Quotes About Lyrics

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He began to play Yesterday, an old Beatles song.

For me, lyrics are the most important thing in a song. And if they don't have meaning, I would never sing them - unless and until someone who loves your work asks me to do so.

I will say this: Rapping-wise, there has never been anybody to match Tupac's energy when coming on a song, like when rappin'. It's unmatched. You can't duplicate it.

The first time you listen to someone else's interpretation of what you've created, it's a little unnerving. They'll change lyrics or something almost every time. That's them being an artist, and you appreciate it more over time.

I love great lyrics, and I love the way it could shape a tune into a very unpredictable one, and I also like taking a great melody and putting lyrics into it.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

With pop, it's pretty much straight up and down. It has to be simple. Everybody has to be able to walk down the street and be able to sing it.

I have always been a sucker for the big, upbeat chorus.

An upbeat song, for example, means one thing, but when you hear it with really vibey, mellow ambience around it, suddenly the same words may mean something else. Music is so powerful that way: It dictates and soundtracks our moods.

I've definitely got a lot more cautious about my lyrics - I feel I want to be a positive force in the world, and I want to uplift people. That's something that comes with age.

The snappier lyrics come when I'm feeling really good and up. A lot of times, they come after I've just had a meeting with somebody that was uplifting, and you get home, and you're feeling playful or upbeat or whatever, and then they just seem to pop right out.

There's rises and falls and ups and downs in all music.

It's strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, 'What?' I'm really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It's cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted people to focus on the content.

Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

For me, naming bands was the forerunner to really writing lyrics, because I work off titles.

There are parts in albums where I wrote a lot of the lyrics. There are parts on albums where Steve wrote a lot of the lyrics, even albums where Steve did the majority of the lyric writing. Then there were albums like 'Coming Home' where I did most of the chorus lyric writing. But it was always split.

For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.

I grew up in the '70s, and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

A lot like Dave Matthews or John Mayer, I kind of stick with the acoustic genre.

It is very disappointing to see the Punjabi music scene of today. The lyrical quality has deteriorated; it is only people like Sartaaj and Gurdas Maan Ji who are sticking to their roots.

I tend to like simple music. And clever, succinct lyrics. Songs that don't try to be more than they need to to be effective, to stir up something emotionally within you.