Quotes About Lyrics

I set myself a rule before I actually write a tune to the lyrics, and the rule is that I've got to take the lyrics on to a level of understanding before I can actually write music to them. What I'm doing is interpretation. If I don't write the lyrics, therefore I must interpret them to the best of my ability. So my rule is that I must understand it, but I don't necessarily have to accept.

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.

The challenges change depending on the song. There are some songs where the lyrics are really a challenge and then there are other songs where the lyrics are there and the music is a challenge. And then you've got rock songs where the challenge is the tightness of the arrangement with the band. The music and the lyrics are there, but it's a challenge to get the arrangement correct. So I wouldn't be able to point to one thing. What the challenge is changes all of the time.

I generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

It turned out so well because it was the first album that I could identify with in terms of lyrics. ("Captain Fantastic") It was passionate...I could associate myself with every song...It's a unique album in our history. This was the story of us..."Curtains", the lyrics to that are so beautiful because it sums up our friendship so much, and our relationship.

[The lyrics and melody] usually come a little simultaneously, but I would say the lyrics are first; usually I have the idea for a story in my head, or few lines.

Since I write the lyrics, I don't want to be pigeonholed into a person who's out there preaching these songs. If you read the lyrics, there isn't a story being set up for you. You have to use your imagination to get the best out of the songs - if you choose to do that.

(Talks about Lucky You) "The song was about a girl who didn't fit in and she didn't care and she was different than everyone else. I think there's a long chorus of me singing "Do do do do do do do do do do". It's very young and I look back and it's kind of interesting to hear those kind of storylines and the lyrics that I used to write compared to the lyrics that I write now.

The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction. If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics - like most of the popular songs are today in the English language that I hear - then it would be much more of a turnoff then if it would allow me to interpret it from the expressive capabilities of the vocalizing or of the sound itself, which allows me to create my own meaning for it, which elevates it into a higher piece of work for me.

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.

Sometimes people will request a song I haven't played in a while and I'll play it and singing the lyrics will mean something different to me as a 35 year-old person than they did when I was 25. I know I'm still that person who wrote it and thought I knew what I meant when I was writing them. They meant something very exact to me in that time of my life. But it's really cool when those same lyrics can transform into something else and mean something entirely different to me.

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

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

When I'm writing a lyric, I totally forget about the music. I'm just looking at the lyric and thinking about it almost as a separate entity. And then I'll go to my keyboard with all the lyrics printed out and try to think of how to make this a complete musical thing. I've got a very basic keyboard with some presets.

Yeah. My singing and my songs were very influenced by all of that. People would come up to me and ask, Is that a Billie Holiday song? I'd say, No, it's my song. The lyrics would be in my style, but the songs would be very jazzy.

It's part of me to get off on those moments where... well, what people would call attention. Obviously, that isn't the be-all and end-all of life, but at the states of creativity that I've reached, well, it helps the lyrics along a little bit.

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

When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.

A digital download is not as visceral as buying a CD, removing the shrink-wrap, putting the disc in your player, and pouring through the booklet of lyrics and liner notes. The digital age has removed us from the tactile experience of what it meant to listen to an album.

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.

I don't have any favourite lyrics. Honestly, all of them I love 'em to death - it's the same with songs. I don't have just one favourite lyric, I love them all.

Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.

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.

My heart is a weatherballoon caught in an updraft of a chinese tax percentage, the tax percentages are unequivocaaaaaaaaaal, Unequivocaaaaaaaaal. This is the sort of lyrics you could never think of, loser. Here's a razorblade go cut yourself

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.

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'm just worn down and weary of bands whose lyrics are cryptic and self-referential.

I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.

So, you’re hitting on Clare the Fair.” “I’m not hitting on her. I’m exploring the possibility of seeing her on social terms.” “He’s hitting on her,” Owen said around a mouthful of chips. “You’ve still got that thing you had for her back in high school. Are you still writing bad song lyrics about heartbreak?” “Suck me. And they weren’t that bad.” “Yeah, they were,” Ryder disagreed. “But at least now we don’t have to listen to you playing your keyboard and howling them down the hall.

As far as the lyrics go, I think I was negotiating a moment in my life where I didn't feel happy. I think I had some existential frustration and I was wrestling with that on a few different levels. I was feeling like I wanted to change a lot of things.

Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.

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

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.

So we're considering doing a new Christmas album, because there's been Christmas episodes since then, and maybe finally do the version of 'The Most Offensive Song Ever' with lyrics intact.

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

As a song writer when I first was aware of the Beatles and started, you couldn't avoid hearing it, not that I, I tried. And what, what struck me was not so much the songs or the part of the songs that, that seemed unique to me were, was more melodic at the beginning than, than the lyrics because they were still talking about, you know, I love you, I don't love you and I need you or don't need you.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

I write about things that tear me apart, and it's all very personal to me. It's funny to hear people disassemble the lyrics. If they get it wrong, it almost means more to me, because it's morphed into something that is meaningful to them.

A more detailed world is a more complicated and complex one, and therefore a more empathetic one. I feel Gord's Downie lyrics are exceptionally empathetic, or that's what they accomplish. The fact that they can cross all those cultural cliques and boundaries really amplifies that, to me.

I'm not really good at writing sad sappy ballads. In terms of the lyrics not matching the vibe of the music, that's kind of the way my career has gone; everyone is a little confused about it all the time.

I wanted people to connect with the lyrics, even if it's in some weird way, because they're all personal.

Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing. ...metaphors support lyrics like bones.

Every song with lyrics is lyrical.

I love knowing that people are connecting to my lyrics, my music and me.

I've also been writing for other artists, producing other artists, doing some country stuff. Those lyrics I tend to leave more universal.

It's been very humbling and very cool to see [that at] each show I tend to see more and more kids lock onto the new lyrics and every night they start to sing louder and louder and it's just been very exciting.

My beats and my production aren't dark or emo by any means; it's basically the lyrics I think, and the melody sometimes can be too.