It's like if every single male artist dressed up as farmers. In every video they were on a farm. Whether it was Jason Derulo or Oasis, they're always on a tractor, they're always surrounded by sheep and always in boots. And all the songs are about enjoying farming, and this is all you've had for 10 years - you'd think you were going mad.

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea.

It wasn't professional, but it was a few levels below the top level. I loved playing football, but my passion was always music. It didn't become a possibility to me until I started playing songs I thought were good. I think it happened during my third song. The dream to become a musician appeared in my heart, and that happened about 2010.

With Free, we had phased out all of the blues material and wanted to phase in all original material, and the only song that stayed from our blues past was 'The Hunter' by Albert King. People just loved that. And I said, 'We have to write a song that will top that - otherwise, what are we doing here?' That was the birth of 'All Right Now.'

I often call Daptone the Motown and Stax of today. But in some ways it's different. At Motown, a lot of the musicians didn't get recognized, music got stolen, and people didn't get paid. Or the label would just throw them a pinch of money for their songs. That is one thing we're not doing. Anything anyone writes here, we get a percentage.

It's the great male fantasy-all it takes is one dance to know that she's the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know-this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want princes, but boys want their princesses just as much.

Obviously, it was a big life change for me and quite a shock to suddenly have these songs I'd written in my bedroom as a far-too-intense teenager all over the airwaves and see my face on buses, especially in a small country like New Zealand, but at the same time it was such a thrill and an honour knowing that my music was reaching people.

We're often afraid to do anything unless we know we can do it extremely well. But we get to Carnegie Hall by practicing. I remember how freeing it was several years ago to read in an interview with Joan Baez that some of Bob Dylan's early songs weren't so wonderful. We have this image of genius springing fully grown out of Zeus' forehead.

I kept saying I got sick of listening to people's productions, like people who had no ideas, no songs, nothing to say but could still con people's ears into thinking those songs were there by the application of production. I kind of wanted my record a little more honest than that: "Well, this is us. We put a microphone on it. Here it is."

I think I have a vested interest in thinking that the lyrics are important, but I think for us it's important that we all write things that mean something to us, and I think we're not really in the business of writing la-la-love-you chart pop songs. It needs to have a personal pulling in the gut for me, to want to write anything about it.

In whichever way my music can get out there, I'm just like, 'Sure.' It's also through the TV synch licenses that I've been surviving. I don't really make money through record sales. I used to be really picky: 'No, I don't want it to be the song of a commercial,' but nowadays it's what you need to do to get the song out as much as you can.

When anything good happens to you in your day, give thanks. It doesn't matter how small it is, say thank you. When you get the perfect parking space, hear your favorite song on the radio, approach a light that turns green, or find an empty seat on the bus or train, say thank you. These are all good things that you are receiving from life.

It's just a blessing. Artists search and search for songs that will connect for a new artist because the familiarity is so low. People don't know what you look like. It's just so unbelievable to find a song that people are relating to. To have a song that people will actually pick up the phone and call the station to ask. It's a blessing.

Anthony Ryan is a new fantasy author destined to make his mark on the genre. His debut novel, Blood Song, certainly has it all: great coming of age tale, compelling character, and a fast-paced plot. If his first book is any indication of things to come, then all fantasy readers should rejoice as a new master storyteller has hit the scene.

My favourite song of Elton's is... it's a tricky one for me. I'm a proper fan and I've probably seen him in concert about a dozen times before I even met him. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, which isn't in this film... but whenever I see him, I always tell him that Passengers is my favourite song because it's one of his least auspicious ones.

I've always seen the songs as having a consciousness. Since I was two-and-a-half they would come to me from nowhere. I never thought that I was conjuring them by myself, and I was always grateful they would come and visit... They've always been very much alive. They don't have a physical body like we do but there seems to be an awareness.

He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

In the far corner, a tenor began to sing, Zsadist's crystal-clear voice sailing up toward the warrior paintings on the ceiling far, far above them all. At first John didn't know what the song was...although if he'd been asked what his name was, he would have said Santa Claus, or Luther Vandross, or Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe even Joan Collins.

What is certain is that singing is not merely modulating a song by means of the voice: we sing and we celebrate the beauty that we can grow and live every day. If you want to sing and give emotions to those who are listening, you must have something to tell through your singing; you have to use singing like an instrument to tell something.

The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects.

If you're up on a stage, naked and solo and singing songs to people, there's not much place to hide, so you may as well confess what you want to confess and say what you want to say, whatever that is. Some songs just turn out as being more about me, and some are more through the eyes of other people, or third-person descriptions of people.

I stopped reading music reviews because it's somebody having a knee-jerk reaction to a song. I realized that that's not the definitive interpretation. It won't last long. It's a fleeting thing. What matters are people's relationships with these things over time and sometimes songs just take a really long time to reveal their true identity.

