Songwriters Quotes

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. ~ Laurie Colwin

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block. ~ Joni Mitchell

Whenever an artist becomes dominated by his own ignorance, his art loses value, for it is only the professional artist that can be humble enough to admit that he is a tool in the hands of creativity. ~ Robin Sacredfire

When you research prolific songwriters, it is usually later in their career they write songs that they distance themselves from, or it's about other people. ~ Paloma Faith

Anyone who knows the history of the Pete Best Band or the Combo, we were on the verge of breaking in in America. In the mid-'60s, I had great songwriters; we wrote some great stuff. ~ Pete Best

I'm doing more deep listening, which is part of the role or job of the songwriter. I think with a lot of songwriting, songs sing themselves to you tonally and also lyrically. And it's not necessarily your own visual memories that are writing the song. It's like there are words that you can catch out there and you have to be able to see and hear them. ~ Mirah

I've asked about you and they told me things but my mind didn't change and I still feel the same. ~ Drake

I think our storytellers - our songwriters should be great storytellers, and they should be mountain climbers and explorers, because music is something that can cross all different borders. ~ Jason Mraz

I appreciate a songwriter like Morrissey with so much restraint. ~ Zooey Deschanel

A lot of people, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and a lot of people have written for other people, and of course Bruno Mars. So I think it's a great way to break into the industry and show people what you can do and show them your talent and people tend to listen a little differently to your own music as an artist, when you've proven yourself as a good songwriter for other artists. ~ Bonnie McKee

There are certain topics songwriters stay away from because it's hard to go there. I didn't sit down and go, 'I want to write something about my dad now.' ~ Robert Coppola Schwartzman

All the songwriters that I worked with said they'd like to work with me again. Such things serve as much inspiration for me. I regard myself a melody maker so it made me happy to be recognized for my work. ~ Seungri

The songs he chose reflected that same withdrawn, private man, but this man had the gift of expressing his inner soulscape through the medium of some of the 20th century's finest songwriters, from Rodgers and Hart to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Jimmy Webb, and as always, making those songs his own. ~ Neil Peart

I'm a writer, first and foremost, and I sort of take my cues from the songwriters of the '70s, who are talking about what's really important to them. ~ Tift Merritt

There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated. ~ Pete Seeger

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end. ~ Steve Earle

Roman Polanski is one of my favorite filmmakers, and John Phillips one of my favorite songwriters. I had the honor to meet each of these men and was almost giddy to be blessed with the chance to tell each artist what his work meant has to me. ~ Allison Anders

I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves. ~ Neil Young

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too. ~ Tom Waits

That's one of the things I love about being a songwriter first, last and always, because whether I do it or not, if someone does a great job on it, my work is done. ~ Carole King

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing ... I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now. ~ Bruce Hornsby

I'd love to claim the title of 'songwriter' or 'intellectual,' but the truth is that anything that I ever learned how to do in conjunction with music was purely so that I would have a platform to sing from. ~ Brandi Carlile

I've had the pleasure of hearing The Novelists perform live. They are gifted songwriters and talented musicians with strong lead voices. This is a band with lots of heart & soul. ~ Daryl Stuermer

I keep reading about people who want to be famous - it's not that they want to be great songwriters or great actors, they want to be celebrities. That is scary because you can be famous doing some really stupid things. ~ Barry Manilow

It's funny, I think after you are a star like Sting and you no longer think you need any guidance or aid - it would be great to see those stars work with other songwriters. ~ Meshell Ndegeocello

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain. ~ Frank Zappa

My job as a songwriter is to write good songs. ~ Greg Brown

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that. ~ Dave Gahan

I do all the things that singer-songwriters do. I introduce the songs, I have a story to tell about everything all the time - I cannot be on stage and have something on my mind without telling the audience. I'm super emotional and expressive and vulnerable in that moment. ~ India.Arie

I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me. ~ Cyndi Lauper

I was a different person before I started to write. When I realized I could be a songwriter and that people would listen - that was when I started feeling good in my life. ~ Gwen Stefani

When I write songs, I like to write lyrics first, and I think that's different from a lot of singer-songwriters. But I heard Sammy Cahn was asked what comes first, the lyrics or the music, and he said, 'The paycheck.' ~ Jill Sobule

