Songwriting Quotes

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Sometimes I just want to paint the words "It's my fault" across my forehead to save people the time of being pissed off at me.”
― Christina Westover

“I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Those in power write the history, while those who suffer write the songs.”
― Frank Harte

“so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...

So ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.”
― Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

“Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Songwriting is a bitch. And then it has puppies”
― Steven Tyler

“I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If I knew what to do
I'd do more than write a song for you”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“I tried to look at writing a song almost like solving a mystery. The song was there, buried somewhere in my brain. All I had to do was follow the clues until I figured it out.”
― Jon Skovron, Struts & Frets

“There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.”
― Pat Pattison

“Unless the object of the singer’s affection is a vampire, surely what Hart means is unphotogenic. Only vampires are unphotographable, but affectionate ‘-enic’ rhymes are hard to come by.”
― Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes

“Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“I can't discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines. You can't discover that in the raw. ~ Leonard Cohen”
― Paul Zollo, Songwriters On Songwriting

“Лена очень любила дочь, обожала, как она поет, только если это были чужие песни. А в песнях Веры Лена вместо слов слышала: «Я ничего не читала, даже из школьной программы, я путаю одеть – надеть, я ставлю ударения, как мне удобнее, господи, я слегка переделала “Лавину” Коэна, но никто этого не заметит, потому что у него песня печальная, а у меня слегка в мажоре и гораздо выше, у меня очень маленький словарный запас, но зато я пою с душой и про любовь, а чтобы никто не забыл, что я пою с душой и про любовь, у меня в каждой песне буквально все утыкано словами “душа” и “любовь”».”
― Алексей Сальников, Опосредованно

“A steampunk nation
Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause
Our art's official and only partially artificial
And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but
There's not where it settles
Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle

And now we face it, this creation we made to
To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's
Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation
In our steampunk nation
Our steampunk nation”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“In order to become a better innovator, you're going to learn how to write songs.”
― Cliff Goldmacher, The Reason for the Rhymes: Mastering the Seven Essential Skills of Innovation by Learning to Write Songs

“Increasing the volume does not improve the quality of a bad song.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I've noticed that TV commercials are often in C.”
― Paul Zollo, Songwriters On Songwriting

“The most sacred ritual a songwriter must honour is this daily offering to creativity. It can be five hours in a dedicated space or five minutes in a window seat on a plane, but it must be done. Write your heart and do it every day, first thing in the morning if you can. Everything else is icing on the proverbial cake.”
― Charlie Worsham

“By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shit the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave [...] It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fire in the fireplace and the wind was making it roar.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

“A bad song gives music a bad name.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The spark of the idea was hope; the work that led to the song was faith; the completion of the song leads to worship, because in that startling moment of clarity when the song exists in time and history and takes up the narrative space in the story of the world—a space that had been empty, unwritten, unknown by all who are subject to time—then it is obvious (and humbling) that a great mystery is at play.

I hope it's clear that I'm not talking about the quality (or lack thereof) of the song itself. That's irrelevant. The point is, time is unfolding like a scroll, and we're letters on the parchment, helping to make up the words that tell the story. Each of us is a character, in both senses of the word. At times, characters become aware that they're part of a story, and that brings the realization, first, there is an author, and second, they are not him.

This realization is good and proper, and leads into the courts of praise, if not the throne room itself.”
― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

“At the very least, in a world where we walk around numb as lepers so much of the time, a song can make you actually feel something, a tingle in a place you thought long dead. That's what the best songs—the best works of art—do for me.”
― Andrew Peterson

“The pièce de résistance, put into the can on the very first day, owed its inspiration to Little Richard, who would whip audiences to further frenzy between numbers by self-congratulatory cries of “Well...all right!” Buddy turned the phrase into a gentle love song infused with all his special quality of patience and optimism and his developing ability to make personal sentiments into universal ones. “Well, All Right” is a riposte to all the criticism and condescension that teenagers faced from their elders in the rock 'n' roll fifties—and have in every decade since. The setting is as adventurously simple as that of “Everyday”: Buddy plays flamenco-accented acoustic guitar, with only a plashing cymbal for company. The mood is not one of youthful anger and defiance but of maturity before its time: calm, stoical, steadfast in affirming its “dreams and wishes.” The intimacy in the voice could equally be that of lover or elder brother. Girl or boy, you can imagine you and he are alone together, gazing into the fire and imagining a bright future when the young will “live and love with all our might,” which could almost be a prophecy of the sixties' hippie culture.”
― Philip Norman, Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly

“I start with the title first. From this title I work out the psychology of the tune. Next I write the lyric backward, and in this way build it up to a climax. In the lyric I work first for the climax, and if I can’t find a good climactic line I throw out the tune . . . I consult rhyme dictionaries. I swear by them. For long, easy rhymes I use Andrew Loring’s Lexicon. Other books I have in constant use are Roget’s ‘Thesaurus,’ and atlas, Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’ and a dictionary”
― Cole Porter, The Letters of Cole Porter