Songs For Kids Quotes & Sayings

Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That's why I sing these songs. That's why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit! — Utah Phillips

As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written - but not really of how they played. So I'd daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them. — Jonny Greenwood

I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I'd been doing it for 30 straight years, writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over. — Bob Seger

I'm not sure how young kids get to the point where they're memorizing and knowing songs, but I knew the words to 'Missing You' from John Waite probably from when I was three years old. For whatever reason, that was the song that I gravitated toward when it was on the radio and I was driving around with my mom. — Brandon Flowers

My whole career was launched in such sort of poptastic style with 'Kids In America', and I liked - and like - being poptastic. Songs big on melody, high on energy, lots of attitude ... what's wrong with that? — Kim Wilde

I'd like to teach kids how to write songs. This will be my first year so I'm just as green as some of the rest of the folks. It's like a music camp and I get to hang out with some of the past contestants. — Bo Bice

I've been writing songs on little pieces of paper since I was a little kid, and it's just always been something I've done. — Chris Carmack

I was so young when the Killers started. I was 21. I'm proud of those songs, but there's no way I would write 'Somebody Told Me,' as I get older. Especially after having kids. — Brandon Flowers

Kids know me from their Grease DVD, so they instantly respond. You can hear a pin drop when I do my old songs. — Frankie Avalon

We stare down at the festival below us. I can hear the low pulse of a local band playing cover songs, the rustle of in the lake nearby, and the carrying laughter of kids our age eating cotton candy and flirting with summer loves. The sun has melted down to the horizon line, leaving trails of orange and pink in it's wake. In the distance, our hotel's roof peeks over the tree line. — Emery Lord

My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that's just the way it is. — Thom Yorke

The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death. — Jonathan Davis

People like to say their songs are like children, but you gotta get those kids out there so they can make some money and pay the rent. — Amanda Shires

First you love the music that your parents love - and then, later in life, you love the songs your kids love. — Elin Hilderbrand

Kids store 10.000 songs on the home computer, after having pricked them on the Net. The company, of the deputies, the senators find that virtuous! However, it is a moral problem: you will not fly, learns one with our children. Moreover, these plunders via the Net are carried out in the anonymat. — Jean-Louis Murat

I could always write songs, act, get into politics, or stay home with the kids. But I've got to have some fun. — Jon Bon Jovi

bought a pristine copy of Man on the Run, a biography of Paul McCartney that began not with the Beatles, but with what McCartney did after they broke up. Parker had always preferred McCartney's work to John Lennon's, whatever effect it might have had on his standing with the cool kids. Lennon could only ever really write about himself, and Parker felt that he lacked empathy. McCartney, by contrast, was capable of thinking, or feeling, himself into the lives of others. It was the difference between "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane": although Parker loved both songs, "Penny Lane" was filled with characters, while "Strawberry Fields Forever" really had only one, and his name was John Lennon. Parker might even have taken the view that Lennon needed to get out of his apartment more, but when he did, an idiot shot him. He'd probably been right to spend the best part of a decade locked inside. Ross appeared just as McCartney — John Connolly

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story. — Paul Bettany

It'll be basically a live album, but it will also include songs, Judas Priest songs, the audience have never heard before, because we felt we wanted to give the kids something else, something they haven't already bought. — Glenn Tipton

The kids of today have taken over the music business - most of them very young. Simply because they write and jot down a few notes, they have the idea that they can write songs. — Rudy Vallee

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Who. They were the most important band to me. Songs like "I'm One" helped me get through high school. — Judd Apatow

I don't look at myself as a celebrity. People recognize me, but it's all about my music, my songs. It's not like I'm a greater being. I take my kids to school, pick them up, go to the grocery store. I'm a mother, and my kids mean more to me than even being an artist. — Faith Evans

You put too many songs on your record, and it ends up like a family with too many kids: some of them get neglected. — Daron Malakian

My songs are like my kids. — Billy Joel

I think there's no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It's like inventing something, but it's invisible, you know? It's weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that's the joy. It's like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they're your kids. — Jason Mraz

