Songs Quotes

I wanted the songs to be themselves, instead of worrying about all this crazy slickster production.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.

Each time I've gone to the studio, the songs have got better and I've got more confident.

You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and it would sell.

I love Benny Hill. He one of my favourites of aaall time. Like, the way Benny did it, he was just amazing. Just seeing how he put songs together and comedy and the timing and the sketches. He was way ahead of his time.

You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.

Those songs are about getting out; they're not about getting out of family. It wasn't about how family life was curtailing because I didn't know family life.

I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs.

They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.

Stephen Sondheim told me that Oscar Hammerstein believed everything that he wrote. So there's great truth in the songs, and that's what was so wonderful to find.

The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.

It's part of the calling to at least do a few songs in the show that give people some hope. There's so much hurt in this world and... music is such a great healing balm and a great way to forget your troubles.

If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

I don't know too many people because I stay at my house, I write songs, I go to the store.

Puffy produced four of the tracks on the album. Those are the four songs that are collaborations between Puffy and me. And he gives me my space to work even when we work together, like with my producer and my vocal coach.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.

I write songs about real things... The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

I don't dream songs. I'm more apt to write dreams down and then to be able to interpret them into a song. I also tend to get up and write prose in the morning from which will come songs.

Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.

For me, the focus are songs, which really get the audience moving.

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

My approach to recording and all that is pretty organic. It just has to do with all the songs I wrote; go in and record them.

First you date the songs, and then you get engaged and then you marry them. They have to stand the test of time, because they are going to be yours for the next 20, 30, 40 years. So you had better choose right.

Then when Gladys Knight came in to do my songs that was the straw that broke the camel's back.