Songs Quotes

When we started I wasn't the singer. I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs.

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I've never done songs with people just for the sake of the great combination. I've always done songs with friends.

When I think about the songs I might record, I ask myself, 'Can I picture anybody I know back home sitting in their truck cranking this up?'

The hits always wind up being the songs with big, high choruses. They're the ones too high to sing every night - not that you'll ever, ever hear me complain about having to try.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.

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.

The divergence of songs in the new population away from those in the progenitor population would only be prevented if these processes were balanced by repeated immigration and subsequent breeding: song flow.

I wanted to write songs that would play themselves on stage, songs that sweep you through their current.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

Normally when we go in and write the songs we write, we think about doing a cover, but never a covers record. That would be, for us, a concept. We don't want to have a concept!

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

Rather, I believe that it is very good, if, with the aid of his songs, we can be reminded, among other things, of the social conditions under which Schubert had to work.

I think with any songwriter the first 1,000 songs are always terrible.

I'd like just to be remembered as a guy that came along and did his music, did his best and showed up on time, clean and ready to do the job, wrote a few songs, and had a hell of a time.

I always think of the live show first, where the song is gonna go in the show. That's why they aren't sad songs. When I play, I want to make people happy, not sad. It's such a pleasure for me to do what I do, and I want other people to feel some form of that pleasure, too.

I've just been recording mostly acoustic stuff, drums, and sax, and electric guitar. I'm just still writing songs and what not.

I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.

There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.

My songs are really never titled. Sometimes I call it one thing. then I change it.

I think Bridge Over Troubled Water was a very good song. Artie sang it beautifully. The Boxer was a really nice record. But I don't think I've written any great songs.

I never thought of having platinum albums and winning awards. I just wanted to write songs and sing when I started out in the music business.

I understand why some kid in his bedroom in Wisconsin thinks downloading songs couldn't hurt anyone. True fans will buy the CD or go see the movie after downloading, but to say it doesn't affect anyone - come on.

We've written something like 900 songs in all.