Quotes About Songwriting

It takes me a lot of time, and it's almost frustrating for the guys sometimes because they're waiting for a new song. And I - it's just so important for me to get the perfect, exact, right song.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

Sometimes I start with a great title or idea, sometimes a great melody will run through my mind; but the higher percentage of the time, the words and music pretty much come at the same time.

Lyrics are coming to you all the time. I get inspiration in the middle of the night.

If you get a song right for its usage at the time, it can be useful to others. ...Those songs are more friendly to other artists looking for material.

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

I very rarely sit down with a guitar and try to write a song. I usually think about it a lot and then I'll try to re-create what was in my head at the time.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I find myself improvising a lot. But, sometimes I'll come us with a chorus or just one line and it will sort of hang out for a long time before it get's flushed out into a real living song.

I write all the time, and I write a lot of songs, but before I started putting out records those songs always just ended up on stuff that I did with The Babies.

I didn't write songs for a very long time.

I have a hard time really claiming my place as a songwriter or as doing anything of import really because I feel like I'm tooting my own horn in a way.

Well, I Am... I Said was a very difficult song, very difficult because I really had to spend a lot of time thinking about what I was before the song was written.

The subject matter of Coldplay songs is deeply intertwined with Chris's frame of mind. He has admitted he needs to be slightly morose, maudlin even, to write well. He cannot see how he can write if he is in a serious and happily committed relationship.

Songwriting is a mix of fiction and myth. Things are very romanticised. A song is like a film in that you can say anything you want. So there are parts that are based on truth and there are also parts that just sound good or feel good. It's a mixture of the two. It's all imagery. It's not strictly truth.

I would love to hear someone write a song like 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' rather than 'You're hot. I'm hot. We're in a truck.' It's just mind-numbing to me.

I love to rock 'n roll. But my finest suit, of all the things I do, is as a songwriter.

I will always really work hard to write as much as I can, but I also love sitting back and waiting on those big Nashville songwriters to send me some great songs, too.

One of the songs I wrote while living there was called "Tearing Us Apart," which was about "the committee," the group of Pattie's friends whom I now blamed for coming between us.

I start songs all the time. If I weren't so lazy, I would finish them. It's like when I have a deadline I have to. I always feel very lucky that I am forced to make records at certain times. If I was forced to make 2 records a year, I would write twice as many songs. I can't make myself finish something unless I am forced

All the issues you deal with get more complicated as you get older; it takes more focus to write songs that reflect what you've gone through.

What people fail to realize is that any album we did, really, 90 percent of it reflected the songs people brought in. If someone had brought in two great rock songs for 'Cornerstone'... they would have been on that record.

I'd always tended to regard song lyrics as sort of a bastard medium because they're subjugated under the music. If you were to regard them as poetry, it would be bad, embarrassing, confessional poetry - a lot of the lyrics I love.

I play guitar all the time, and I'm constantly thinking of songs... Every time I pick up a guitar, I come up with different riffs, all different bands I've been in. Sometimes there is a song or riff that could only belong with Slipknot, and I just can't use it for anything else, regardless of whatever happened.