Quotes About Songwriting

We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.

All I ever wanted to do was write songs and get on a bus and go play them for people.

You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

I have the most eclectic audience - I've got gay, I've got straight, black, white, rich, poor, young, old, in 45 countries. And they don't all come because I'm the Sinatra kid, though that's a big part of it. My biggest successes have come from pop songs that I write myself.

I've had a lot of successes as a songwriter, and I really have nothing to prove in that arena, so I'm just excited about the next challenge of pursuing this artist thing.

I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.

One of the big songwriting things for me has always been: always think what you do sucks. Because the second you stop believing that, you suck. And that's a fact.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.

I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.

For me, songwriting is really where it's at. I turn to use the guitar just to help me write the songs. That's it. As a result, my guitar playing suffers pretty horribly.

I got this book called 'How to Write the Popular Song.' I read that and went through all the things they suggested, and I learned how to do it.

Rakesh is very strict and he will never use suggestive words in a song. Yes, he wants modern melodies but he wants the lyrics to be clean.

It was immaterial to me that Elvis didn't write his own songs. Those were very different days, and he selected whatever suited him best from material supplied by publishing houses and teams of writers - all of whom were extremely conscious of his style of delivery.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

Normally I begin writing a song with just with aim to express something, and sometimes I don't know what I want to express until a sentence comes to my head that will sum up everything about how I'm feeling at the time.

I spent the summer of '88 indoors, writing 'Shoot You Down,' 'Bye Bye Badman,' and 'Don't Stop.'

The inspiration for 'Ai Dil Mere' happened at 4:30 A.M. on a Sunday.

I remember writing Sunday Morning' and Gwen wasn't feeling well that day and I had an acoustic guitar and I started singing, Somebody is feeling quite ill ' and that became Sunday Morning.'

People don't realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiselled down into a song that has to be sung.

A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.

I think I write very good songs. But I don't know if anybody could record my songs with as much fervor. They sound good sung by me, and they especially sound good with my band.

I hear my songs being sung by females before I change them and make them into my voice.

At first, I didn't focus that much on the Internet. I was more, 'I'm going to write songs,' and I'd have sung that song out in a club, pub, or a jam session or whatever 10 times before I recorded it. We live in an Internet age, and if you don't embrace it, you get left behind a bit.