We with Michael Jackson were in the studio recording some work on "Man in the Mirror" or the duet. I can't remember which it was. We did the duet in three languages: English, French and Spanish. So, I spent like a week with him in the studio doing the three songs in different languages. It was just an awesome experience recording with him.

I think that the most significant, guiding principle was that we wanted to return to a three-piece live form, whereas we became a four-piece for the last record because the songs had more extensive arrangements and we needed a keyboard player to pull off a lot of those songs. We missed the energy, and more push-and-pull of the three-piece.

Mine would be Your Song, which is just one of his ones that I... I was actually glad the whole song wasn't played in this film and it's just a few bars of it because it makes me cry. You know, there are some songs that just make the hairs on the back of your neck just stand up? That's one of those for me - I put it on if I want a good cry.

I wrote an album about being in love. I don't think it's possible to write an album while you're in love - why on earth would you bother? I mean, Christ. If you're in there writing songs about someone rather than just being with them and kissing their every molecule, surely the person that you're with must be asking some questions as well.

Sometimes I'll write a song first and then I'm like, "Oh this person will be great on this song." But there are some artists I know what want, like off the top I knew I wanted Brandy and Faith Evans. Their music is like the soundtrack to my life, so it was a personal thing for me. So once they said yes, I wrote songs specifically for them.

I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted.

Country music in the mid-'90s was a big influence on my career, and I played all the songs that are referenced in '94' back in my club days. Joe Diffie was rocking a sick mullet, and he was hotter than ever... just putting out monster hit after monster hit. It totally takes me back to those days, and it makes me smile every time I hear it.

If a song is cooking in the studio, that's great, but if I can imagine doing it on stage, that's the next level to me. ... Some people love paintings, and some people love poetry, and of course I love all of that, but when a musician is so in control of her instrument, I'm in awe. That's when I start to kind of evaporate into the universe.

Songs are snapshots of what you’re going through, and mine involve questioning, searching for completion, joy, and truth, and desperation for relief. I’m satisfied with my progress as a writer and a human being, and I know I’m going to get better at both. There will be times when I’ll feel like I’m not improving, and I’ll get through that.

The heart was a weak, changeable thing, bent on nothing but love, and there could be no more fatal mistake than to make it your master. Reason must be in charge. It comforted you for the heart's foolishness, it sang mocking songs about love, derided it as a whim of nature, transient as flowers. So why did she still keep following her heart?

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.

I have never written a musical. I have never written a weird, interactive piece of theater. I wanted to do something that would be disturbing. It will be disturbing theater with songs. There will be no people on wires. That's probably the next one of those things on my bucket list of things that I need to write before I get hit by that car.

Take a bunch of little kids to the beach and they all make art. Adults are too stupid to call it art, but it is art. They'll use their imaginations, make drama, make up characters, make pictures in the sand, they'll make up songs that no one's ever heard before. All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

I definitely shut down sometimes. I always just go into my own little cocoon and write, and I surround myself with as much music as possible. The last girlfriend I had, when we broke up, I remember being in a room for days on days on days with my music cranked up, playing songs like Kanye's '808's & Heartbreak.' That playlist just was long!

The city sleeps and the country sleeps, the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, the old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; and these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, and such as it is to be of these more or less I am, and of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

When I finished performing 'I Won't Give Up' for the first time, I opened my eyes, and I think there was maybe six people in there when I started, and when I finished there was about 30 people, all standing around with their jaws dropped in complete silence. I said, 'Okay, I think this song has some power to it.' So coffee shops work for me.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.

In a way, the songs are written to be performed. I put them on records, but I'm always thinking about how an audience would react to it. I realized at age 7 that I wanted to be a performer, and I used to do that, and occasionally I'll get an acting job. I don't really make much of a living as an actor, but it's fun to do it when I get a job.

English has always been my musical language. When I started writing songs when I was 13 or 14, I started writing in English because it's the language in between. I speak Finnish, I speak French, so I'll write songs in English because that's the music I listen to. I learned so much poetry and the poetic way of expressing myself is in English.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I'd like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he'd be broke, I'd bring out a different song and immediately he'd receive all the money he needed.

Give me the end of the year an' its fun When most of the plannin' an' toilin' is done; Bring all the wanderers home to the nest, Let me sit down with the ones I love best, Hear the old voices still ringin' with song, See the old faces unblemished by wrong, See the old table with all of its chairs An' I'll put soul in my Thanksgivin' prayers.

Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time.

His [Death] voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.

Without our faith, we wouldn't have been able to succeed. On many occasions, before we'd go out on a sit-in, before we went on the freedom ride, before we marched from Selma to Montgomery, we would sing a song or say a prayer. Without our faith, without the spirit and spiritual bearings and underpinning, we would not have been so successful.

I was writing a lot of true love songs-true love almost gone wrong but saved at the last moment...Many of the best songs get written in a state of abject misery. I prefer to write fewer songs and have less cataclysmic events in my life...Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

"After 17" is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, "Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter," but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.

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