Quotes About Lyrics

I usually start with a guitar riff or some little pattern of chords, and then I kind of go from there. Usually my lyrics are the last thing to go onto a song. For years and years I only ever did instrumental, so I'm still trying to get confidant with my lyrics and find the right balance. I'll generally get inspired from the music. I'll have a guitar line, and then I'll have a melody line, and I hook the lyrics up to fit that rhythm. So, my lyrics to tend be very rhythmic as well. They work with the music rather than the music works around them.

Every song has a different genesis, or feeling. Usually the lyrics, I don't really know what it's all about, I just kinda do it. I mean, there's a combination of, like you're saying, that kind of lyrics about commitment or vaguely relationship lyrics mixed with jokey 90s Beck-style non-sequiturs and stuff.

I never write a tune before the lyrics. I get the lyrics and then I write around them. Some people write music and the lyrics come along and they say, 'Oh yeah, I've got something to fit that.' If that's the way people write songs, I feel like you might as well just go to the supermarket.

[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.

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 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.

Lyrics are back, maybe. It seems like there was a bit of an attitude that lyrics are not important.

People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. F**k them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there. ... I think my melodies are superior to my lyrics. ... I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.

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 have to decide whether I'm just laying down a groove, kind of a bed and canvas for the lyrics and music to live on, or trying to illustrate something in the lyrics.

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.

I was just thinking of Rush. I went to see Rush a few years ago, because my record label guy in the States really wanted to go. We had crazy good seats. It was fascinating watching the crowd - mostly men - who were so moved by these really esoteric lyrics. I don't know Neil Peart's lyrics super well, but they're not that straightforward to me.

Finally I started really opening up as a songwriter and an interpreter and taking songs from all kind of genres and stripping them down to just lyrics and the story inside the lyrics, and trying to make them really mine.

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

It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"

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

When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

When I see other rappers' lyrics of "I don't do what I don't like to do", I feel like it's really cool and there's also an envious side to me about it.

I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

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.

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.

I don't understand why America embraces Lady GaGa and Katy Perry and all of the "pop stuff" as much as they do. The Jonas Brothers, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber are also included, and I don't really get any of that. Maybe that means that I am old. That stuff seems like it isn't that "authentic." Katy has a cool writing style though, and her lyrics can be poignant and mean stuff from time to time. I really appreciate that about her.

I usually get my lyrics when I let my mind wander, when you're not really awake, but not yet fully asleep. I keep an open notebook by my bed and then just write whatever comes to me.

I grew up with all kinds of music, but my heart was particularly drawn to Country Music because of the guitar playing, the lyrics and of artists like Steve Warner and Vince Gill.

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.

I try to focus on the melodies and try to make everything else minimal. The melody and the lyrics are most important to me.

Lyrics are coming to you all the time. I get inspiration in the middle of the night.

CD's are amazing because you get the artwork, you get to look at the lyrics, you get to look at the behind-the-scenes photos or something.

To all companies please stop using Xmas songs and inserting your own lyrics. Write your own music. I am boycotting you until you stop.

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.

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.

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.

We're going to sing about things that matter to us. The balancing act is to present these ideas but also make the music exciting and sort of fun enough that even if you're not paying attention to the lyrics, you might still like the songs anyway. That's the idea.

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

I think every generation has that movement of hip-hop that you know you're playing it and you definitely have that moment of like, "Why am I saying this so enthusiastically? Why am I so stoked and psyched to say these 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.

"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.

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.

I probably listen to more instrumental music than music with lyrics, but at the same time I do love both.

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

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.

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.

I like to make people dream and think and imagine and learn and study. Nowadays, music is so literal - it's telling you, "This is how it is," and my music's the opposite. I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know.

If it wasn't for this person's privacy, I'd be able to talk pretty freely about this subject on a personal level. The record's about not her. It's about my struggles through years of dealing with the aftermath of lost love and longing and just mediocrity and just bad news, like life stuff. And in the [record], where the title comes from, the lyrics are actually a conversation between me and another girl, not this Emma character.

I'm a bit of an insomniac. I'm always thinking. I've got a lot of ideas for lyrics and shows. I have a notepad by the side of the bed and voice recorders around the house.

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

Nothing really goes through my head when I'm performing live, I normally just look out into the crowd and see the fans and it makes me feel really happy - especially when they all sing the lyrics back, it's amazing.