Song quotes
10.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside song — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Songs like the Buck Owens tune, for example, are very simple and straightforward, and recording it really gave me a chance to get into and get a sense of Buck's personality, a feel for that whole Bakersfield sound."
"O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel's song!"
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
"The vocals are what immediately draw people in and sell the song."
"My other advice is to start writing songs and singing right away."
"Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards."
"When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song."
"Wer nicht liebt Wein,Weib und Gesang, Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang. Who loves not woman, wine and song Remains a fool his whole life long."
"I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads."
"Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song."
"I think you can hear the struggles and hear a realness in Theocracy songs, a human element that you don't get from a lot of the typical Christian stuff."
"I'm a serious aficionada of country music - Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I've even written some songs. They haven't done anything of mine yet. But it's only a matter of time."
"I have a very eclectic iPod. So I've got my cardio people - so it's anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song 'Tightrope,' that's a good cardio song. And then I've got Sting. I've got Mary J. Blige. I've got The Beatles. I've got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love."
"I do like to write nasty songs. It's a useful weapon to have, and it's cathartic as well, because I create art out of anger, something positive out of something negative."
"All songs have those X factors. I couldn't even explain or describe what will grab me about them but it's all music that I'm usually listening to. I'm always looking there to hear new music and see what's going on so that's usually when I'll hear something and be like "Wow, that melody is really crazy."
"Finally I started really opening up as a songwriter and an interpreter and taking songs from all kind of genres and stripping them down to just lyrics and the story inside the lyrics, and trying to make them really mine."
"I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words."
"People are coming to shows on the strength of one song. I guess that's the way it goes."
"...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world."
"I've always believed that there's an amazing number of things you can do through a rock'n'roll song and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat."
