Quotes About Songwriting

A whole album to one writer - now that would be really interesting.

I write about things and put things into my albums that I don't talk to people about. I don't hold back or sugarcoat anything.

I kind of like the idea of creating my own literature within my albums. I definitely thought about that when I started writing songs.

Sometimes, I make 50 songs and pick out the best 10. I've been in the studio all day, all night, making the beat, writing the raps. You never know what's gonna be a hit.

I write alternative, folkie pop. It's very acoustic.

I'm never too ambitious when I go into the studio. I always know that I'm just going into the studio to work on or try to develop an idea that I have for a song.

'Freebird' is an anthem, and 'Simple Man' is a very nice song.

I have a lot of songs that I kind of put away, and I don't let anybody else hear them, and those are my songs.

I used to write songs to get love, but now that I have it, I don't feel the need to anymore.

I still write more songs about girls than anything else.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

I've just always written songs in a style that appeal to me personally.

A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.

Movie composer Henry Mancini, stimulated by Audrey to write 'Moon River' and 'Charade' and 'Two for the Road', always maintained that if you listened carefully to these three songs you could almost determine who inspired them. They were all imbued, he said, with Audrey's inimitable wistfulness – 'a kind of slight sadness'.

Lonesome Whistle." Credited to Hank and Jimmie Davis, it was one of a long line of prison songs.

Hank, like most other songwriters, kept his song titles to fewer than five words so that they would fit onto the jukebox cards, and made sure his records timed out at under three minutes and twelve seconds, the time at which a record would automatically eject from a jukebox turntable.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

Sometimes I have a melody in my head; sometimes it's just a verse. I read lines from a book or movies that I watch and grab a few quotes and start writing on paper. From there, I record a really rough version and work on the song.

I always say it took me 10 minutes to write 'Cars,' but if I am honest it could have been even less than that - and it has been a really successful song over the years. It is still massively used, in advertising, in films, and people do cover versions of it a lot.

'Teenage Dream' was the most difficult song I've ever been a part of. We wrote five different versions of it. We couldn't get the lyrics right. Max Martin and Dr. Luke wrote most of the melody, and then Katy Perry and I were responsible for getting the lyrics right.

A Hard Day's Night' is the most perfect pop album you'll ever get to hear in your life; it's filled with definitive versions of the two-minute pop song.

Beck said he didn't believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.

There's probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, 'I think that might have been about me,' or, 'I know it's about me.' I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don't think I'm ever gonna write a song and drop somebody's name in it.

The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?