I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard. ~ Louis Tomlinson

Artistes breathe and dream creativity! ~ Avijeet Das

I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing. ~ Avicii

Compassion is an action word with no boundaries. ~ Prince

The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter. ~ Andrew Bird

I see what other people do and what songwriters don't. They don't get out and take care of themselves. Producers turn themselves into a massive brand. Songwriters tend to be under someone else's umbrella. If you're building your own legacy, it can't be under an umbrella. ~ Ester Dean

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer. ~ Keith Richards

Tits and cunts and legs and lips and mouths and tongues and assholes! How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For Love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together - the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn't it something more like weakness? Isn't it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn't it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that "love" that the marriage counsellors and songwriters and psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? ~ Philip Roth

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun. ~ Rosanne Cash

I've never in my life bought a big piece of jewelry - like, 'I'm gonna get myself a big piece of jewelry!' Songwriters' lives are unstable and up and down. Even though mine has sort of has followed more of a going toward the sky trajectory. ~ Kara DioGuardi

One of my favorite songs is 'Ghost' by Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers wrote that, and she is one of the most talented songwriters ever. ~ Tig Notaro

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places. ~ Anne Lamott

Music is a handshake where I, as a songwriter, am only part of the equation. I love that, the fact that you can make the song your own. ~ Jon Foreman

A lot of people do not like singer-songwriters, and a lot of people who like them do not like hard rock. It's either-or. ~ Art Alexakis

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. ~ Norah Jones

It seems like songwriting for most songwriters is only one season in their life, a five or ten year period. For me, I don't worry about it, but I know there might come a day when I can't write anymore, or don't have good song ideas or the fire to do it anymore. ~ Rodney Clawson

As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me. ~ Mel Brooks

Singer/songwriters spend two or three years making an album, and then it goes up for sale and everybody pirates it and you don't make any money. Whereas, writing a film score you still get presented with a paycheck. ~ Cliff Martinez

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics. ~ Denis Leary

He [Patrick Stump] is been a friend of ours for a long time, and when we were talking about working with different producers and songwriters for the record, Patrick's name came up. We were excited to work with him - he's a very gifted lyricist and songwriter, and a really cool guy and it was a pleasure to work with him in the studio. ~ Mark Hoppus

As a songwriter you have an umbilical cord to the song and it's hard to expand on your understanding of the lyrics. Whereas when you cover a song you can create your own reason why you're attached to it. ~ K.d. Lang

It's a songwriter's dream to have a song recorded and run up the charts. ~ Valerie Simpson

I feel like this song [Yello, "Oh Yeah"] was probably done in a couple of minutes in a studio. There was probably no thought behind it; they were just playing with some samples and threw it together. I feel like there's no dream behind the song. Usually there's a dream or some kind of passion attached to a song. This song feels very empty. It made a lot of money for the songwriters but at the expense of culture. ~ Margaret Cho

And I can say this, most of the people who have recorded my songs are songwriters themselves. ~ Smokey Robinson

We only had enough money really to cut 10 things and be in there for a month because it's expensive, you know. And, singer/songwriters, today are lucky if they can get a deal, you know. So, we actually worked so fast that we really cut 20 things. ~ Graham Nash

I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions. ~ Barry McGuire

I'm really happy that I got to work with such fresh talent. In a day when record companies are not particularly good at encouraging young, talented songwriters to come forward and get exposure, I think it's important to give tomorrow's songwriters the opportunity. ~ Robin Gibb

I've had offers to sign a record deal, but the people I've talked to have wanted to package me and have me meet with songwriters who've written stuff for Whitney Houston, that sort of thing. That's not at all my style. ~ Lukas Haas

I hope you don't get known for nothing crazy, cause no man ever wants to hear those stories bout his lady. ~ Drake

I can speak for most songwriters - those breakup love songs are so easy to write, as far as the inspiration and all that. ~ Lucinda Williams

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point. ~ Paul Thomas Anderson

The best songs that I write usually come in, like, two minutes, and I think a lot of songwriters would probably say those kind of songs that come just like that are the good ones. ~ Lauren Hart

I thought [ as a kid], "Maybe I don't want to start a punk band necessarily. I just want to learn to be a great songwriter," and got really into trying to figure out how that could be possible. ~ Ezra Furman

As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge. ~ John Fogerty

She did get put through the system with a lot of the hit songwriters, who were great songwriters, but it was more like 'This is how it's done here. It turned her off - not specific people, but the whole system turned her off. And she wanted to do something, I think, that she could play for her friends in Texas and they would say, Okay, well you're still Miranda. ~ Frank Liddell

