I'm a great believer in not over-thinking lyrics. You might become technically better as a songwriter, but you lose what originally made your songs great.
Interpretation
Overthinking lyrics can diminish the natural creativity that makes songs special.
Paul Stanley emphasizes the importance of maintaining the raw emotional power and authenticity of songwriting. While technical skills can improve with practice, over-analyzing lyrics may strip away the unique essence that makes a song resonate with listeners, leading to a loss of its original charm and feeling.
In practice
During a workshop on songwriting, you could use this quote to encourage participants to embrace their initial instincts.
As big as my ego may be, I'm really not of the belief that I can't be replaced. I didn't invent the wheel. There's someone else out there who can do what I do, maybe a little differently. I believe that Kiss is bigger than its individual members.
Anybody with money can put on a KISS show, but they can't be KISS.
Our Euripides the human, With his droppings of warm tears, and his touchings of things common Till they rose to meet the spheres.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Through a shared aim, shared needs, shared love of a shared result in theatre, from the creation of space... the coming-together of an endlessly repeated climax of shared performance, again and again, something special can appear.
It is a pity to make a mystery out of what should most easily be understood. There is nothing occult about the thought that all things maybe made well or made ill. A work of art is a well-made thing - that is all. It may be a well-made statue of a well-made chair or a well-made book. Art is not a special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself that is good. Most simply and generally, Art may be thought of as "The Well Doing of What Needs Doing."
Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile.
Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.
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