Quotes About Songwriting

My first significant break was when I was 15, going on 16, and my cousin Courtney 'Bear' Sills told me you can make a career out of writing songs. He was the one who put me in with 112. The first song I did with 112 was 'We Can Do It Anywhere.'

I don't have any particular methodology, to tell you the truth. 'Silver Blue' took exactly the amount of time to write that it takes to sing it, and 'Prisoner in Disguise' took about a year and a half. So you just never know.

I'm born and raised Long Island. Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Ben Gibbard - melody-driven guys... They shaped me, molded my music.

Paul Simon is the king!

As a pop musician, as someone who makes songs, the best ideas are the simplest. They come, and that's the lightning bolt moment.

Simplicity is the key for me. I can't write clever songs; I just can't do it.

Instead of this dumb rain check idea, I'll write a song about a guy who likes a girl who works in a bookstore but he won't tell her. And the clichés keep coming, he grumbled. Quit being one, then, she said.

When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me.

Because of who I am, and how open I am, there's something inherently political about just writing love songs.

Write down everything you can think of, no matter how stupid it seems. I always write down my thoughts throughout the day. Sometimes good things come out of it, and I'll find an idea to develop into a song, so my best advice is to try and draw inspiration from everyday things.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

There's always a personal satisfaction in writing a song by yourself. You get the inspiration, and see it through, and you're done. It's focused and very personal.

I am never without my lyric book. If anything inspirational happens, I have it there so nothing's forgotten.

For me, I write some songs that are really important to me, and I've got some feedback where some of them help folks and inspire people.

Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful.

I didn't know they would pay you money to sit in a room and write songs for other people. I always thought that George Strait was singing a song, he made it up, and that was the end of it. But the instant I found that out, that that could be a job, I thought, 'That's the job for me. I gotta figure out how to do that.'

I don't try to write songs that will further my career. I write about things that I care about. I don't have a career as much as I'm having an adventure with a guitar. I never liked the business way of doing it. You have to follow some sort of instinct.

I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.

I'm not one of those guys who can just take a guitar into a room and come out with a song. I need all my instruments dotted around.

The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.

I started writing songs by myself. That always came from whatever I was feeling and being honest about that because I never had any intention of anyone ever hearing them.

I could write songs on the beach, but the interior darkness, we have it all. We have it.