More Songwriters on Songwriting Quotes

“Had you looked at it that way yourself? Difford: To be honest, I hadn’t. It’s about time you were honest! Difford: At long last. [Laughs]”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“I know so many songwriters who say they can’t read music as if they couldn’t learn. It isn’t hard to learn! It really isn’t. [Laughs] It’s like learning a very simple language that has no exceptions to the rule, very logical grammar, and a small vocabulary.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“Even Herbie Hancock, who surely knows the piano keyboard better than almost all other humans, told me that there’s always new musical ground to be discovered right there on the same keys he’s been playing forever. “It’s endless,” he said. When I told Paul this, he laughed and said it’s endless for him as well. “If it’s endless for Herbie,” he said, “you can be sure it’s endless for me too.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“It was a true wonder to behold. This entire world, seamlessly fusing so many disparate components: melody, harmony, groove, finger-picked guitar, drums, rhymed verse, romance, and more! All of those delicious ingredients wed together into an organic whole, this swift passage of time. A universe in under 3 minutes (2:42 to be exact). And one I could freely enter and lose myself within. It was a genuine and timeless joy, and at my fingertips.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“My first memory is of a song. A song spinning in infinity. A bright red 45 single of a song about farm animals, replete with their individual sounds. Pretty delightful stuff. Over and over—I couldn’t get enough of it. Skip ahead a few years to another single spinning, another eternal 45. I’m in a little room at the very far end of a vast old apartment on Aldine Avenue in Chicago, the home of my Aunt Shirley and Uncle Miles. Dusty sunlight streamed in from the window above almost horizontally, the sun making its early winter descent. I was on the floor with a little electric record player, an ancient small boxy machine that played no LPs, only 45s. In its middle was a black cylinder on which records neatly slid. One side, one song. It was pure and right, and it was the center of my universe, 1966. I was seven. Up on the bookshelf over the bed was the book Frankenstein, tucked in between other nonthreatening titles. But my proximity to it was mildly terrifying. Trying not to look in that direction, I directed my attention instead to what mattered most. The song. Music trumped everything, even being all alone in a giant apartment with volumes about monsters just overhead. I had one record and one only, but it was enough: Simon & Garfunkel, “Homeward Bound.” (On the B-side was “Leaves That Are Green.”) It enthralled me. It was both human and electric, chords shifting from major to minor, simple drums spelling out the folk-rock groove, all crested by two voices in harmony, singing words that to me were the essence of beauty. It was a bit beyond my grasp, this tale of playing music abroad and yearning for home—not only had I never been out of the country at this point, I had never even been away from my happy home in the kingdom of Illinois. But the idea of the narrator being both a “poet and a one-man band” made perfect sense, as I knew—even then—that this same man writing the song was also making the music. And that promise, of a musician performing the thing he creates himself, and the boundless bounty of expression that spelled, shone to me like a bright star. The song spoke to me, and spoke to some place deep in me, and expansive. Even the rhymes thrilled me. I always loved the beautiful completion rhymes bring to an idea, and the whole song started with, “Sitting in a railway station / Got a ticket for my destination.” That made me happy. It still does. A couplet for the ages.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“I also received with awe this understanding that while being carried down the river of life, with time and everyday chaos infiltrating every moment, one could create something immaculately conceived and ordered. Something that would exist outside of time and be durable so as to never “fall apart on the street like a cheap watch,” to quote Van Dyke Parks. That was the goal. Not to create good songs. But great ones. As Patti Smith explains in her interview in this volume, the whole difference between poetry and songwriting to her was that a songwriter writes a song not for an elite group of song enthusiasts but for the world. The entire world! That’s a big target audience. And designed to work not just for now or next season but for the ages. To write a song people want to hear and to play and to sing across generations. It’s a lofty goal, to put it lightly, and it says a lot about songwriters—all songwriters—that one would even attempt something so bold. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah—Yiddish for crazy courage. That is where songwriters live, after all, on the edge of courage and crazy. It’s creative chutzpah, the audacity of making art.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“Because there’s a whole lot to learn when learning to write songs. It’s why almost all the great songwriters interviewed here and in the first volume admitted to years spent writing bad songs before they wrote good ones. (With the exceptional exceptions of Laura Nyro, Janis Ian, and John Prine, all of whom, remarkably, began with masterpieces.) It’s because writing a song, any song, is not unlike painting a cubist painting. Songs encompass many elements at once, and it’s in the seamless fusion of those elements that greatness is achieved. But in each of these pursuits—the creation of music and lyrics—is a whole world to discover. Music is a universe unto itself, with melody, rhythm, and harmony. Lyrics, as well, encompass a complex realm of considerations, combining language both poetic and colloquial, weaving together metaphor, symbology, storytelling, and more in rhymed verses. Add to those aspects the mastery of song structure itself—the precise architecture of verse, chorus, bridge and other song forms—into which the words and the music take their place. And despite the impact of songwriters such as Dylan and Lennon and McCartney, who forever expanded the potential of the popular song, the song form itself was never exploded and replaced. Dylan, The Beatles, Simon, and the rest showed great respect for the song—and within its narrow confines created miracles. And it is in that accomplishment—creating something eternal and unlimited within a restricted form—that the full and true phenomenon of the song is realized. That, as Krishnamurti said, “limitations create possibility.” That within this tiny room, this narrow space, this fast passage of time, a songwriter can create something boundless. Once I started writing songs, I never stopped. To this day nothing is as compelling, exciting, or fulfilling.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“But he did more than teach me new chords; he insisted I write a new song every week using these chords. Which was a brilliant exercise that enriched me both as a guitarist and songwriter. When a chord was in my own song, I found, I learned how to play it! Even the hard ones, like F major, which, as every guitarist knows, is the first really tough chord to play. So my guitar chops quickly expanded. But so did my harmonic vocabulary, the tool bag from which I compose my songs.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“At that time Chicago was home to a great and thriving folk music scene with wonderful clubs like the Earl of Old Town that featured local legends Steve Goodman, Bob Gibson, John Prine (see page 434), Michael Smith (see page 462), and others. It also had the great Midnight Special radio show on our classical station, WFMT, which, on Saturday nights only, swapped Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest for our heroes Pete and Woody and those heroes coming in their wake. That show, which remains the Chicago equivalent of Carnegie Hall for singer-songwriters, is still on the air.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“I quote Van Dyke Parks’s statement that the writing of a song is a triumph of the human spirit all the time because it is so true.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“For songs—and songwriting itself—is a source of joy. We don’t work music; we play it. Being playful and connecting with joy is the essence of the thing, even for those who find the process torturous. It’s only tough up to that point when you get something that works. Then it becomes joyful.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“The world doesn’t need any new songs,” Dylan told me with a sly smile. But to this he added the qualification: “Unless someone comes along with a pure heart.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“As Leonard Cohen said in Volume I, “Songwriting is much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“Because as Lennon said and all songwriters understand, any one of us could sit down and write a song right now. Given a title—even a key, a tempo—we can sit down and write a song. But a great one? A timeless one? That is the goal. And how you get to those ones—the songs that seem beyond, even beyond the songwriter who wrote them—that remains a mystery.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting

“Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody’s living that. Not just somebody—there’s a lot of people.”
― Paul Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting