Music Lyric Quotes & Sayings

There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly. — Tim Finn

My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric. — Ben Folds

When I'm writing a lyric, I totally forget about the music. I'm just looking at the lyric and thinking about it almost as a separate entity. And then I'll go to my keyboard with all the lyrics printed out and try to think of how to make this a complete musical thing. I've got a very basic keyboard with some presets. — Scott Walker

Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus. — Debbie Harry

My music is basically all about witty punchlines and lyric progression that is aimed to make you laugh or say "Woah." — Mike Stud

Lyric helps invoke the core person. And, without lyric, it is difficult to touch the core. Lyrical music is the music of India. — Dayananda Saraswati

The fundamental message of the Wu Tang music is as vast as the ocean in all reality, but it's still a straight path. You can take one lyric and by researching what that lyric is giving out to you, it should give you more than a day's worth of school, maybe three days' worth of school. — RZA

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song. — Joe Meno

Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride. — Charles Frazier

Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form. — Russell Smith

In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around. — Michael Kosser

Music is my catharsis for that. It's an incredible blessing that I have this way of expressing myself through music and lyric, and I'm so grateful for that in moments of pain or of suffering - that I have this means of channeling it; it's really amazing. My band as well - having them around and being able to jump on stage and bond together and share that energy is really uplifting as well. — Kimbra

I started doing shows in places that I couldn't pronounce, didn't know existed, and I've seen people that didn't speak English or Spanish rapping to every lyric and singing to every hook. I said, "This is the type of music that I want to do." — Pitbull

Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room ... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with. — Quentin Tarantino

I really do seek to create music that is timeless, ... Each project takes on its own life, and the songs from "A Time To Love" are the most appropriate for the statement I wanted to make ... The most important thing is, when I do give the music, I'm satisfied with it, that it speaks for what I want to do ... It is a different kind of lyric; it's very picturesque. I can see everything that I'm writing, I can visualize all those things happening. — Stevie Wonder

That night changed my life: I was finally experiencing, in person, the songs that had been the soundtrack of my life for the past few years, the lyric-images I'd memorized after hours of headphone-listening on walks to school, the words that had been direct-deposited into my heart though the channel of my ears
I was hearing them here, now, in a moment that would never exist again. — Amanda Palmer

Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When we feel, a kind of lyric is sung in our heart.
When we think, a kind of music is played in our mind.
In harmony, both create a beautiful symphony of life. — Toba Beta

Not sure if you know this. But when we first met, I got so nervous I couldn't speak — Shane Filan

The melody seems to have gone to the country. The country music seems to still have melody and interesting lyrics. But pop music, you've got to really listen hard to somebody who's doing a good melody and a good lyric. — Barry Manilow

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it. — Stephen Sondheim

Music is creation. In reggae the lyric, the music itself, arrangement, that vibe, such melody - everything within the music moves the people, understand? — Burning Spear

I express through my music my philosophy, my feelings, my passion, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, my wishes and my expectations. Without music, I would be mute, like a fish without water, like a bird without wings like a human being without air. — Ricardo Derose

Metal is made up of many silly cliches, and Dio's songs rarely shied away from a good cheeseball lyric about medieval knights and crystal balls. But the amazing thing is, Dio the man never succumbed to the typical ravages of drugs, booze or hideous all-body tattoos. He never gained 75 pounds later in life or lost most of his voice through merciless shredding and ended it all playing county fairs for 19 drunk dudes in a barn before collapsing in a heap in a motel room in Jersey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Or everywhere. — Mark Morford

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come. — James Taylor

He is a lyric poet ... aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed. — Samuel Barber

I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general ... is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in. — Leonard Cohen

The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power. — Henry Rollins

Really, music is what I'm interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing. — Adam Schlesinger

Kids today aren't listening to music audio-only. They're picking up a CD and looking at the lyric sheet and wondering why the pictures aren't moving around. Who wants to do that? It's like Bam Bam Flintstone hanging with the dinosaurs vs. Elroy Jetson who's flying around space. If I'm a kid, I wanna be kicking it with Elroy. — Will.i.am

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun. — Eric Idle

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music. — Dinah Shore

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me. — Van Morrison

The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always ... first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it. — Frank Sinatra

Maketa Groves has a strong, bright lyric gift. Her poems come out of music and are full of music. They bring us the sounds of the streets and the sounds of nature, and make us see once again that they are parts of the same song. She celebrates American lives as they are lived today: the mother scrubbing her kitchen floor at midnight, the drag-queens in the Tenderloin, the homeless woman knitting in the courtyard. This is poetry that relentlessly shows us the beauty in the world, with all its struggles and complexity, and demands that we go out to meet it with open hearts. — Diane Di Prima

Cinnamon Girl" wasn't right for this day, for this time, for what was about to happen. If he were to have music, he thought, maybe Shostakovich, a few measures from the Lyric Waltz in Jazz Suite Number 2. Something sweet, yet pensive, with a taste of tragedy; Qatar was an intellectual, and he knew his music. — John Sandford

I think the overall mood of the music informs the artwork, but I've found that good lyrics can be inspirational, too. — Neil Farber

My first lyric departed directly from Mingus's title "This Subdues My Passion." If you didn't think the song was already half written after that title, then you had no business dallying with the tune in the first place. I wrote about the way that music tempers the violence within a man. This subdues my passion And it may control my rage It may stem the poison that spills out onto the page — Elvis Costello

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first. — Neil Diamond

I don't think there's a problem. First of all, I don't think music turns people into social liabilities. Because you hear a lyric — Frank Zappa

Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in. — Paul Simon

Find it incredible impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks's "Landslide," especially the lyric: "I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you." I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don't cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox. — Mindy Kaling

My inspiration comes from so many things, it is hard to give credit to one. I find music of all kinds to be a great inspiration. A melody or a lyric can fire my imagination. Exercise is another. Endorphins fuel my thoughts - I tend to work out scenes and dialogue when I am exercising. Reading is also a great inspiration. — Julia London

Songwriters I've always been drawn to are people who deal with something of depth in the lyric writing ... I've always been influenced by the folk song, the storytelling tradition in folk music. And so for years I wrote mostly story songs. I still do that, but as I've gone on, it's gotten a little more personal. I used to write mostly in the third person. I write a little more in the first person now. — Bruce Hornsby

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement. — Ezra Pound

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do. — Stephen Sondheim

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry ... As the poet Heine said, 'Where words leave off, music begins.' — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I knew there was something special between us, knew it as surely as a lyric that belonged in a song. But as with all good songs, I needed time to figure out the melody and chords. — Cari Quinn

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling. — Cass McCombs

I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be. — Chris Cornell