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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"Everything I do is about setting up for the next. I think that my confidence and belief in myself as well as the music and trusting my judgment of my songs really grew the most."
"I never put myself in a box. I like to have various different types of songs and different genres and situational songs. No matter is going on, I have something for that time or era."
"If I'm over a song two weeks after I made it, I'm not going to put it out. It has to last months."
"I don't have a nice singing voice! Particularly if I've had a few beers, that's when I'll get up and go on the karaoke. I'll usually try to murder a Frank Sinatra song like 'My Way'. In my head I sound exactly like him, but when you watch the footage back, evidently not!"
"As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it."
"The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact."
"Youll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song."
"Just like my career, I've sung the same songs night after night in so many ways. It's always different because every space is different. I lost my mojo once. It was like Austin Powers. I don't know why or how, but I had to get it back. And I did."
"Mortal City was really influenced by geography. [The song] "The Ocean" is the Pacific Northwest. Southern California and New York also figure into songs, and Iowa. "February" is very much about New England. "Mortal City" is Philadelphia. The whole album is this anthropomorphized landscape where the metaphors live in this geography."
"I really lucked out with that song ["As Cool As I Am"]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world."
"A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music."
"I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, "Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don't want to cover up the song.""
"A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play."
"There's always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn't play."
"The gods at will can shape a gladder strain, and from the lamentations at the graveside, a song of triumph may arise."
"I don't really have a ritual. On the car rides over to the racetrack, I just make sure that the right songs are on."
"I think one artist to another artist, the best compliment you can pay one another, because the part of you that is inspired or creates something, to write a joke or a song, that's like the God-like part of a person."
"I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away."
"What I like doing is writing and recording and much more on the, I guess, the - on that creative level. It's fun interpreting songs and all that, but I wouldn't like it as a living."
"I think a lot of that album ["Tonight" ] is still very good . . . the songs, but I think I was indifferent to the arrangements."
