Quotes About Songwriting

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

I think when you're making an album, as the songs are piling up, one of the good things about it is that you will often write the song that you need.

I only write maybe one or two songs every couple of years that I think are good enough to play alone without other stuff happening.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I actually dream a lot of songs, and I try to be good about voice-memoing ideas.

As I get older, I don't aggressively pursue songs. All the great ones just appear.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There's no tricks. It's honesty with big melodies.

My first instinct when I write songs is not a negative one. It's something positive... Everything I've ever done has some form of hope in it, I think.

Along with a sense of humor, my songs have to be sincere, and they have to be sung from a position of inner conviction.

I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you've experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.

We must begin to make what I call "conscious choices," and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs.

If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

There's the famous thing that the A&ampR man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.

But my strength was in singing and songwriting, which was a new discovery for me when I was 18. And I decided if I pursued songwriting, which is what was closest to my heart, then there would be no competition. I would just live my life being myself and living my dream.

She could only write with him at night and she was wasting her days just sitting around. So he thought I could write with her during the day. And that was Carole King.

I've always loved Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and I watched the Petty documentary 'Running Down A Dream'. I was directly influenced, it made me want to go write.

I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

The guitar influence that affected my songwriting came from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

Freddie was very much able to ride the neutral wave. We all respected his views because he was such a great songwriter. It was his idea that we share all the credits. It was decided all the songs would be attributed equally to Queen. That immediately got rid of the arguments. That was a fantastic, democratic notion.

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.