Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song.
I could go play some songs for two hours every week - play whatever I wanted to - and then also spend that time putting more music on my computer and getting into more things. It definitely informs the way that I think about music and I think in general, made me a more open-minded consumer of music.
Everybody tends to overplay live. That's just the nature of playing live. And that can be great, but it can also kill something that's special, and intimate, about a recorded version of a song. You find out very quickly which songs you can play, and which songs you do damage to by playing them live.
I think that anyone really can write songs, it just takes having an idea and a feeling and chasing it, and you can learn more about it. I think that's why I go to so many sessions. It is a craft that you can learn from other people. I find it to be the most fascinating thing. So I write a lot, yeah!
In 'Purab Aur Paschim,' there's one of the nicer patriotic scenes which is patriotic without going jingoistic. There's a scene set in a rotating restaurant, where Pran, who has left India, is completely running India down and Manoj Kumar is taking up for India. And there's that song 'Jab Zero Diya.'
Even when I was with Arista records, which was the freest part of my career, you still have to run a lot of stuff by committee whether it's a budget, or the album artwork, or how may songs you get to record. This was total freedom. We had nobody to answer to. We didn't have to get anything approved.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine.
I'm a Syd Barrett fan, and early Pink Floyd, and then about two things from the rest of their career. I don't like them, really. I mean, I like the psychedelic stuff. I listen to the first albums, and even on those, they go off and off and off. Songs that are 20 minutes long. I don't like long songs.
When I first started writing songs and being very explicit, it was hard, but one of the main things people respond to in my writing is that 'just say it' attitude of my songs. There really is nothing personal or private; it's all universal, if you can just find the courage to be open about your life.
With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.
I loved both [Bob] Seger and the Eagles, knowing why they didn't play some of the songs I wanted to hear. But at the same time, they covered all the big bases, and the stuff that most people had heard. But they definitely had a bunch of album cuts that I wanted to hear that they didn't get around to.
Today, I'd like to talk to Bob Marley. I'd just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don't know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from 'Redemption Song' to 'Is This Love?' and 'I Shot the Sheriff.'
You know, the age thing really bugs me. Do people have more of a right to not like what I say because I'm 19? I'm up here because of what I write. Obviously, I must know something, or I wouldn't have been nominated for Best New Artist. Sometimes it's like, "You're right. My mother wrote these songs."
To be honest, that whole exchange with Crunk Feminist actually made me write the song because I realize there's a lot of young women out there so hurt by the misogynistic images in hip-hop they paint it with such a broad brush stroke that they think anybody that defends hip-hop is defending misogyny.
I think as an over-protective parent of my songs: I always feel like none of them get enough attention. There are the ones that get attention on the radio, but that's one thing. You always feel like people are not quite hearing what it is that you think makes a song special, and that takes time, too.
When you sing R&B songs in front of an audience, you look out and there's 85% women. I think R&B music is sort of designed for a man singing to a woman. I don't sing it like the sexy thing, but sort of pseudo-sexy. We rally the women together because it's about being independent and things like that.
Gather yourself by the sea shore and I will love you there. Assemble yourself with wild things, with songs of the sparrow and sea-foam. Let mad beauty collect itself in your eyes and it will shine - Calling me. For I long for a man with nests of wild things in his hair. A man who will Kiss the Flame.
I wanted to try to make songs that worked as songs, not just as productions. People wanted me to do a solo acoustic session, they were like "Can you play song on the piano?" and I was like "Not really. It doesn't really work." I wanted to write songs that would work in a variation of instrumentation.
I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song and it means something different.
What Whitney Houston has accomplished will never be accomplished. She's the most famous person on the planet as far as vocaling and her songs. So I'm very happy that I can sit here and say I had a chance to know her. And I'm still dazed that she's gone. But she lives because her music is so powerful.
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
I was working with Toby Gad, who spent a lot of time in India. There's a sitar [in "Body Shop"] and the song has a very Indian flavor to it. I liked the idea of the body of a car as a kind of sexual metaphor - What you do to a car, what you do in a car - drive. So, lots of innuendos, and lots of fun.
I feel like you have to constantly keep proving yourself, and you have to constantly keep getting out there and showing them you're more than just that one song on the radio that's just playing. And that's what I had to do the first time around; I had to keep going out there and keep performing live.
I just wanted to finally release something that sounded really fun, and 'Must Be Love' is that song! I'm telling you, I went to the Philippines and sang that live for everyone, and everyone was singing along, and I thought, 'Wow!' Everyone was singing this song back to me because everyone loves love.
