Songwriting Quotes

When you get married and have children, and you start having hits and success and your business starts growing, there's less and less time for songwriting.

Songwriting is hard - it's so easy to fall into the same traps. It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

I feel some kind of duty to be really, really honest as a writer. The same is true of my songwriting.

I feel like I'm creeping closer to finding the situation that triggers songwriting, which is obviously an extreme of an emotion.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

The trick to songwriting is writing in a poetic enough way that other people can identify with it.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

Obviously I attach myself so much to my songwriting. If I didn't attach myself to that being my sole attribute, then I would be fine with those.

It wasn't so much that I had to leave to make it in the music business as I was curious to be out on my own and sort of explore. I never felt that where I was ever influenced my songwriting.

I've always loved songwriting, and I vowed to be a songwriter like Cole Porter when I was only 9 years old.

I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up, but I'm so out of practice, and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

I do feel songwriting is a bit of its own creature and the writerliness of it...it's freeing. It's good for people who have an innate resistance to any restrictions whatsoever.

I'm not inspired by songwriting at all; that took place years ago. I'm pretty well established, as far as my influences go. I don't listen to music anymore. It all sounds the same to me.

I was always interested in science, and pre-med was arespectable thing to do while I ursued my songwriting.

Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.

I think my songwriting might be a little more on the darker side maybe.

There's this art form in songwriting that's incredibly difficult - to be really funny in a song and also really touching. I can't do that.

The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.

Songwriting, I have to take myself away from everybody to do. It's an unsightly act.

I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

Sometimes when I'm writing a song I'll get carried away with production when I'm only on the first verse, and that sacrifices the songwriting.

Songwriting is something I really need to work on. I don't have very many songs but I really love it. I would love to be a great song writer some day.

Songwriting can be cathartic, but then you just keep it private. If you're going to play out and have other people listen to you, then you need to make sure there's some point to what you're saying.

I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio.

I think my entire songwriting catalog reflects where I was in my life at the time. I capture whatever moment I am experiencing in life.

I think my songwriting has developed over the years. As I get older, I have become less afraid to share real experiences.

My songwriting and overall approach to music go beyond just good singing and strong musicality - I want people, now more so than ever, to feel something and be moved somehow by the content I create.

I think I'm more prolific in the songwriting.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

The classic, quote/unquote, craft of songwriting still works; it still is relevant.

Those are the magical songwriting moments, when you have a partner that clicks like that. That's a dream come true, man.

My passion is more in songwriting than ... in being a star.

I'm getting bored performing the same songs over and over. Songwriting comes and goes.

Say a thing well and it will be remembered-and so too will you.

As time progressed, my songwriting developed out of my bass, because that's all I could do. I decided to take it as far as it could go and to use my skill as a tool.

It doesn't stop. It really doesn't stop. It's the way I live every single day. I don't do anything else. I have no other interest other than music. At all.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Country music was the music I was brought up on. It's the music that's closest to my heart and the music that speaks to me the most, and it's always been a big influence on my own songwriting.

I wanted to be a writer when I was a little kid. Then I wanted to be Pete Townshend - the songwriting guitarist who occasionally sang.

I think sometimes songwriting becomes diluted when you have lots of components to mask a lack of core.

But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging.

I would describe my style of songwriting as classic. I learned very early on and have stuck to the core principles of song structure regardless of which genre I'm writing in.

Songwriting is an emotional medium, and rock and roll is an emotional medium.

Songwriting is reliant on inspiration, which ideally you don't have that much control over. Songs kind of half make themselves, and then you have to finish them.

My lesson from that [songwriting process] was that I should go back to where I was and try to make that first pure even more strong.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

Not that there is anything wrong with confessional songwriting, there are plenty of people that do that I admire. I think it is great; it just isn't how I do things.

I'm sitting here doing nothing but ageing while my guitar gently weeps