Quotes About Lyrics

As you can imagine, over the years I have been asked many times to discuss and explain my song "American Pie." I have never discussed the lyrics, but have admitted to the Holly reference in the opening stanzas. You will find many interpretations of my lyrics but none of them by me. You will find many “interpretations” of my lyrics but none of them by me. Isn’t this fun? Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence.

[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.

Sometimes melody and sometimes lyrics. It depends on the tempo and feel of the song. Slower pieces usually begin with melody and faster ones with lyrics. I write for the song and it leads me to my conclusion.

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.

With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.

I'm so bad at lyrics. I'm always trying to get better. Sometimes, the song can restrict your lyrics - if you're trying to make a poppy song, you don't want to sing something that sounds like it could be on an At the Drive-In song.

I detest 'love lyrics.' I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics.

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

Just because I said lyrics are a sign of the inability to sing doesn't mean....A) I believe that, or B) I don't think they're cool. They are cool. Words are great. I sing along with my favorite songs, but when I am drumming and singing, the words become a note that for me. In the process of playing they have more emotional impact as notes then an actual word.

The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’s with the fabric of this society itself.

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 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.

Lights are to drama what music is to the lyrics of a song. The greatest part of my success in the theatre I attribute to my feeling for colors, translated into effects of light.

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

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.

I mean, my wife is always like - I don't write lyrics. So I couldn't, like, really technically write a song for anyone. I could write a very nice instrumental. So she always sort of gives me a hard time because it's just such a ridiculously impossible standard to live up to, that your step-dad wrote that song for your mom.

I feel like I want to write some songs and I don't know how to go about doing it. Usually it's the lyrics that are a problem, and I think I am not really cut out to be a lyricist.

I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.

Two records put me over the top with hip-hop. One of them was 'Planet Rock,' and the other had no lyrics - it was called 'Numbers,' from a group called Kraftwerk. Every kid in the 'hood in New York and New Jersey was popping, locking, and breaking to that record. It was the hottest track on the street at the time.

I don't think there are any songs that I've written in the past that I now disagree. It's kind of like tattoos; I would never regret a tattoo, because it was how I felt at that time in my life. I don't think I've ever said anything that I would take back. So far, so good! I would probably change the music, or change how I sing it, maybe do it a little bit cooler, or a bit more grown-up. But I don't think that there are any lyrics that I regret.

I think that a great song needs the full package. I think that a great song needs everything from lyrics, to melody, to music, and it needs to be interesting and it needs take you in and swallow you and swish you around, and then regurgitate you back in better form.

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

Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.

As a lyricist, you love to hear other great lyrics or other great concepts.

I think, then, there's the sort of, like, political dimension to lyrics. One of the problems that I've had with my output as a lyric writer is that I look back at it and there's some turn-of-phrases and some images and some kind of montage-y kinds of things I'm really proud of. But it kind of bums me out that people have told me again and again that they don't really understand what I'm trying to say.

It'd be tricky to read into my lyrics - some are autobiographical, but sometimes I just like the sound of words.

If you really look at my lyrics, nobody's exempt. Nobody's exempt from observation, criticism or what I think is correction.

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

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 remember when I was very young, I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said, 'You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly.

"The way I feel about music -- any song, any style -- is that there is no right and wrong, only true and false. If the music and lyrics are conceived out of honesty and if the production of the song goes along with its original message, then what has been expressed is art, regardless of what anyone's opinion is of it. So things are a lots impler if you just tell the truth.

As accurately as I possibly can. I explain , to my kid, that love's an elusive, fragile and resilient thing. And as far as the lyrics, I say that part of being an adult is being sexual, and when you're in a relationship, to express yourself that way is a beautiful thing.

Cynthia's lyrics always expressed the feelings people felt but they couldn't express themselves.

He doesn't make it so complicated but just really allows the lyric to come through even though there's a lot of production going on. I think that's the key and that's the magic, it's making sure that people could still connect with the lyrics while they're on the dance floor.

I'm used to getting sexy sometimes in the lyrics.

I'd break out in hives if I had to sing (`Stairway to Heaven') in every show. I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don't know. It's just not for me. I sang it at the Atlantic Records show because I'm an old softie and it was my way of saying thank you to Atlantic because I've been with them for 20 years. But no more of `Stairway to Heaven' for me.

When I'm playing guitar, I just try and put those words into lyrics and just try a few things. It's all over the place.

We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.

I was a geek who thought I was cool. I didn't hang out with a particular clique, but with different people from different cliques. I was a total nerd, trying to fit in. Luckily, I found music and that was my niche. That sorta took me out of my geekdom. I was never invited to parties as a teenager - I turned up with the popular people. That's where the lyrics to 'Guilty By Association' came from.

Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you dont feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel youre making art.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

I think I have a vested interest in thinking that the lyrics are important, but I think for us it's important that we all write things that mean something to us, and I think we're not really in the business of writing la-la-love-you chart pop songs. It needs to have a personal pulling in the gut for me, to want to write anything about it.

I love artists who have spirituality. Jonathan Coulton is the man, I love his melodies and lyrics. Chap-hop is the bomb!

Everything I do, I do it because it's me. At the end of the day, I only know how to be me. Everything is gonna be authentic, so I think, when it comes down to sayin' certain stuff in lyrics, or whatever the case may be, it's just me bein' me and me bein' honest.

I don't like to get too specific about lyrics. It places limitations on them, and spoils the listeners' interpretation.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.