Quotes About Lyrics

I always write lyrics first and the rhythm and the melody come from the lyrics. It always comes from the lyrics: words have rhythm and words have melody.

I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.

If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.

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.

I wanted to write some lyrics that had some meaning to them, lyrics that were meaningful to me and hopefully people can take something from that.

I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it.

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.

I listen to a variety of music. The only common point is strong lyrics; I'm more obsessed with lyrics than music. I need to hear a form of truth, and if it's a hard truth, even better.

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.

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.

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.

I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff.

I was babysitting the night High School Musical premiered last year. I watched with the kids and we sang along to the lyrics. I was making $12 an hour.

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.

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.

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

I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.

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 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.

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

I've always felt that dark lyrics with dark music is pretty useless. Maybe that's a strong statement - not useless, but for me, it's just boring.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.

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.

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

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.

The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?...We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal...I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious...The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.

'White Rabbit' was mostly done in about two days, the music in about half an hour. The music is a 'Bolero' rip-off and the lyrics a rearrangement of 'Alice in Wonderland.' You take two spectacular hits and throw them together, and it's hard to miss.

But I always loved songs with great lyrics.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction...All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland...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...Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.

It's not like we wanted to get really political in terms of specific causes, but I think a lot of the lyrics deal with paranoia and feeling like "the man" is in control somehow.

I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.

I’d forgotten to keep blasting a song in my mind. I remedied my mistake, but the lyrics to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” seemed too close to home at the mo-ment. “Culture Club?” Now his mouth curled downward. “And you accuse me of practicing cruel and unusual punishment.

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams

Will sat where he was, gazing at the silver bowl in front of him; a white rose was floating in it, and he seemed prepared to stare at it until it went under. In the Kitchen Bridget was still singing one of her awful sad songs; the lyrics drifted in through the door: "Twas on an evening fair I went to take the air, I heard a maid making her moan; Said, 'Saw ye my father? Or ye my mother? Or saw ye my brother John? Or saw ye the lad that I love best, And his name it is Sweet William?" I may murder her, Tessa thought. Let her make a song about that.

I think I'm just now startin' to get to the point where fans are startin' to respect my grind, and respect my lyrics and things that I'm gettin' into, and they see the hunger in me, and they know that I wanna become the best, and I'm just tryin' to prove myself. I feel like it would be a letdown if I stopped now.

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.

I wasn't writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I'd listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We'd put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies.

I thought Everything Ecstatic was the happiest of them all - hence the "ecstatic" name. The whole concept behind that was total out-and-out euphoric mania. I think tracks like "Smile Around The Face" are the jolliest things I've ever done, really. But one of the things I like about my music is the fact that it's instrumental, so there are no lyrics to guide people.