Quotes & Sayings About Writing Lyrics

Lyrics are so important, I hate every second of writing them, but it's something I take great pride in when it's finished. — Nate Ruess

I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration. — Talib Kweli

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important. — James Hetfield

It's strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, 'What?' I'm really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It's cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted people to focus on the content. — King Krule

I let the music set the tone of the lyrics.I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost. — Jose Gonzalez

I think I took a few stabs at writing socially conscious lyrics. I had never intended to write a song about the Gulf War, but when I wrote "Before You Hit The Floor," I didn't know what the hell was going on in the world. — Bucky Pope

It's just like an idea, like a chorus, and then we just jam on it - it happens in loads of different ways. The best songs I find always come from the subconscious, like when you don't think. Not to be pretentious about it, but usually songs just blurt out rather than thinking about it. I never write lyrics and then do a song, I find that really hard - that's like a real skill. — Luke Pritchard

I'm not really good at writing sad sappy ballads. In terms of the lyrics not matching the vibe of the music, that's kind of the way my career has gone; everyone is a little confused about it all the time. — Mac DeMarco

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up. — Jason Schwartzman

Singing the songs, writing the lyrics, emotioning the words; that is all I can do for love. — M.F. Moonzajer

I am a big Brian Eno fan - the first few Brian Eno records are just absolute gibberish and he came up with a lot of lyrics by writing down loads and loads of random sentences and streams, and I find meaning in that music, even though he'd probably say it's absolute gibberish. — Jay Watson

I actually find a lot of pleasure in writing lyrics. — King Krule

Drink up my honey eyes,
Kiss them shut every night,
And be my 'one' all my life. — Crystal Woods

I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news. You can call them topical songs, songs about the news, and then developing into more philosophical songs later. — Phil Ochs

I don't think lyrics need to be deep - just write whatever comes out of you. You don't need to find intense meaning in everything. — Bethany Cosentino

When I first started writing lyrics and stuff, I was writing it to garage, and obviously garage kind of progressed to grime. — Lady Sovereign

You don't meet that many people that you can talk about Roots Manuva with, but that was my favorite in school, this record of his called 'Run Come Save Me.' When I first started writing lyrics, it came from that. — Alex Turner

Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song. — Leon Bridges

I used to play guitar for myself and write lyrics and listen to different styles of music. — Rokia Traore

If I knew what to do
I'd do more than write a song for you — Criss Jami

I started writing lyrics out of desperation. I was broke and wondering where my next job, my next meal was coming from, although I had had several successful revue songs on Broadway. — Sheldon Harnick

Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster. — Jimmy Buffett

Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write. — Yannis Philippakis

I've got pages and pages of snippets of stuff, and if Max [Hershenow] sends me a track to write to I'll go through all the stuff and the initial reaction of gut and how it makes me feel and I'll sort of go from there and start pulling my favourite pieces of my lyrics and that will be a very literal word collage and from there I'll sculpt it for and whatever reason the song sort of presents itself. It's a bizarre process. — Lizzy Plapinger

When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth. — Billy Wilder

We all know what good writing is: It's the novel we can't put down, the poem we never forget, the speech that changes the way we look at the world. It's the article that tells us when, where, and how, the essay that clarifies what was hazy before. Good writing is the memo that gets action, the letter that says what a phone call can't. It's the movie that makes us cry, the TV show that makes us laugh, the lyrics to the song we can't stop singing, the advertisement that makes us buy. Good writing can take form in prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. It can be formal or informal, literary or colloquial. The rules and tools for achieving each are different, but one difficult-to-define quality runs through them all: style. "Effectiveness of assertion" was George Bernard Shaw's definition of style. "Proper words in proper places" was Jonathan Swift's. You — Mitchell Ivers

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

Do I start with the lyrics? No. Quite honestly, it's the opposite. I generally get the melody first - I kinda fiddle around on the guitar and work out a melody. The lyrics are there to flesh out the tone of the music. I've tried before to do things the other way around, but it never seems to work. Obviously, I spend a lot of time on my lyrics, I take them very seriously, but they're kinda secondary. Well, equal, maybe. I think sometimes that if you write a poem, it should remain as just a poem, just ... words. — Iron & Wine

