Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself - and if other people like it, that's great.
I always have loved music, ever since I was really little. I just loved to sing. I can't really explain it, except maybe - and this is going to sound really stupid - when I would listen to a song it would make me more excited than anything else could.
The travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you're doing. You are really called into service - and it's the service industry man, it's blue collar man, I'm sweating by the second song. It's construction work from that second song on.
You know...sometimes I'll be looking out at the audience and I'll be in the middle of a song, and I'll just stop dead. I'll look out at them, and think what is this... There's one thing that keeps me doing it though, I really love it, I believe in it.
Some sang too that Thror and Thrain would come back one day and gold would flow in rivers, through the mountain-gates, and all that land would be filled with new song and new laughter. But this pleasant legend did not much affect their daily business.
James Taylor is the kind of person I always thought the word 'folksinger' referred to. He writes and sings songs that are reflections of his own life, and performs in them in his own style. All of his performances are marked by an eloquent simplicity.
Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.
I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can.
I felt really bad for someone who is swimming in so much hate. I just thought, that's someone who's in a really bad spot, and I am in such a happy spot. I laugh my head off every day with my husband and my kids who are mooning me and singing me songs.
I would say a great song [is where] you like everything in the song. The lyrics move you, the beat makes you want to dance and you feel invincible when you listen to that song. A good song I think you can listen to but you get tired of it really fast.
I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know.
With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.
Like a good song, life has verses, the goliards had taught me. Each verse has to be sung. It takes all of them to make a song. It is the entire chanson you name, but when you think of it, when you smile, it is a favorite verse that delights your ears.
The nice thing about doing a pop opera is that, because the convention is set from the beginning that this is an opera and everything is sung, there is never that feeling of "Why is this person bursting out into song?" because the whole thing is sung.
Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.
It was disturbing to me that an idea or a song could become something so different from what you originally intended. It's like if a friend took a stupid picture of you at a party on their phone, and the next thing you knew, it was on every billboard.
I'd written a lot of songs with hummingbirds in them. None of them ever came to anything, but I did write a few lines last month. It went like this: 'Listen to the hummingbird whose wings you cannot see. Listen to the hummingbird, don't listen to me'.
In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English sang me What Did You Learn In School Today? in Bengali! Tom Paxton’s songs are reaching around the world more than he is, or any of us could have realized. Keep on, Tom!
The melodies were melodies that anybody could sing or hum or whistle. And the words were just about that simple. I think the stories Hank told in his song fit so many people. Nearly everybody in the audience acted as if Hank were singin to them alone.
The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them...and royally squander their lives with her.
Looking at the original lyrics [of "A Song For You" ] as I was preparing it, I thought, "Wow! I feel like it was written for me." That's what a great song does. You don't have to do a lot of homework. You can just say the words and it springs to life.
Where is the video of Kanye [West] telling me he was going to call me 'that b***h' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that b***h' in front of the entire world.
My feelings are, if you're gonna lead a rock n' roll lifestyle, don't let it affect your work. I know I can stay up all night and still come in the next day and write a song, and nothing will stop me from doing it. I expect the same from everyone else.
I got one entire song from fortune cookies (Land of Sunshine). On another one, I took words from different Frank Sinatra songs and pasted them together. Another one, I was just driving around and there was a piece of paper on the ground, so I stole it.
Someone told me about drama schools, and they seemed like mythological places - you can really go and be in drama classes all day? I inadvertently entered into this world where people wore bicycle clips and did song-and-dance routines in the corridors.
I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.
If you think of the way Howlin' Wolf made records, you get the feeling there wasn't a production manager onsite, or a publicist having his say on how he should sing the songs. When you listen to his records, you feel like you're tapping into his voice.
Life was not intended to be simply a round of work, no matter how interesting and important that work may be. A moment’s pause to watch the glory of a sunrise or a sunset is soul-satisfying, while a bird's song will set the steps to music all day long.
I don't want to try to recreate for no reason. Like, me in my bedroom, singing songs to a camera was a special thing that was at that time in my life. But I'm just not that kid. I like the format of it, but I want to be able to release things for free.
It was just like a dream. I could have ended up with an album that's not all that different from anything else coming out of Nashville. Mutt made the difference. He took these songs, my attitude, my creativity, and colored them in a way that is unique.
I met people that I couldn't talk to - they didn't speak Spanish or English - but they knew my songs. That's what I love, the music has gone past where I thought it would get to. That's the power of music, how it can travel and break language barriers.
P.I.L. has been a favorite of mine since high school especially there metal box album. The guitarist Keith Levine gets some of the best sounds ever to come out of a guitar. The songs are really free form and experimental and have a heavy dub influence.
'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.
I sometimes try to write something that is actually really simple and I can't do it. So, then, it's not simple anymore. It's really hard and it gets all messed up. I sometimes sit down and try to write a song with just three chords and it doesn't work.
You can't just walk into someone's house and take $15 bucks out of someone's wallet and then walk out with their song. You can't do that. You got to know the difference between stealing from being cool to the band and paying them what they're deserved.
The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.
'Spectrum' is in part a disco song. But we play it hard, and it's a real euphoric, wailing tune. It's kind of like a total house anthem, in a way, but it seems to be going down really well. We've got all the grunge kids going mad for disco house raves.
Miley is always on, she’s always funny, she’s always writing songs, she’s always making music. The parallel of the film is like Miley says, going back to her home, going back to her roots. Getting back to Tennessee was art imitating life imitating art.
There's a truth to the fact that it's hard to be real. It's easy to be indulgent. It's easy to be bubble gum, but it's hard to find a real thing that really makes your soul tick. It's painful and honest. It can be more challenging than just a sad song.
There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.
I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.
My goal in this music business is to be here as long as I'm alive. I want my music to be here. I want to be the Michael Jackson and the Prince of hip-hop. I want to be a legend. I want to change the world. I want to give them songs that mean something.
Well, the moral of the story, The moral of this song, Is simply that one should never be Where one does not belong. So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin', Help him with his load, And don't go mistaking Paradise For that home across the road.
I am fine with 'Puppy Love.' I hated it for a while. But I still sing it. I have a country version, a sexy version and a cheesy nightclub version. I am trying to infuse it with maturity. I will never escape that song. I will always be Mr. 'Puppy Love.'
I have a song entitled "Just Ain't My Day" that is a straight country song almost. My vocals are very soulful it's a different kind of record but people's response to it is beyond powerful. Proving that good music is good music regardless of the genre.
When you love what you do, you just really fall in love with it. Sometimes you record a lot more songs than the album will even hold. You record like 300 songs and only 12 songs go on the album. It takes time. But if you love what you do, it works out.
We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?
I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.
I sing the best when I'm really in my voice. It's kind of like I'm meditating but I sort of imagine my voice as a physical thing. I see colours, I feel it moving out of me and I try to tap into images that I was tapping into when I was writing the song.
Writing a song is almost like cheating-writing because you don't have to finish your sentences, you don't have to use any punctuation, no one's going to edit your work. It's so wide open. People just grunt and that's a song. You can kind of do anything.