I don't want to do children's music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids - like when I'm putting them to bed. We sing some song that we made up but I don't want to make a record like that. — Frank Black

When I was a kid my Dad never let me sing Patsy Cline songs for one simple reason: they've already been done. — Tanya Tucker

I started writing songs when I was a little kid actually. I wrote a song about Catwoman and I wrote a song about Leprechauns, as a little kid. — Bonnie McKee

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. — Nick Hornby

My songs are like kids. I love them all. I encourage them to grow, to reach their full potential, and then send them out into the world. — Seal

We went back, afterward, after the show was over that night, I took my kids backstage and said, You know what? I know my dad's songs ... — Arlo Guthrie

Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.' — Jerry Leiber

We don't mind being ripped apart, but don't rip the songs apart. They're like our kids. — Maurice Gibb

My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs. — Donald Fagen

It's very cool for me to be able to get in an airplane and fly for fourteen hours and show up in a place I never thought I'd ever be and have kids in the same room singing these songs I'd written so far away. To me, that's so surreal. — Adam Young

Words matter, in fact. They're not pointless, as you've suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history. If they were just words, we wouldn't write songs or listen to them. We wouldn't beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn't have been around since before we could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them." (p. 210) (Henry Jones) — Cath Crowley

My seven-year-old daughter knows old songs and how the neighborhoods got their names. There are little things: Businesses receive blessings from Hawaiian priests before opening, and everyone's kids have their debut luau. You can't really get through a day without doing something Hawaiian. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

I'm not a grown up until everybody realises I'm a grown up. When everyone remembers me as the dirty kid singing little songs I am the dirty little kid. — Bo Burnham

Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something. — Jeff Sypeck

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat. — Peter Blegvad

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally. — Jennifer Egan

I'd like to protect children, too, but ... is everything worth sacrificing to that? I mean, drugs have done a lot of good ... They've midwived a lot of good ideas ... lot of great songs, you know? I think Penny Lane is worth 10 dead kids ... I think Dark Side of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids. There, I said it. — Bill Maher

I would get songs sung to me, like 'Old Man River, 'or kids would call me Mississippi and things like that. At the time, I wished I had a name that blended in more with my surroundings. Now, though, I've really learned to love it. From fifteen, I really liked it. It felt appropriate. Before that, I don't think it quite fitted me. I had to grow into it . — River Phoenix

Rich kids who write songs about food stamps always piss me off. I'm not going to write any songs about that, either. — Neko Case

That little Miley Cyrus ... she's like a little Elvis. The kids love her because she's Hannah Montana, but what people don't realize about her is she is such a fantastic singer and songwriter. She writes songs like she's 40 years old! — Dolly Parton

I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another. — Billy Joel

Love. Children are loving, they dont gossip, they dont complain, theyre just open-hearted. Theyre ready for you. They dont judge. They dont see things by way of color. Theyre very child-like. Thats the problem with adults: they lose that child-like quality. And thats the level of inspiration thats so needed and is so important for creating and writing songs and for a sculptor, a poet or a novelist. Its that same kind of innocence, that same level of consciousness, that you create from. And kids have it. I feel it right away from animals and children and nature. Of course. — Michael Jackson

Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with. — Paul Weller

When my sister and I were kids, swimming down in Charleston, there was this pizza parlor that had this old Dixieland band play, and I just loved Louis Armstrong and the sound of his voice, and I got up there with the band and started singing Louis Armstrong songs when I was a kid. I have no idea why, but I did it and I loved it. — Thomas Gibson

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other. — David Almond

The fact that we represented freedom, you know. We talked about that in the songs and I think that the parents, like all parents, they want their kids to be in line and not go crazy or do anything too weird (laughs). And for some reason, I think, people identified The Doors as representing just being able to do whatever you wanted to do. — Robby Krieger