The visual side of being a performer or in a band is, to me, as important as the music. I know not everyone shares that same opinion, but when I'm writing songs or working on lyrics or coming up with an idea, I think about videos as I'm in the studio. If I had all the money in the world, I would have the most amazing videos ever, you know? You're saying grandiose, and big; if the song warrants it, I try to push the visuals as far as I can. — Tamaryn

Basically my personality, and my talent, and my lyrics are so outstanding that what listeners can tell is that I put so much hard work into what I'm doing because it comes through my music. So I feel that my music for one will get my point across. I write from my heart and my spirit ... You know what I'm sayin'? Some people don't know their place, they're just like Oh I rap because I'm tryin' to get this or that, and I'm doin' this because I want to get money. — Lil' Mama

The lyrics are always the last thing I do. I always have a recording of basic tracks and maybe some of the lead work. I'll sit back and listen to it, and I'll just concentrate on what kind of feeling it gives me. My goal writing the lyrics is to not disrupt that feeling. — Tom Scholz

Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead. — Matt Berninger

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than ... is where it all comes from. — Zachary Cole Smith

Sometimes I'll get a burst when I write lyrics, it usually happens in 20 minutes and I'll write the whole song, and that's really the only way it feels comfortable. — Jonny Lang

Acting and making music are quite complementary. Acting relies on someone else's writing and direction; writing music or lyrics doesn't. But they are both creative and personal in completely different ways. — Josephine De La Baume

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it. — Ian Anderson

I started writing my own songs from the time I was a little kid. I would write my own lyrics to other people's songs that I heard on the radio and take whatever song and make it about fairies and angels - whatever little girls sing about. — Bonnie McKee

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams ... Motivation? The memory of the rush I get from a really good writing session - even on a bad day, I know I'll find that again if I keep going. — Trudi Canavan

I used to sit on the roof of the apartment where Jim Morrison used to write his early lyrics — Henry Rollins

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on. I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board. I think the equivalent of balance is tone, so I think tone gives birth to the story. — Etgar Keret

When I'm in Los Angeles, it's hard to be creative. For me, New Orleans is one of those places that's like a muse. You can hear music on the streets. There's a certain character the city has that inspires you when you're needing to write lyrics and come up with melodies and come up with rhythm and blues. The city has a pulse and it's an inspiration for me. — Chris Thomas King

I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit. — Nikki Sixx

When you make a melody that doesn't come with words from the get-go, sometimes you're just thinking about random vowel sounds that go with it - and it's really, really hard to write lyrics that actually obey the vowel sounds. — David Longstreth

Writing music and lyrics that mean something personal to me. It's an exciting, intense, cathartic, this-is-who-I-am experience. — Mark Hoppus

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. — Virginia Woolf

Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head. — Craig Finn

You can find me in the melodies, the chord progressions, the song style and structure. The lyrical places you fine me most are in the lyrics that 'show' more than 'tell.' I like to describe what the listener is seeing and let them make up the middle rather than telling them. — Kristian Bush

It's funny, I write lyrics in a bizarre way - I'm always writing lyrics, mostly when we're traveling or walking around New York, that's when I'm writing most of the stuff. — Lizzy Plapinger

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book. — Chuck Palahniuk

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it. — Paul Banks

My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics. — Esperanza Spalding

I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics. — Paul McCartney

Metaphors are not user-friendly. They're difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing-indeed of most creative writing ... metaphors support lyrics like bones. — Pat Pattison

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes. — Cole Porter

Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage. — Alanis Morissette

I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead — John Frusciante

I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff. — Oliver Sykes

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. — Ben Gibbard

There's lots of bands where somebody will write lyrics and somebody else will sing them. It works for a lot of people, but that feels weird to me. I don't mean this in a bad way at all but it just feels fake.. I guess in my heart of hearts, whether the person has a good voice or not I want [the songs] to come from them. I don't know why. — Frank Iero

There is a diverse meaning to the lyrics as well. A lot of the stuff I write is from a personal level but is not really anything that I care about if people get or not so I write alot of the stuff as metaphors based in Viking mythology and Viking History which is sort of my main interest in life and sort of my main atmosphere in life. — Johan Hegg

I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head. — Joanna Newsom

I write about things that tear me apart, and it's all very personal to me. It's funny to hear people disassemble the lyrics. If they get it wrong, it almost means more to me, because it's morphed into something that is meaningful to them. — Robby Takac

