Quotes About Songwriting

The lyrics - everything I sing, I've written.

I'm more honest in my lyrics than I am in anything else. It's where I feel the most safe to express myself.

If I don't write a song, I only record it when it's played for me for the first time and I connect to it, am empowered by it, and have a deep connection to the lyrics.

Until Mad Season, I didn't have that confidence to write songs, and I really got it, playing with these guys. It meant the world to me.

When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don't do songs from outside people.

I don't know, I've always written songs that are mainly about attitude, not me personally.

I still maintain the fact that when I write songs, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think about it pragmatically. I say what's in my brain, and sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's terrible.

I found it easier to make up songs than to learn other people's songs.

Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly - they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.

The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories.

I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

Songwriting is an emotional medium, and rock and roll is an emotional medium.

For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there's some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

Experience is definitely the high road once driven. It actually enhances the songwriting and song sourcing process.

When I write a song, I see a tunnel, and then the chorus is an open space, or the bassline is doing this shape. I see songs as a more of a geometric, spacial experience.

I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.

As was Max's method of demo making, all the hooks in the song were worked up to their finished state, but most of the verses were unfinished, often mere vowel sounds. There was no bridge yet, because, as Lunt puts it, "Max would say, 'If you don't like the song by then, fuck you'—in his polite Swedish way, of course.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I can plunk out enough chords to write a song, but I'm completely afraid to play guitar in front of other people. It's a fear of failure, I guess.

I plan to write more songs of my own, especially on behalf of the animals we needlessly raise for food, at their great expense, and at great expense to our precious, deteriorating planet.

Please rehearse new material," Brian's telegram said. They chose to interpret this as "please write new material" and, in this instant, the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was effectively reborn.