Quotes About Songwriting

I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.

When I'm writing, I try to think about what would make a song better before worrying about personal opinions.

When you write songs for your best friends and maybe two other people to hear, and then realize that a million other people are going to hear them, it can be a bit worrying. You get concerned about what you might reveal.

Record companies worrying more about market share than developing artists - I hear there was a time when if your first record didn't sell 8m copies, you were still given a chance to grow as a songwriter.

What I'm most pleased about is that there's no particular decline. The songs I wrote 40 years ago are no worse and no better - there's a consistency.

I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

I've spent most of my life playing with Tom Petty, and he's a damn good songwriter.

Things began to pick up for me record-wise when in 1971 I wrote 'She's a Lady' for Tom Jones.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well.

My parents' example of a loving, caring relationship, I think, has affected my songwriting a ton and allowed me to start writing love songs that people could connect to without sounding like you're being cheesy, because they're coming from a real place, something that I saw coming up. I think they're a huge influence on my songwriting.

I want to see the guitar in a non-linear sense that encompasses tones, arrangements, songwriting, audio production, and everything else - you have to do it all.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

Springsteen's 'Thunder Road' and Carole King's 'It's Too Late' are examples of why I am a singer/songwriter. I practice these songs every day. The melodies are timeless in the rock world, the lyrics are words that I need to say, and they need to be heard again.

I don't know too many people because I stay at my house, I write songs, I go to the store.

Songwriting helps me sort out my personal problems. With acting, you're just a tool for someone's ideas.

I've used songwriting as a tool, I've used it as a way of being able to talk about how I feel.

When you're in a songwriting class, and you write a song, and you hand it in to a teacher to grade, I'm still going to say that it's a really awesome song whether I got an A or a D. I learned to stick to my guns and take the tools as tools and not as rules.

As I got a little older, I discovered Lori McKenna and Patty Griffin and found out how many other tools we have as songwriters, that there's storytelling and there's ear candy, and that there is a place where they meet, too, and both of those women are really good at doing that.

I remember seeing an interview from the Bee Gees and they were like, 'The biggest competition to the Bee Gees is the Bee Gees.' They just kept trying to top themselves and write better songs, and I'm just always trying to do that.

Writing songs is a profession; so it's not an attempt to take things from my interactions with other people and for some reason give them to a total stranger to listen to. I find it offensive to hear other people do that.

I can't get enough of this guy called Baths. He's a total L.A. dude and really young as well. It's super-electronic, but with almost Hall & Oates-style songwriting. Without the context of the production, it could be super-cheesy, but it has amazing harmonies.

Stevie's very prolific," McVie notes. "She writes constantly, and all her songs are like babies to her, even though some of them are rubbish.