I'd got married and wanted to have kids, so had kids, brought them up, did other things, and slowly got back into music. And it feels great, having one foot in the present, writing and covering interesting songs, and having one foot in the past. — Kim Wilde

Unfortunately, we are living in an era where plenty of songs with vulgar, objectionable lyrics are also becoming popular. It's a disturbing trend, and I feel really sad when I see small kids dancing to such numbers in television shows. In my career so far, I have refused any song whose lyrics I haven't been comfortable with. — Shreya Ghoshal

I've written quite a variety of songs, everything from kids songs to political satire, and my dad covered a fairly large range, also. — Arlo Guthrie

I wasn't a kid when I came out. Soulja Boy was 16. I'm saying that when he came out he was a kid so it was naturally a show for him. It's not about the music right away. It's a show for him. Not that he's not putting enough effort into his music, but how much effort can a 16 year old put into his music because as you mature and get older even the songs he's doing now has evolved and he's looking back. — Nelly

As a kid, I always had a super vivid imagination, like "Man, I like those shoes, but they should've made them in purple" or like, "Man, I wonder how people make songs." — Pharrell Williams

When I'm 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I'll be like: 'Cool, I'll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.' — Taylor Swift

Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. — Jack Kerouac

I felt a real strong connection and still do with Hanukkah. So it started out by doing concerts on Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights tour, and then, yeah, let's make some Hanukkah songs. Let me make a Hanukkah song that kids can listen to, party to and get the spirituality of it, because it is not just about dreidels and having fun. — Matisyahu

My favourite thing in the world, apart from my wife and kids, is writing songs. Ever since I was a kid. — Richard Hawley

I have a real soft spot for flying saucer songs and Frenkenstein songs. When I was a kid the first record I ever really liked was called "The Mummy", and the flip-side was called "The Beat Generation" which Richard Hell later re-wrote as "The Blank Generation". I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I didn't like Elvis much then, but I was very young. When I was a kid I used to play that monster all the time! — Tom Verlaine

I'm a family guy. A lot of my songs are inspired by my kids. Simple relationships. Watching them grow up, watching them share experiences with me and vice versa. — Five For Fighting

Set foot in his classroom, and you'll see that he hasn't quite given up on these dreams. True to his compulsive nature and eclectic taste, he punctuates his courses with entertaining routines to keep his students engaged, playing four songs at the start of each class and tossing candy bars to the first students who shout out the correct answers to music trivia. This is how a poster of a rapper ended up on his wall. "If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch," he explains. "To most of these kids, accounting is like a root canal. But when they hear me quote Usher or Cee Lo Green, they say to themselves, 'Whoa, did that fat old white-haired guy just say what I thought he said?' And then you've got 'em. — Adam M. Grant

Being a kid myself, I loved playing and I loved playing with words, and making up things and riddles and songs and not afraid of being silly in public. — Malachy McCourt

My kids don't really like when I sing for some reason ... but they like when I play guitar. So I started writing songs just playing guitar for them. — David Pajo

I think great songs appeal to people at any age. Kids love the Beatles, too. Kids love Tom T. Hall. Of course, Tom T. wrote some things that were specifically for kids. But I think kids recognize quality more than they get credit for sometimes. — Jason Isbell

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience. — Michael Tilson Thomas

We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him. — Margaret Whiting

School of Rock. The best music school anywhere. This whole idea of getting kids not just taking lessons and learning notes and chords, but learning songs and playing with other young musicians, and getting out on stage ... I was so impressed that my daughter Cheyenne goes to School of Rock on Long Island. — Dee Snider

I love kids, but there's always time for them later. You can always adopt; you can have a puppy. The songs are my children. — Jenny Lewis

I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids. — Edie Falco

But I love you, and before you say it words do matter. They're not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history and they wouldn't be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn't listen to songs, we wouldn't beg to be read to when we're kids. If they were just words, then they'd have no meaning and stories wouldn't have been around since before humans could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words then people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, stop aching because of them, have sex, quite a lot of the time, because of them. — Cath Crowley