Quotes About Songwriting

Simple Plan's trademark is pretty easy. By the time the song ends, you can sing it. It doesn't take 20 listens. It's hard to write those songs but we try our best.

I basically had the idea when I was 18 that I wanted to write my own songs. I knew it was going to be a long, tough road, and I was like, if I just begin now, by the time I'm 40, I'll be good at it.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

Spending a lot of time alone, gave me a lot of time to think. A lot of time to think gave me the time to write songs.

I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.

I was a different person before I started to write. When I realized I could be a songwriter and that people would listen - that was when I started feeling good in my life.

Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound.

Faith is a really important part of my life and inspires me in all facets of my life, including my songwriting and my singing.

Most of the songs I write are just very directly from my life. I don't have a big imagination. Whenever I tried to write from fantasy, it comes out sounding really fake.

The launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers sounds, I think I'll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.

And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I'm pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top.

Once I had recognized that it was not my vocation to write a happy ending, I did my damnedest to avoid one entirely. I once referred to this process as "Messing up my life, so I could write stupid little songs about it," and I can't improve on that description here, but then songs are never exactly taken from life.

There's so much fear involved in trying to do something you don't know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

I use writing as a counselling session - recently I've written a song for Paloma Faith, so after being a singer, I'm happy to keep writing for other people.

I just kind of go with what I am feeling and don't think I have any kind of recipe for it... I mean, that's what drew me into writing. It's fun, and sometimes you don't get a great song. Sometimes you do.

I don't start a song with an idea of what ingredients are going to go into a song. It's not like a recipe. I will normally either talk from personal experience or I'll make a character and then try to allow that character to behave the way he or she naturally would.

When I started college, I wrote a song 'Pee Jaun,' with a friend. I never intended to make mainstream music, but that song did really well and I got some recognition.

If there's going to be another Misfits record, I'd probably have to write the stuff.

I can't freestyle or else I'll just start saying anything, so I'll write the song first and then record. I'll rap to the producer and he'll make the beat off my rap.

When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.

The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation.

When I got my first email from a record label, I decided I didn't want to go in with just one song, so I sat down and kept on writing.

I had basically been shelved by the record label for two years and I was writing songs every day. I made two albums that just never came out, and that was just a really big knock to my confidence, because everything I sent seemed like it just wasn't good enough.