People may not tell you how they feel about you, but they always show you. Pay attention. ~ Keri Hilson

I would love to play with Rufus Wainwright. He's one of my favorite songwriters. ~ Sydney Wayser

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction. ~ Jimi Hendrix

There is a downside to having one of the biggest-selling albums ever. ~ Carole King

Songwriters tell the truth. ~ Kara DioGuardi

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house! ~ Nanci Griffith

As you can imagine, over the years I have been asked many times to discuss and explain my song "American Pie" I have never discussed the lyrics, but have admitted to the Holly reference in the opening stanzas. You will find many interpretations of my lyrics but none of them by me ... Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence. ~ Don McLean

In the beginning I had a lot of self-imposed limitations as far as production and instrumentation. It was really inspiring for us at the time, because those limitations allowed us to push ourselves as songwriters and gave us a strong sound that people could recognize as ours, like wearing a leather jacket every day. A uniform. They know it's you - and that's great - but my original intention wasn't to be a shoegaze band or to be derivative of one sound. ~ Tamaryn

There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them. ~ Billy Bragg

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting. ~ Rodney Atkins

All songwriters are links in a chain. ~ Pete Seeger

I kicked the door open, and I'm gonna hold my leg in there. I'm keeping the door open for all these amazing female singer-songwriters that are coming out. ~ Miranda Lambert

I built a reputation as a songwriter in the industry before my own hits. People were used to coming to me for songs. There were songs like 'Clown' and 'Mountains' that were my songs that I wanted to keep. But the record labels saw me as a songwriter. It was hard to get people to believe in me as an artist. ~ Emeli Sande

What I wanted to be and who I am is a singer and a songwriter. I wanted to be onstage, and I wanted the world to hear my music. The product of that is fame and the disgusting celebrity that goes along with it. But celebrity does not equal creativity. ~ Katy Perry

What Autotune allows is for people like myself and Kanye West not to depend on the singer. Back in the Fifties, the songwriter was rendered invisible. Now the songwriter is there in the forefront. ~ Will.i.am

I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love. ~ Elton John

As a songwriter, I don't rush. I may sit on lyrics for two years before the music hits. ~ Ben Harper

I was only a folk singer for about two years ... . By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, ... the word art has never lost its vitality. ~ Joni Mitchell

I mean, just like every other prominent songwriter or producer, you have the shot. You send in records and if they make it, they make it. If they get heard, they get heard. I'm not sure if you know how that circle of songwriting and producing works, but every time a big artist is working, everybody and their mother is in the studio writing records to try to get on it. ~ Bryce Wilson

Magic is easy if you put your heart into it. ~ Michael Jackson

As a songwriter, it's kind of hard to listen to your own stuff with clarity. ~ Stone Gossard

So many artists who came out during that time, including myself, were able to get on radio. New forms of singer-songwriters developed out of that. ~ Carly Simon

Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two 'fabulist' writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it's all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it--who couldn't do that and make it colorful? (Readable, of course, is another matter...) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters--well, that's hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they're just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton. ~ Nick Hornby

Increasing the volume does not improve the quality of a bad song. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head. ~ Lenny Kravitz

My parents were both very musically inclined, they were both songwriters and musicians, so we grew up in the house singing music together, and R&B had a huge strong arm in the foundation of my career. ~ Jesse McCartney

In many ways, Viv and I were the only ones who were really songwriters. ~ Neil Innes

I think I'm different from a lot of singer-songwriters because some of my favorite singer-songwriters told stories. Like John Prine. ~ Jill Sobule

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. ~ Steve Earle

I like singer-songwriters, and I find sad songs comforting rather than depressing. It makes you realise you're not alone in the world. ~ Natalie Imbruglia

This world is bullshit. And just because I appear in music video wherein I am in my underwear, and make young women feel not good enough so that they become anorxeic; and okay, maybe because of that I became popular more quickly than other singers who are, I don't know, maybe more talented or better songwriters. That doesn't matter because, and ... um ... my boyfriend is a magician, and he can pull a quarter out of your ear and say things like 'We have not met before have we?' Go with yourself. ~ Janeane Garofalo

I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard. ~ Leon Bridges

A lot of times songs are very much of a moment, that you just encapsulate. They come to you, you write them, you feel good that day, or bad that day. ~ Mick Jagger