Quotes About Songwriting

My love songs are very personal and quite weird. They don't really have the big radio hit choruses because basically they're my therapy, stuff I have to get off my chest.

It's weird, because the ideas in my songs aren't controversial to me. I feel like I should be able to sing about anything.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

There have been 700 or 800 songs I've written over the last 60 years, as I went through different periods of writing. I listen and marvel at how different they are and how they still stand up. They are very well done, if I must say so.

I am a really passive person to begin with so I have written a lot of pretty crappy songs with strangers because I let it go in a direction that I didn't feel it should have and I didn't know them well enough to speak up.

So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.

I took a few months off after my senior year was over, and I prayed and tried to figure out what was my plan and my purpose. That's how I started writing songs and playing guitar just to get my feelings out.

I have always preferred paper and ink to a computer screen and I still write most of my lyrics by hand.

Usually I write the songs at home and then I bring them in to the band; when we play them as a band, that's kinda how we figure out the feel of how they're going to be presented on the record or live.

I don't go into any album with pressing issues. I just try to write songs.

I've written hundreds of songs, and I tend to think that my instincts are pretty good when it comes to what people are going to like and what people aren't going to like.

We actually have some pretty good songs. But if they come out too serious, then we have to scrap them.

We all write the lyrics together, but Frank really shines on 'em pretty good.

I've tried writing darker, more serious songs, but they don't go anywhere. Everything revolves around the chorus for me.

We definitely like to write songs about darker things, but we like to think of it as a celebration of the evil ideas that run through everybody's head.

My day job is that I write songs for other artists and if I'm not on the road I'm in my studio.

Even though we didn't actually record it as the Move I had already written a song called 'Dear Elaine', which I subsequently put on the Boulders album. I thought at the time that was probably the best song I'd written.

Here's the way Static-X has always worked: I write all the songs by myself - totally and completely by myself - I give demos to the other guys, and then they add their parts to it, and then we argue about stuff and compromise and it turns out being Static-X.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

I wrote my first song when I was about eight. It was about putting a diaper on a chicken!

I'm not really interested in myself in my writing. I can't see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

When I write a song, I tap into the emotion and the feeling and then I use the emotion to write the words. It's the opposite when I act. I use the words and tap into the emotion.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.