Quotes About Lyrics

I want to be on the Billboard Hot 100 with a single that has Korean lyrics.

You don't plan 'La la la's.' They just pop out. Bowie and Marc Bolan littered many of their songs with 'La la's.'

I would say I'd rather dig a ditch, you know, do hard, manual labor than write lyrics.

The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is very important . It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her. "Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

Ooh, James, are you selling your soul to a cold gun?

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.

Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).

Music's staying power is a function of how timeless the lyrics, song and production are.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

A good song gathers the years in. It's why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it's been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.

We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.

I never wrote completely in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the Dylan comparisons, so I steered away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of "Greetings" came from an unselfconscious place. Your early songs emerge from the moment when you're writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it's been just you and your music. That only happens once.

I decided the world was filled with plenty of good guitar players, many of them my match or better, but how many good songwriters were there?

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.

My mind seemed to think in terms of very bad song lyrics these days.

The music machine played away - far away - and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.

Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play.

When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

I think I'm better than I was in my younger days, because I'm exploring deep lyrical material, and I've been sober for a while now.

You want to have a feeling when you sing that you just love singing; you love the feeling of singing, and you love this feeling of this voice coming out of your body into this world. It's about really getting that most beautiful, pure, centered tone, thinking about the story of each song and the lyrics, and connecting your own life to that story.

When I was a youth, to be called 'African' was a diss. At school, the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game, and I'm saying lyrics like, 'I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/ My bars make you push up your chest like bras,' that was a big deal for me.