Sometimes my lyrics are about things that are, well, not the brightest, but I have been working with this outlook for such a long time that it's not dark to me anymore. It's just something that you work through and in the end, it's a lot of happiness.

I wanted to make mini features. And there was a wonderful creative freedom; not necessarily copying the lyrics, but just trying to create emotion. Like the songs, you know? Just like how the song creates an emotion, I wanted the video to create an emotion.

A good song has to have a great melody, and the lyrics have to touch my heart. Now, if it's just a little toe-tapper, got to make me feel good somehow or another, or when I sing it I can't make you feel good.

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

I had written lyrics to a song called The Silent Extreme, which Alex later renamed Humans Being.

In writing lyrics - well, for me, anyway - it's about getting into character, you know? 'Who is writing this?' In the case of the original 'Thick As A Brick,' supposedly a precocious, very young child who's fantasizing about his future and the context of all the confusing elements to which school boys are subjected at that time.

I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process.