Quotes About Lyrics

First we start with the lyrics. Most of the lyrics are done by Stefan Kaufmann and me. When we have enough lyrics and enough stories we have the lines to make titles. Then we collect all the ideas of everybody in the band and see which ideas fit together the best with the lyrics to get the right atmosphere. That's the way we compose.

[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 try to write lyrics that will be able to function on their own if they get separated from the music. But I wouldn't want to take anything away from poets, who work without the frames songwriters get from melody, and I think lyrics should be considered as their own thing.

People say, "You should write lyrics" and I say I'm quite happy not to, because I like being part of that process where you write your version of what someone else's lyrics are saying to you, and that enjoyment has never changed.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

I don't write lyrics, the lyrics write Thom Yorke

[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.

We've learned over the years that if we wanted we could write anything that just felt good or sounded good and it didn't necessarily have to have any particular meaning to us. As odd as it seemed to us, reviewers would take it upon themselves to interject their own meanings on our lyrics. Sometimes we sit and read other people's interpretations of our lyrics and think, 'Hey, that's pretty good.' If we liked it, we would keep our mouths shut and just accept the credit as if it was what we meant all along.

I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve. ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing.

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

Cornelius Cardew very famous in Britain, because he was the darling of the avant-garde, and he played in a band called AMM, which was an improvising band in the '60s. Paul McCartney used to come watch them. Later on in life, he became disenchanted with avant-garde music, because he felt it couldn't reach the public. It didn't have a wide enough appeal. So he'd take these tunes of old English folk songs and write Stalinist lyrics over the top of them. I do think that when he changed to folk songs, he actually lost the tiny audience he already had, which is quite interesting.

Smoke Ring for My Halo was the first album I bought of Kurt's Vile, and when I first listened to "Peeping Tomboy" I was really depressed and unemployed. But the lyrics are, "I don't want to work. I don't want to sit around all day frowning." I was like, "Ah! Yes!"

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.

That was my intention, was to have it be from the perspective of my high-school-aged self, and to try and emulate the music that I listened to at that time. So to write essentially like a pop-punk song about musicals. I wanted the dichotomy of the tone of the music with the lyrics and my singing voice.

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.

I privilege the music over the lyrics

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.

Music is very nebulous, and you can conjure up a lot of moods with music. But lyrics - they're a lot more tangible. They're much more specific. And you want to say something meaningful and creative and artistic and that tells a story and that takes people someplace else.

I think we need to sort of broaden our definition of poetry, which maybe it's a good thing that they just gave this Nobel Prize to [Bob] Dylan because blurring the lines of song lyrics and also hip-hop for me is like some of the greatest uses - most innovative uses of language in my lifetime.

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.

People really listen to your lyrics if you rap. So, I had to make sure that they were clear and concise.

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.

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.

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

There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there.

I am a big Pink Floyd fan. That is where a lot of the concept lyrics come from.

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.

I should attempt to write a love song, I have written lots of poetry about love so I could turn those into lyrics. I'm a sucker for romance - always have been, always will be. I love walking down the beach and listening to my iPod and belting them out. What would we do without love songs?

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

I don't see myself as the boss. I sing and write the songs, and it would feel strange if somebody else wrote the lyrics I sang.

I want to do a stripped-down album. That style is actually where my heart is - storytelling and just letting the voice and the lyrics talk for themselves. I still want to write the perfect song and sing it in the most honest, undressed way. But I feel like I have to gather more experiences and more layers in my voice. I have to live more to be able to tell this tale. So I'm saving my folk record. I have a feeling nobody will understand it.

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.

From her gospel-singing mother Cissy Houston, her legendary pop-diva cousin Dionne Warwick, and her Queen of Soul godmother Aretha Franklin, she [Whitney Houston] inherited gifts for skillfully interpreting lyrics and endowing them with new depth and jeweled nuance.

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

I like to write my lyrics on clay tablets.

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.

Sometimes it's nice to be able to reflect on the music itself and then write lyrics that I feel anyone can relate to. It's not my dreaming tree that is dead. The feeling of a loss of hope is universal. There are moments that we've all felt a little bit of it, so I don't think it is something that is too hard to identify with.

"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.

Each song had a different way of coming about. In some, the music was written first while others it was the lyrics. We didn't want to overthink anything too much - we just wanted to, writing-wise, chuck out as many ideas as possible.

Lyrics are kind of the whole thing; it's the message. Something might have a beautiful melody but if it's not the truth coming out of your mouth, it's not appealing

I would always write lyrics and songs on the piano.

But I always loved songs with great lyrics.

I wanna be able to stand on the stage and hold out the mic and people sing all the lyrics to my song.

I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics.

I am a musical-theater nut. When the lyrics, orchestration, and performance all come together just right, I come alive and can feel every cell in my body.

I wish Howard Ashman was still alive so I could just meet him and tell him his words are magic. It's so fun to say. He has such great alliteration and paints the most vivid images with his lyrics

I'm on this planet for another forty years at the most and I got a baby and a wife and I'm worried about their future and that kind of fear, that anger is spilling into my lyrics, I can't just sit back and talk about myself until I'm dead.