Quotes About Lyrics

In film lyrics, I avoid Persianised words because they are not widely understood.

'Walk on the Wild Side' was a very catchy song.

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.

But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.

I tend to write songs that are about something pretty specific. A lot of them tell some kind of little made-up story.

When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.

Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it's a good enough term.

A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!

Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process.

One of the first places where I started to respond to song lyrics was in reggae music. A lot of what I was responding to were references to the Old Testament. It was not that I had to adapt the lyrics to the sound. Reggae and the Old Testament are bound up together. There wasn't anything that I had to do.

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?

I remember a song we used to sing, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean. But I thought it was, Columbus, Jump in the Ocean.

liable to quote lyrics about the death of the campaigner Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi rally in London in the seventies and rant about oligarchic corruption in the US body politic.

Berlin's great secret is that he says exactly what he means; sometimes he hits a gigantic line both musically and lyrically -- almost Wagnerian in its strength.

final syllable of Bowie's 'Suffragette City'—the word suffragette being, perhaps not coincidentally, among the McCartney song's lyrics).

His goal now, he continued, was to write "just kind of songy songs that the milkman can whistle."4

Miriam sang, "Gail, Gail, she bosses everyone around. Gail, Gail, she is really stupid." The melody was just as good as the lyrics.

I just feel "One More Try" is better lyrically. "Careless Whisper" was written when I was 17 years old, and I had not really experienced anything that strong in my life, so it was a bit precocious.

Life is a song to me.

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

In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics.

One night I was sitting listening to some Hank Williams songs - and they'll change your life in a hurry.

The PMRC pressured the music industry to establish a rating system that would warn potential record buyers of sexually explicit and violent lyrics. Their purchases may as well have carried stickers emblazoned with 'THIS RECORD CONTAINS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK'N'ROLL!

Gary Kemp: 'True' was written about Clare Grogan. She was the inspiration, and she also gave me a copy of Nabokov's Lolita, and I used a couple of lines out of it for the song – 'seaside arms'.