Quotes About Songwriting

It's usually drawing on personal experience. I don't think I could dig deep enough trying to get into somebody else's life. Like 'Far From Me' - I wrote it about this waitress that I was dating when I was fifteen or so, and she broke up with me.

It's always Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits for me - the big three.

I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record.

Songwriting is hard - it's so easy to fall into the same traps. It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up with a song in my head, and I have to finish it so I can fall back asleep.

One day I'll wake up and I'll have 10 or 12 songs and think, 'Oh that sounds like it could be a record.'

When I wake up in the morning, and I go to the piano, and there's a blank sheet of paper in front of me, by the end of the day, that could be a gold mine. You really do need to wake up and expect that the world is your oyster because it very well may be.

'The Taxi Ride,' from my second album, is one people want to hear a lot. I'm consciously trying to walk on the sunny side of the street, to really lift myself into a place of greater positivity, and that's a sad song.

Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle.

I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.

When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I'd write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I'd sit there writing songs with my guitar.

Electric Gypsy' was really raw. I was literally sketching out the lyrics as they walked in the door. I jumped up and had a sheet of paper and I showed them the chords, which are simple. We counted it off, I got the lyrics off the sheet into the song and played a solo at the end - done!

When I walked into the studio, the chorus of 'Nobody Love' was already set. For me, the challenge was to make it have depth.

Sometimes you're gonna write a song and it's not gonna be right from the beginning. And you're just gonna have to work through that wall. But if you know something is there, you've gotta just keep doing it until you get it right. So, I'll work on a song for three months if I have to, to get it right.

I tend to write songs critiquing myself. The best way for me to deal with stuff is to write a song about it... That's not to say all my songs are like that.

It's hard when you're writing for someone else. You obviously always want to do your best work, but sometimes you write and have a song idea and you're like, 'Oh, it's so good I want to keep it for us.'

For me, the more time you can take and the more care you can take with songs, the better off you're going to be.

I always played around with writing songs, but when you're spending a lot of time in bars, you have a lot of big ideas, but you don't do much with them.

I can blame a lot of things for not writing songs, but cancer isn't one of them.

I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I've gotten into writing story-songs.

I wrote 'Show Me the Way' in the morning and wrote 'Baby, I Love Your Way' in the afternoon of the same day. I've been trying to figure out what I ate for breakfast that morning ever since!

I met a girl, and two months after we met I wrote 'Nevermind.' And 'Never Go Back' is actually a song I wrote two or three days after the breakup, after a year and a half. Straight continuation of the story.

I think any great song is difficult to write, in some aspect. It's just difficult to make somebody feel something. That is the main goal. How do you make somebody want to get up and dance? How do you make somebody feel okay after their breakup?

We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs.