Song Quotes

My dream artist to play at prom would be Frank Ocean. "Thinking of You" is one of my favorite songs. He makes really sweet music for slow dancing at the prom.

Yeah. I'm amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don't play well at all. I wouldn't even attempt for a second to play in public.

If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

White people don't sing together very often, and when they do, it's about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

I think a lot of good directors listen to music while they're working. The songs just don't become a part of the film. They're replaced.

The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.

I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

The whole time you're bouncing ideas off each other, you continue to try and push the songs as far as you can take them and make them the best that they can be.

All the best songs are, I think, the easiest write because they just come out.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there's great truth in the songs, and that's what was so wonderful to find.

I'm not particularly worried by any of the songs we've written in the past, except for some of the really early stuff which is total tripe.

I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

And I used to think that proof that I had religion was whether I knew how to sing all of the songs.

A black face, run-down shoes and elbow-out make-up give me a place to hide. The real Bert Williams is crouched deep down inside the coon who sings the songs and tells the stories.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

I'd rather write great songs because the word "commercial" is so subjective

It's scary when you get to a point where you write these songs that people like, and then you think, "Am I ever going to be able to write something better than that?"

My favorite record of all time is Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. It's made up of a bunch of songs that don't really sound the same, but they all go really well together.

There are a shitload of songs about being in love with someone who doesn't love you back and I talk about weed and my cat and being lazy a lot.

Image is everything, and the voice or the idea or the song is hardly anything at all. Half the time the person isn't even doing the singing. I'm a bit cynical about this [music] business.

The song Some Other Time is full of emotion. In wartime, it had a tremendously poignant feeling.

We'll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory...let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.

My intent for EPs - and, really, my philosophy on my music - is that every single song has to be worth it.

I'll put on a song that I really like and do bicep curls with two kilo weights the whole song.

Sometimes the best songs almost write themselves

I had a guitar sitting around, and it just happened to have four strings on it, and I would sit around watching TV and playing it. I ended up writing bunches of songs around four strings.

With the Rhythm Kings, I can involve myself in arranging and producing the music as well as the choice of songs.

When we were making the record, I just decided, at the last second. I thought, "This song ["Ordinary World"] makes a lot of sense, being on the album [Revolution Radio]."

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

Sometimes I have songs born out of stories.

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

Sometimes the songs you think will be best don't turn out to be best.

The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present.

People try to make a big deal, like I don't want to play my old songs. That's not it. I don't want to play my old songs if that's my only option. That's a different thing.

I want to make great songs.

The Killer in me is the Killer in you.

In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn't have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote.

It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play.

I'm really a singer, so I love songs and I love singing. I like rap music, but I didn't grow up freestyling.

She's got a way about her, And everywhere she goes, a million dreams of love surround her, everywhere.

They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio. They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone. But only songs like these played in minor keys, keep those memories holding on.

If you said good-bye to me tonight, There would still be music left to write.

Here I am starting a franchise and I'm gonna be 65 years old. I should've started this in 1978... I wrote like 300 songs and I'm gonna have to re-learn some of them!

My songs are like my kids.

Sing us a song you're the piano man. Sing us a song tonight. Cause we're all in the mood for a melody, And you've got us feeling all right.