I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not.
Beauty imposes reverence in the Spring, Grave as the urge within the honeybuds, It wounds us as we sing. Beauty is joy that stays not overlong. Clad in the magic of sincerities, It rides up in a song. Beauty imposes chastenings on the heart, Grave as the birds in last solemnities Assembling to depart.
Steve Jobs was one of the first people to understand that the computer wasn't just a tool, but that it could be an extension of ourselves, and he positioned Apple that way. The iPod was this revolutionary device with the idea of 1,000 songs in your pocket, and then that machine represents who you are.
There's a certain feeling of giving, a certain feeling of generosity in love songs. When you sing a song of love, you're actually giving something to yourself, too. You're singing and casting these affirmations of love out into the universe. It resonates in your body in a way that feels extraordinary.
I can't control how high my song goes on the charts, you know what I mean. I mean, I can sway it a little bit by working as hard as I can, hopefully being a decent person and giving good interviews and working hard on the road and being nice to people and shaking hands and doing everything you can do.
All I cared about was the music, like hearing Townes [ Van Zandt] talking about "For the sake of the song"; it's all that mattered. In spite of me a couple of things happened, mainly the Eagles and Seven Bridges Road. That certainly helped me survive. Joan Baez, Rita Coolidge, and Ian Matthews did it.
Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.
Sometimes the show needs that kick in the ass so being able to sing a Nirvana song kind of takes it there. I've grown up putting on extravagant shows with Girl Talk so when I'm playing I like to go nuts. After 30 minutes of pointing and clicking it's nice to scream into a microphone for three minutes.
Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist's eye and a human heart and soul. His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details. Deep stuff. And they get better every time you listen to them.
There are two things that really move me: music and acting. And I'm not talking about my music or watching myself as an actor, but listening to other people's music and watching other actors. There are so many different songs that have moved me. It all depends upon the mood that I'm in at that moment.
Generally, if you could picture a bunch of rock and roll momentum behind a song and it was particularly melodious, maybe the Pornographers would do it. If it was kind of moody and more lyrical, then maybe it would be a Destroyer song. Anything that's really lyrically driven I would keep for Destroyer.
To me, I always felt like drums have to be the support and the driving factor in a song, and there's places where the drummer has to show off and do things and get the spotlight, but not all the time. You've gotta pick and choose. And it's always gotta be about the song. That's really the bottom line.
I've been YouTube surfing a lot lately so I'll Shazam a song that I find or some s - - and type that in on YouTube and just go through all the relateds for it. So it's been a lot of random jazz s - - lately. Like I found Lonnie Liston Smith, and Ahmad Jamal, s - - like that. So that's been very tight.
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
I had a long distance relationship going while we were writing the album so a lot of it is about that constant struggle— you look up at the moon and wonder if that person is looking at it too. I was trying to write love songs that weren’t sappy Ben Affleck movie songs, but kind of a … man’s love songs
I love our country. My dad served in the army. I always grew up with a song sense of belonging as an American. But I was also in the counterculture and I was coming from a place of fearing the police. So I was anti-establishment, but also loving your country. It's kind of an ironic sort of upbringing.
With 'Believe' bringing really big success for me outside of the U.K. for the first time, it meant I have been touring around the world and that led to a gap from the studio. I really feel like the gap has done me the world of good. Throughout that time I was able to collect songs that I really loved.
I am lucky to have the greatest band and when you add a symphony orchestra to the mix it brings all of my songs to a whole new level. I wouldn't say I really change what I do but, having those talented musicians behind me, along with my band, really makes the songs so much bigger and more fun to sing.
And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity.
In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
Maybe I feel like I'm writing songs that don't need to be saved or made more interesting by endless overdubs and studio tricks...maybe - remember, where I am with songwriting I have never been before - sparkly guitars and overdubs I've done (and will do again - see instrumental record in above answer)
Most songwriters who have been lucky enough to have their song on the radio or be heard widely don't know anything about science. The best songs have a strong dose of metaphor. Most songs about science don't have that. Like 'She Blinded Me With Science.' It's a stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.
I have an office full of product from brands trying to be in videos and an inbox full of songs from artists, but at the end of the day if the artist doesn't support the brand or it doesn't make sense for the song, then it will never work. What we do is try to pair them up so that both sides are happy.
I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking "Uptown Girl!" I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called "Ragdoll," which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.
All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.