Quotes About Songwriting

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.

At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, 'I can do this for real and not go to college.' When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.

Justin Hayward was a teenager when he was drafted into the Moody Blues in 1966. He brought with him one song he had written for his girlfriend. This was called 'Nights in White Satin,' which subsequently made a fortune for a lot of people.

Songwriting was always my 'plan B'. I didn't even know that songwriting was a job until my late teens!

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that's gone into my song writing.

When I started writing songs for Temple of the Dog, I went to my room with my acoustic guitar, and I was happy staying in that mode. It was more chordal based and more lyric driven. I enjoyed not making riff-based songs built around a guitar idea.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

You know One Direction do a lot of up tempo songs, but when they did that Ed Sheeran song 'Little Things,' that was probably their biggest song off their last album, so it shows you that a ballad never goes out of fashion.

I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?

I'm not an extremely prolific writer. I don't write songs all the time.

I made a promise to myself to write songs I liked. I'm an acoustic singer/songwriter, and I need to be able play every song by myself on guitar. No matter what the production ends up being on the record, I've got to be able to go out and sell it all on my own. It's about connection.

There seems to be a great propensity in this business to write tear-jerkers, 'You-left-me' songs. I thought, 'Why don't I count my blessings by looking at what I have?' I'm pretty much an optimistic guy.

I could never write a proper party song.

I came to Nashville in the early '90s, and I thought, 'OK, enough is enough. I write songs; I just don't have the backbone to show it to anybody. I want to go to Nashville and learn how to properly write a song.'

I try to make all my songs good. I don't ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response.

I don't know why, but I don't fancy writing love songs; I never have.

I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.

Obviously when you write songs you've got to record them, but just writing the songs is one of my favorite things to do.

My favourite place was in The Congo. It's where I began to write songs and build myself as an adult.

I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I think I write songs because of pent-up feelings.

I still feel like that 17-year-old-kid that fell in love with country music, but I also am allowed to write songs about being a man, too, which I think is the coolest place I've ever been in my life.

There's a few people that I write with that we don't stop until one of us cries.

Maybe this is wrong, but I feel like I craft my songs carefully enough that I still find that fifteen years after having written one, it still works for me - I'm not cringing.