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together. — Jim Capaldi

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs. — Stephen Sondheim

I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me. — Butch Walker

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos. — Jason Robert Brown

Sometimes when I'm writing I'll play Cole Porter, just because the rhythms and the lyrics are so perfect that it's like having a smart partner in the room. I have a huge collection of music that I listen to when I'm writing, and I also prepare a lot of music before I start directing. I put it all onto an iPod that I have with me on the set. It's helpful to the actors, because for an emotional scene, I'll play it and say, this is how it feels, to keep us in the zone. — Nancy Meyers

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring. — Rivers Cuomo

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication. — Ian Anderson

The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song. — Bryan Ferry

I'd like to do a song that I wrote today about our government's increasing infringement on our right to privacy, but the lyrics mysteriously disappeared from my guitar case. — Dan Piraro

I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing. — Jeff Tweedy

Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising. — St. Lucia

I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid. — Zachary Cole Smith

People say, "You should write lyrics" and I say I'm quite happy not to, because I like being part of that process where you write your version of what someone else's lyrics are saying to you, and that enjoyment has never changed. — Elton John

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami

Although I have guitars all around and I pick themm up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don't really see myself as a musician. It may seem a funny thing to say. It's just like, I write lyrics amd I make up songs, but I'm not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It's when you put all these things together - that makes me. — George Harrison

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. — Criss Jami

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring. — Mick Jagger

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread. — Azar Nafisi

It's more like you write what comes to you ... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave ... — Eddie Vedder

Sometimes it's nice to be able to reflect on the music itself and then write lyrics that I feel anyone can relate to. It's not my dreaming tree that is dead. The feeling of a loss of hope is universal. There are moments that we've all felt a little bit of it, so I don't think it is something that is too hard to identify with. — Dave Matthews

While 'Rap Trax!' recorded, Neel found some scrap paper and we started writing our first lyrics. Bandying about subject matter and title, we got stuck on the idea of 'cool', so my first rap song became 'Pretty Cool'. It was a symbol of our confidence. We weren't awesome cool or mega cool. We were only ... pretty cool. — Nikesh Shukla

When you have four people writing lyrics instead of one person, the lyrics are going to be a little more broad. — Brendon Urie

So, you're hitting on Clare the Fair."
"I'm not hitting on her. I'm exploring the possibility of seeing her on social terms."
"He's hitting on her," Owen said around a mouthful of chips. "You've still got that thing you had for her back in high school. Are you still writing bad song lyrics about heartbreak?"
"Suck me. And they weren't that bad."
"Yeah, they were," Ryder disagreed. "But at least now we don't have to listen to you playing your keyboard and howling them down the hall. — Nora Roberts

Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day. — Anita Diament

The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song ... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics ... and I find that quite inspiring. — Zach Condon

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure. — Jonathan Lethem

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Usually when I write lyrics I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of other stuff. Some of my favourite lyricists are like Lou Reed, kind of the classics - Bob Dylan and stuff like that. — Andrew VanWyngarden

There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there. — Rosanna Arquette

I usually get my lyrics when I let my mind wander, when you're not really awake, but not yet fully asleep. I keep an open notebook by my bed and then just write whatever comes to me. — Brie Larson

The only thing that made the music different was that we were taking lyrics to places they had never been before. The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage. The New York bands were much more into their pain, while the English bands were much more into their rage. The Sex Pistols' songs were written out of anger, wheras Johnny was writing songs because he was brokenhearted over Sable... — Legs McNeil

To all companies please stop using Xmas songs and inserting your own lyrics. Write your own music. I am boycotting you until you stop. — Bill Engvall

I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too. — Jack Kerouac

I try to write in a way where the lyrics have many meanings and you won't really know what's behind it. — Taylor Momsen

I like to write my lyrics on clay tablets. — Randy Newman

I'm proud of the lyrics because I take a lot of care in writing them. I try to make it so people will want to go in and get really into the lyrics. I hope there are different corners to them, with lots of levels-without sounding pretentious. — Andrew VanWyngarden

Cut the crap. Just don't try to be anything that you aren't, have ambition but when it comes to lyrics especially just be honest and write from the heart almost to an awkward degree, at least that's what works for me. — Max Bemis