Quotes About Songwriting

I don't like to talk about my songs. It's self-defeating, it is the antithesis of what a songwriter wants to do. He writes a song so he doesn't have to talk about it.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

It's funny because my main awkwardness around writing the song had little to do with the method.

There's this art form in songwriting that's incredibly difficult - to be really funny in a song and also really touching. I can't do that.

I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I say, "I think I might have written that."

Funny songs aren't usually that good. Like Weird Al and maybe a couple of Beatles songs, but it's kind of hard to bring humor into rock music in an interesting way.

One of my real goals was to hear someone whistling a song I'd written.

I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself.

Coldplay's ultimately show-stopping opus "Fix You" might never have seen the light of day had Chris given up and caved in when Guy politely asked of him one morning: "So, 'tears stream down your face, and AAAAH.' What's that all about, then?

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don't care about instrumental prowess. I don't care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I'm a songwriter and I'm familiar with Cage and I couldn't really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn't interest me and I'm astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up, but I'm so out of practice, and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

I like to write with people I have a relationship with otherwise it's kind of scary, and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.

Falling in love is awesome, but I'm never drawn to happy songs per se, so whenever you sit down to write a heartbreak song and you're happily in love, it's like, 'OK, now I have to go back to a sad place to get something good.'

Do you want to know how to write a song? Songwriting is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key - putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don't know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle and again you wait and you watch. And if that doesn't do it, you shoot the clown.

Everyone remembers Syd for his songwriting, but he probably deserves equal credit for his radical concept of improvised rock music.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter, but I think I've learned a lot about it, and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

Taylor Swift dates guys so she can write a breakup song about them. I don't think she's dating for love - I think she's dating for creativity. So let's get her off the market and put her in dating detox. If she really wants love, she has to stop writing music about them.

What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.

One evening Bowie vented his frustration, says Pitt, by telling him, "I'm going to write some Top Ten rubbish," then proceeded to write a song that was neither. "Let Me Sleep Beside You" would be his first collaboration with Tony Visconti, the producer with whom he's most associated; the finest song Bowie had written to that point, it also became the cause of his biggest artistic setback.

Pythagoras felt that specific notes affected people to very minute gradations of feeling. And every songwriter, I think, knows that D is a great key for a long song. It just happens to work. And B flat is always a great jump key for jazz. ~ Janis Ian

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.