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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"There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that."
"I think I opened up an area with Astral Weeks that hit a lot of peoples' nerves. But you can't really say that they're my favorite songs."
"Joyous Sound evolved from a gospel influence. Actually it evolved out of sitting at a piano and just picking out a riff, a gospel type riff. It just seemed to come joyously-something about the song, about living in another place of joyous sounds. I'm not quite sure-that's one I'm trying to analyze. It just came out."
"A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images."
"Somebody's going to hear a song that will key in a nerve or something in their experience that represents their own vision. And the next person is going to see it completely different. So even what it means to me is probably irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. What matters is what it means to each person listening to it."
"[The music is about ] for the purpose of getting people to an excitement level. They feel something, they feel emotions. They're going to go home after that concert and remember it.Maybe they got something out of the experience rather than intellectualizing about what songs mean which is the whole head trip."
"The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff... that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture."
"What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted."
"Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity."
"I wrote a couple of songs that had gypsy references in them. The only reason it happened was because that's what was coming through and I liked the idea at that period of time. But that doesn't mean that it's a myth or that I'm a gypsy. It's gotten totally out of context."
"I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say."
"You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived."
"I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it."
"The thing about albums is just coming up with new material. I just got tired of that syndrome of putting out an album and then some reviewer claims that this song or that song has something to do with x y or z."
"The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from."
"To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune."
"To the birds you gave songs, the birds gave you songs in return. You gave me only a voice, yet asked for more, thus I sing."
"The first flower that blossomed on this earth was an invitation to an unborn song."
"Why do they cover Paul's songs but never mine?"
"Many of my songs were dance orientated from way back. That's because I love dance! When I hear a dance number, just hearing the first eight bars, it immediately makes my bod start moving and dancing."
