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 only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas."
"Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning."
"Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods."
"Every broken lunatic needed a theme song."
"Janis Joplin didn't just sing a song, she took it over. She swallowed it whole, then sent it back through her gut and her heart."
"Melodies are far more interesting. They are there, in your face, in certain sections of the songs. People do complain about the melody thing, but we do hit patches of melody and beauty, as well as the other stuff."
"I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white."
"I think it's OK to compose songs and sing them about questions that we don't have answers to yet."
"Seeing that the 97's are a democracy through and through, inevitably, some of these tons of songs I write will get vetoed. The first time that happened (and every time thereafter), I consoled myself with the thought that sooner or later I'd make a solo record"
"Yesterday I wrote the majority of a song called 'Burn the Nightclub Down' which was about kind of driving into Cleveland full of dread at the prospect of playing at this night club and actually just the night before I had called my girlfriend whose birthday it was. And it's her birthday and here I am on the road in some hellhole in Ann Arbor in Michigan."
"I like songs and film because you can turn your life into a sort of myth or dream."
"I was always nervous to play my father's [John Lennon's] songs."
"I wouldn't even say "Imagine" is political. I think it's…more just sort of declaration of humanity. I don't find his political songs to be the ones that I go home and listen to. And I would say that of any artist. They're not the ones that interest…"
"Some people feel that it's controversial if I say that because my dad is known as a political artist. But I don't really believe that he was a political artist. I think some of his songs were political, and I think they were incredible because he was able to make art that was political and that wasn't pedantic. But I think he was unique in being able to do that."
"To think that when they come out with these gigantic songs, it's pretty tough to top them, you know."
"When one individual writer sings her song of beauty, she changes the lives of a million others."
"I have my own opinions, but my songs don't share them."
"It always disappoints me when I go to a concert and they don't play my favorite song, or at least one of their biggest hits."
"Sting I've seen a few times, and he really inspired me in the sense that he breaks the songs down a lot and will take a different approach. He'll take an acoustic approach to them; he'll rearrange them for the live stage."
"People take songs so literally."
