Quotes About Lyrics

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

Usually I will hear a sample, think of a theme and then it will take me a couple of days to write down some lyrics. Then I will decide that I hate those lyrics and rewrite. Then I will change all the music around. Then I will rewrite all the lyrics again. I am a bit of a perfectionist although you would never know it because all my songs are like chopped up and @#$%& up, but you see that's on purpose.

I was quite surprised when I started looking at the lyrics for 'Punk Prayer'. Given its brutal style, I did not expect the lyrics to be so well written and thought through. But the more I understood of it, the more I realised that this was not only a protest, it was brilliant art as well. So I decided I would try to strip away the layers that made me sceptical in the first place, and focus on the desperate beauty Pussy Riot have conceived in this song.

The one good thing about a movie and music and stuff like that: Sometimes it's a counterpoint between the movie and the music itself, the difference and the tension they build together. I think that could be something that helped with me, because when I write songs now, I write lyrics a bit like that. I try to make the music be an interesting twist on the lyrics and help tell the story in a - I don't tell crazy stories, you know? So a lot of times, the twist is in the subtleties. The twist is in the way the story's told.

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

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.

The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative.

And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.

It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff.

I make up new lyrics to well-known lullabies. Mostly because I don't actually know a lot of the lyrics.

You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to the lyrics; I wanted to squirm.

Basically, no one else gives me any opinions on lyrics. I don't ask for them. If they did, I would listen.

I used to play guitar for myself and write lyrics and listen to different styles of music.

As the book writer for one big smash and one big smelly flop, I always wondered if anyone knows just what goes into making a great musical. When a show is a hit, the critics trip over themselves not knowing who to laud and applaud the loudest. It's that marvelous score, those urbane lyrics, that irreplaceable star. But only when a show is a flop, does anyone notice the book writer. And then it's always our fault.

To me, the lyrics mean more then the music, and that's the way it should always be.

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews?" "Basically everything, except technical proficiency," Walter said. "Right." "But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

I always start with the lyrics, because starting with the music means the words will be bad.

If the lyrics have meaning to it and it gives me a certain emotion, I think that's the most beautiful part about music - you can feel it and connect to it.

Sometimes I start just on the piano with a melody or musical idea that kind of leads me to certain lyrics.

I have seen quite a few folk whom I know to be both fair minded and, as it happens,[Bob] Dylan fans, take up cudgels for this position. To them, it's not necessarily that Dylan doesn't merit the highest honour. It's that he doesn't merit this specific highest honour [Nobel prize], in the way a champion pole vaulter shouldn't be given a medal for the long jump. It is in this group that the Wahey!s are mainly to be found, firing off jests, or mock solemnly reciting Dylan's sillier lyrics as if these are entirely representative of his oeuvre.

What I look for in a voice is for it to be unique. I don't really care if a singer sings well. Really, it's about emotion, or being able to sing the lyrics and actually mean it. A lot of singers sing good notes but forget about what words they use.

When I'm playing music I'm usually not thinking of surfing, just because I'm usually thinking about the chords and the lyrics, and sometimes that messes me up 'cause you'll start thinking, "Wait, how am I doing this?" But when I'm surfing, I'm usually thinking about music - whether it's an idea for a new song, or just singing a song in my head.

When I write lyrics, it's only when I'm angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it's never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff...Basically what people want to hear is: I love you, you love me, the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees, the wind is blowing, it got cold, you went away, my heart broke, you came back, and my heart was okay...Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear. Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass...If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?

Most of all I like to sing my heart out to lyrics that really speak to people.

I'd much rather talk about guitar playing. I hate it when people ask me about my lyrics. I always feel like telling them to just go and read them.

I've gotten to a point where I don't want lyrics to mean anything.

I used to sit on the roof of the apartment where Jim Morrison used to write his early lyrics

In both pop and disco, the meaning of the lyrics is not too important. I have nothing I feel I particularly want to say.

The lyrics to the single 'Survivor' are Destiny's Child's story, because we've been through a lot, ... We went through our drama with the members ... Any complications we've had in our 10-year period of time have made us closer and tighter and better.

I get a lot of shit because I put "I" in the lyrics all the time. The "I" is always for someone else... When I say "I," it's so that when that person is singing along with the song, it empowers them.

I can be stupid in my lyrics or say whatever I want without having to worry about anybody else's feeling or anybody being embarrassed by it or anything like that.

If you actually dissect the lyrics in 'Motley Crue', you'll notice that there's a lot going on beneath the surface.

When I was working on the lyrics, I thought of all the lullabies we learn as children: "Away in the Manger," William Blake's lullabies. I realized that the key to lullabies is simplicity.

The lyrics were my sarcastic way of realizing you can't be the king of the hill all the time.

But I don't like working on lyrics publicly in the studio - I prefer to take them away and work on them in my bedroom.

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.

I have way too many songs that have music but don't have lyrics.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what's really happening to me, even if it's a tough pill to swallow for people around me.... I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I basically try not to waste any lines in any of my songs, and I think the witty phrases and funny lyrics I have bring a smarter sound to college hip-hop.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.

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.

All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

Music critics think of lyrics first and don't consider melody but so many songs are lyrically depressing but musically great, and that's why they become classics.

We've played it [Milquetoast] a million times. When you play a song that much you sort of become disconnected with the lyrics. It's just another song essentially about people's opinions and being told how to live your life even though they may have less life experience than you have.

I listen to some of the lyrics I used to write and I say, "Where was my head at when I wrote that?"