Explore Quotes on Song

Even a song on the radio that completely lacks substance is there for a reason. Sometimes, people need a break from cold reality; the song that you really don't have to put that much thought power into can be just as entertaining as something that might take you on a three- or four-minute cruise through the depth of reality.

A Hank Cochran song in the studio is spiritual. It's like singing a hymn in a church.

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.

People have used Crowley before, but we wanted to try and get a Crowley-reference song on the radio. We just wanted to have a go, and just try things. There was a kind of 'why not?' attitude.

If you can whistle the melody, then the song will stick. But if you need a bunch of machines to make it sound good, you're probably not writing anything that's going to last a long time.

I think most of my songs are based on an emotion and in every song I write, there's at least a partial truth.

Facing inward, join hands so as to form a small circle. Then, without moving from their places they sing the opening song, according to previous agreement, in a soft undertone.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

It's hard enough to make a good song and a good recording of that song. But to try to tailor it to some outside force is just like - It's never been a factor in what I've done or what the band's done.

I always say that if the song is strong enough, it'll stand on its own.

The first time you hear a song you might not remember the words, but you can go to the record store and hum the melody. The story almost becomes secondary.

It was a kind of siren song that called me out to the front lines.

You used to have to come to America for 18 months and drive around in a van, trying to get radio stations to play your song. But I remember One Direction's manager telling me that the first time they came to America, they hadn't released a song - they'd only been on 'The X Factor.' But there were 2,000 fans waiting at LAX airport.

In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time.

Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page - a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on the obvious side, or a mixture of all of these things.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

If my life were a song it would be called 'Don't Stop Believing'. Yeah.

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

On the song 'Dangerous,' it feels like a teenager picking up a new instrument and writing something with all of that naive excitement.

I don't think about Norfolk as I write songs, sadly no! But things like 'High' is a song about watching the dawn come up over the sea, and I've had many of those situations.