Quotes About Songwriting

If you are any competent musician, if you have creative ideas, ideas of songs, of arrangements, in a band like the Stones, where these 2 people do all the things, there is no freedom.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.

I ran to get my cassette recorder and sang 'We Got the Beat' into the recorder to document it. I knew I had written something special. It took two minutes. I didn't labor on the lyrics. It's a simple song, which goes back to the '60s, when I had my ears glued to the radio for the Stones, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys.

I think women were just accepted more as songwriters when they sat on a stool with a guitar and had scruffy hair. It was quite insulting really, because it was like saying that if you're pretty and slim and glamorous there's no way anything could be going on between your ears, you just like doing your makeup.

The United States created the best popular songs that were ever written, and from the 1920s to the 1940s, it was a renaissance period. It stopped in 1950.

I must have 300 songs unreleased or unrecorded, lying around. I'm a production machine, it never stops.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

I like people who tell stories. I like storytellers. A lot of my songs are misconceived as being auto-biographical when they're not because I write in the first person.

I consider music to be storytelling, melody and rhythm. A lot of hip-hop has broken music down. There are no instruments and no songwriting. So you're left with just storytelling and rhythm. And the storytelling can be so braggadocious, you're just left with rhythm.

I've always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you're a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can't fit as much in. I'm just a big fan of storytelling.

You have to live what you write, or you have to know it. There are exceptions, like story songs, where you just have to have your facts straight. But I think you don't have to live a hard life to be a good or interesting songwriter.

You've got to be a really straight man to write a song like 'It's Raining Men.'

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write.

I think sometimes when I sit down to write a song, it doesn't come out naturally, but when you are writing an email to someone, especially if you are writing to a stranger, you write much more spontaneously, and it's freer.

I'm really proud of 'Kissing Strangers.'

Harrison brought along a copy of a new record he was obsessed with, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. On only his second album, Dylan turned in an all-original breakout with meteors like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Lennon and McCartney sponged it up as only two songwriters could while they hammered out sound-track songs for their movie, which would begin filming in March.

It sounds odd, but I was a singer and started writing songs, and I didn't have anything in mind. Maybe it crossed my mind that it would be cool to have a hit record and a career, but that was so out of reach that I don't think I thought about it that much.

A close girlfriend of mine and I have been writing and playing together for years and decided to make it official, so we formed a band called 'Everly.'

I think the first time I tried to write a romantic song, it was just horrendously embarrassing. I remember thinking, 'Okay, I'm not going to do that anymore.' I think that sort of embarrassed me for the next 10 years.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I've had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

I deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.