Quotes About Songwriting

I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

The first record we put out on Fueled by Ramon, 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea what the term 'producer' meant. It was just us writing songs, and we are trying to go back to that - singing in a room and vibing off each other.

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

I've been very grateful and humbled by the fact that young people really dig Joy Division's music. It's a great testament to the chemistry and the songwriting prowess between the four original members.

I got several litmus tests for songs, but usually the people at the publishing company... they're straight-shooters.

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I think my strength is in shaping a song - you know, making it feel like it reaches its peaks and valleys, and ends when it should end.

No Words,' for example, was two songs that became one song.54 I wrote the first few verses and couldn't get any further. I took them to Paul, and he added his little bit of magic.

final syllable of Bowie's 'Suffragette City'—the word suffragette being, perhaps not coincidentally, among the McCartney song's lyrics).

But if he and Linda composed together, they stood to earn a higher share, since unlike Paul, Linda was not under contract to Northern Songs and could route her part in the collaboration through another publisher—specifically, McCartney Music, Inc., the publishing arm of the newly formed McCartney Productions Ltd.

All Paul had to do was show her how to make the leap from listener to creator. Teenagers in garage bands were doing exactly that, all over the world; there was no reason Linda couldn't become a songwriter too.

Linda was keen to try, but musicianship and songwriting did not come easily to her, and she quickly discovered that she could not count on master classes from her highly accomplished husband. "No, he is not a good teacher, Paul," she said in a frank moment. "He has no patience what-so-ever with somebody who doesn't know. He

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write.

All the songs that were written for that album are just all our first sophomore songs. So they're all from real life. Very sweet and very innocent.

I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.

Songwriting is actually a really great outlet. I kind of recommend it. You get to sum up whatever is going on in your life in a song, then perform it really passionately.

What I do as a songwriter is a constant force in my life, that I'm grateful to have.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

Gary Kemp: 'True' was written about Clare Grogan. She was the inspiration, and she also gave me a copy of Nabokov's Lolita, and I used a couple of lines out of it for the song – 'seaside arms'.

On 'Van Halen ' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning ' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.

I started out writings songs for what I thought was going to be a maximum of five people down our local pub.

I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that.

'Band Played On' is a good one. Barbara Orbison, who was Roy's wife, was involved in publishing in Nashville because she oversaw Roy's publishing, and she had a company in Nashville. She had a whole bunch of writers assembled, and they got together every day and wrote, and they write for everybody in Nashville.