Explore Quotes on Song

It's nice if people ask to use your song. You have to make a decision as an artist how you feel about that.

You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

With every record, with each band, I just try to make a song good. I'm not so much focusing on my technique. There are a million better drummers than me. I try to adapt to the songwriter; I try to adapt to the situation and retain my sort of melodic power. My goal is for the band to be good.

I'll refer to my music in color, like 'This song needs to be bright red.'

I try to make everything I write a little bit different. Those songs that go, 'I love you so much and you love me,' they're boring. If I'm going to write a love song, it's going to be a little bit tortuous.

I did the co-writing thing all through the '90s and I got one hit out of it - a Keith Urban song called 'But For The Grace Of God' - but then I got burnt out.

For some producers who are technical-minded, making the song sound good is easy, and getting the emotion into the song is harder.

It's honestly every time that I'm doing something, and every time I visit a station and hear my song on the radio and people buying my stuff, I'm like 'Are you kidding me? This is insane!'

I love when a song is conceived as a jigsaw puzzle in the studio, and then it's a natural to play live. That's my gauge of success for a song.

My entrance to music was singing gospel in church, and to hear that gospel language in a hip-hop song was cool.

When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.

My hope is that 'Blk Girl Soldier' is a freedom song for black women today who are fighting the macro- and microaggressions of daily life in our city/country/world.

It's important to me that there's not just one story told about our city. 'LSD' is an ode to Chicago, a song for the complicated love I have for my city.

I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.

I really like Holly Williams. I've said that a bunch, but her song 'Drinkin',' I just love it.

It's a different process for me, but it's really cool to hear someone else singing the song that you wrote.

What a character eats is a detail - like eye color or a favorite song. But food is also our lifeblood.

Most people in the U.K. discovered me playing a standard on Parkinson. In America, it was on VH1 singing an original called 'All At Sea,' which is a contemporary pop song. So the people that know me there tend to think of me in the singer/songwriter category.

More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.