Quotes About Lyrics

When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.

Usually when we go in to cut demos, one of us will lay down some mumbling sort of stuff for the vocal melodies because the lyrics don't come until later.

I've read and heard that some of the most inspiring vocal interpreters adhere habitually to one rule: Always think the lyrics as you're singing them, so that the sentiment is always appropriate and heartfelt.

All songwriters are known as 'topliners' because the vocal goes on top of the track.

Initially we were spitting lyrics over garage beats, in that eight-bar gap where there wasn't a vocal. But we were rebellious towards garage because they were rebellious towards us; a lot of their gatekeepers said grime was too violent.

But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.

'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.

I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.

For me, songwriting starts with a melody. When a musician plays a chord progression, either the words and vocal melody come to me, or they don't. That's how I determine who to write with. It works, or it doesn't.

The thing with One Direction songs is that you can probably break them all down to an acoustic guitar and vocal.

I think one of the biggest sleepers that people are going to be able to dig into later is 'Fermi Paradox,' it's the song before 'Exist.' To me it's got the coolest, it's just so bizarre because it's got one of the most melodic vocal melodies, but we put it over a black metal blast beats.

I always start with writing vocal melodies before writing lyrics.

Making vocal hooks is my favorite thing to do. That's what I love about songwriting - making catchy stuff.

Usually what I do is I write my vocal melody over guitar parts and then I come up with lyrics.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time' was a perfect song. It was so beautiful and so heartfelt. Her vocals were so amazing. And, for me, that was a song I went to when I was feeling sad and wanted to feel even sadder.

I want to make an album with just great beats and big vocals and just amazing lyrics.

The vocals are what immediately draw people in and sell the song.

The music comes first. Final lyrics are usually written very close to recording the vocals.

There's Eddie's conviction and his lyrics and his ideals, and he can just rock straight out. His vocals are incredible. And we all are really competent musicians.

It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.