Quotes About Song

An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.

Musically, though, you're a character and you're singing a song. If you're not your own character, you're the character in the song, most of the time. Even blues musicians, a lot of them who were the most realistic, at times, they were singing a song and portraying a character in the song. There's something to be said for getting involved in the emotion of a song, too, with the characters.

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.

I'm a panicked karaoke participant because I am always searching for a song in the moment. I don't have my go to song. I will be driving along and I will be like, "That should be my karaoke song!" and then I forget what song it is.

Actually think anybody ever approaches writing any song, I think the song approaches them, truth be told. Usually what happens is that a song arrives and afterwards you say that "I wrote the song," and it's not actually true; they find you, they write themselves.

We haven't started playing it live yet but we're going to. And then 'Warpaint' is a song that's really, really close to me because it's actually - we've had that song for many years now and it's changed so many times, it's been through every reincarnation of our band with every drummer, with sometimes with me playing drums, it was when we were a three-piece, every incarnation of the band that we've had we have played that song.

What is good is what it's going to lead to, like the song "Jai Ho." If good numbers are going to come in the future, it bodes well for a lot of things. But then, who's going to maintain that. That's the question. So far they could never lead to an Indian song, like a normal film song in this that they can relate to.

'Unbelievers' was a song that we felt like we could tackle, so that's one of the reasons we wanted to start playing it live, we really believed in that song and we still believe in that song a lot.

As an example, there is a Japanese composer / singer whose name is Tanimura [Shinji]: he has composed a song entitled entitled "Kazeno Komoriuta" and I have recorded my piano adaptation of this song and honestly I couldn't expect that it would be so difficult and challenging for me to perform my piano version of this beautiful song.

It's always amazing seeing the song-writing process. A song just starts off as just an idea or a story you want to tell. It keeps building and building when you add the lyrics, the instruments, the vocals until you finally reach the finished song other people can enjoy.

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.

I think that I have come at it backwards in a way because a lot of what I'm doing as a songwriter is not incredibly intentional. There's a moment that happens which creates the song or the actual idea for a song, and then I'm like, "Oh, it's this kind of song."

To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.

You are hearing this song, and you're 16, and it's a song about love, or a girl. And then maybe there's a girl at school that you like. So you're going to be thinking about that girl. That song is sort of about that girl. The songwriter doesn't know that girl, obviously. He wrote it for something else. But there's the specific meaning with the universal again.

I started playing bass in my friend's band for some reason. It was just something I did because, well, he asked me if I wanted to play bass and he played me this song - Nirvana's version of "Molly's Lips", the Vaselines song - and he said, "You can do this! This is not hard!" and it's like a two-note song. I learned that and then I thought I was a genius.

I think, sometimes, artists release music too fast. If you just sit back and listen to the track for a little bit you could pick and choose how you want to do it and see if you really feel the song, because sometimes you might not even like the song after a few listens.

There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping...in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.

It's just a blessing. Artists search and search for songs that will connect for a new artist because the familiarity is so low. People don't know what you look like. It's just so unbelievable to find a song that people are relating to. To have a song that people will actually pick up the phone and call the station to ask. It's a blessing.

I sing, not to hear the echo repeat, a shade fainter, my song! I think of light and not of glory! Singing is my fashion of waging war and bearing witness. And if my song is the proudest of songs, it is that I sing clearly to make the day rise clear!

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band's lead singer, Eric Burdon. "So you're the honky," she said, "who stole my song and got a hit out of it?

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

"After 17" is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, "Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter," but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.

When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.

Well, I make every song I sing personal. I've never chosen a song that wasn't.

I love truthful songs that tell a story and talk about people and their lives. If a song calls for a tear, then we will cry. If a song calls for a smile, then we will laugh. That is what I like to do.

It's difficult for me to describe my own music; every song is an experience that I set to music. There's no lyrics, no singer, just instruments, but I'm sure you can feel what the song is talking about just by listen to it. I can't describe a feeling, my songs are feelings.

Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?

I was probably five years old or four years and I would listen to "White Christmas," and I just thought it was the most beautiful thing ever. The musicianship and his voice and the melody of that song; it's almost like I wish it wasn't a Christmas song because I wish that you were allowed to listen to it all year.

Generally, if you could picture a bunch of rock and roll momentum behind a song and it was particularly melodious, maybe the Pornographers would do it. If it was kind of moody and more lyrical, then maybe it would be a Destroyer song. Anything that's really lyrically driven I would keep for Destroyer.

I wrote a song at age five about algae on the pond by our house, then the next 'real' song was in fifth grade about an unrequited crush.

All I'm saying, as a fan, is I'm tired of the same song for 30 years. Can't we change the message a little? You've arrived. You have a black president. Every white guy in a commercial doesn't have to be the idiot and every black guy in a rap song doesn't have to be God's gift to the world.

Certain songs have a life, and certain songs don't. A song is like a saddle: you ride it for a while, and if it's the right kind of song you can sing it for the rest of your life. And then other songs are only really important for certain periods of your life, and you move on from them and find yourself not necessarily needing to sing them anymore.

Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week.

Sometimes I'll write a song first and then I'm like, "Oh this person will be great on this song." But there are some artists I know what want, like off the top I knew I wanted Brandy and Faith Evans. Their music is like the soundtrack to my life, so it was a personal thing for me. So once they said yes, I wrote songs specifically for them.

It was always meant to ease out of a big radio song and flow into the next one. Don't is the bridge song in between Sing and Thinking Out Loud.

I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song - it's this thing that's affecting me.

I love Thelonious Monk's song "Just a Gigolo." It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized, because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.

Ash paused as he entered the house to find the three women lined up and... singing to... dear gods, anything but this. "Fergilicious." All he needed was for Simi to be here and off-key with them since it was her favorite song and he'd spent the better part of the last year cursing whoever was dumb enough to introduce that song to a hormonal teenaged demon. Worst part? Simi wanted him to call her Similicious.

I wrote a cheesy love song - called "Tender Torture". I guess it's more of a song about being away from someone that you love. It's pretty strange. It's sincere, I guess. It's actually something that I really felt.

One of my favorite things as an engineer is watching a band get comfortable in the studio and getting a great take. Like, they're playing the song, warming up, and then suddenly, the communication really happens and everybody's really in the song, and they nail it, and then that's the take.

Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.

Make every song is your best song to date.

I've always written songs from a sad place. I can't think of one good song that I have written in a happy place. I was saying I was kinda bummed because I've been sorta chasing the girl I've been in love with for years and years and we're finally together now, and I'm like super happy for months and months and months. And my girlfriend asks, "Why haven't you written a song for me?"And I don't know how to tell her "Because it's just too good."

The fun part, I will admit this much, there is a period when listening to my music is fun, and that's when I'm making it. There's a tiny little window before something gets old, but after it's come to fruition. There's a little window there where I can listen to a song probably about five times, and I'll really think it's awesome. That's kind of the period that lets me know when I - 99 percent of the time, that period is right about whether a song is going to be a keeper for an album or just a throwaway track that never gets - in that little window.

A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.

I think that songwriting is understood from an early age that was the priority to figure out first. Learn to write a good song, and then figure out who you are as an artist because, once you know how to write a good song, you can dress it in any kind of clothing.