Chords Quotes

I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.

Three chords and the truth - that's what a country song is.

Any idiot who knows five chords can bang a song together. But it's probably going to be rubbish.

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters.

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

When I was on the air a lot my throat and vocal chords got tired. If you don't vary your tones you can't get pretty tired of your own voice.

A friend of mine, that I had known for some time, came up one day with an old guitar. I don't know where he got it, I don't know how long he'd had it, but he knew about two chords on it. He proceeded to teach them to me, and then we proceeded to go crazy over music.

Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five!

Those three chords were part of my life - G, F, Bb - yeh, it is, it is, and I can't help noticing it. But there have been other things nearly as close to it which people haven't noticed, other things we have done.

I'm no good with chords. I'm horrible with chords.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

I tried several times to get the song right. The tune and the chords that I started with, there really wasn't anywhere else it could go. I stopped fighting it and let it take me away.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

I understand I'm supposed to be feminine and dainty, but I'm not. There are two sides to the coin. People are more impressed with things that I do because they almost treat you as if you're handicapped if you're a woman... people can be impressed that I can play a few chords on the guitar.

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

I used to help Viv with the chords and melodies sometimes.

I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

I'd been thinking I'd have to learn how to play really well, but obviously the message of punk was that you just learn three chords in a week and you're away.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

You obviously don't really forget how to play the old songs; you just don't have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you've already written and chords you've already played.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

Except for a few guitar chords, everything I've learned in my life that is of any value I've learned from women.

For some reason, the concept of writing with swing chords was intimidating.

It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

You treat the air as a canvas and the paint is the chords that come through your fingers, out of the keyboard.