Conor Oberst Quotes

I can turn heartbreak into songs that help other people.

You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

When my dad passed, there's a lot of sadness right below the surface, and I think there will be until the day I die. So, writing sad songs helps it. And when I sing them, it's pure therapy for me.

My songs are basically my diaries. Some of my best songwriting has come out of time when I've been going through a personal nightmare.

Performing was how I was able to release this pain I had.

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

Songwriting is therapeutic for me.

What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.

I think pain is the best feeling for song writing. You can write good happy songs, but I think the kind of bruiting, depressing ones are more effective. They are easier to write when I am impassioned and angry. It is a good way to channel that negative energy.

My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

I'm a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I've been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness.

I hope people hear my songs and realize that writing music is kind of easy, or that taking your sadness and turning it into a beautiful song is worthwhile.

The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape.

I always know when a song is good or close to finished. When I sing it, it makes me feel the emotion. My tears will start flowing or I'll start laughing. I'll start feeling whatever intensity or emotion was the seed of that song.

Out of my own great woe I make my little songs.

I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.

I tried to find a way out in many ways, but it all caught up with me. Once I realised I could sing and write songs, it was just so much easier to do than anything else!

You're not going to die," I told her, lifting my head to look at her. "I'm not done writing songs about you yet.

We don't have a particular plan. We just do what we do. This is the only way we know how to do it. We make the music that moves us. We use it as therapy. The songs are cathartic. They're ways of dealing with life experiences and the world around you. It's meant to be as a release for us as it is for other people.

I gasp, because Isn't that just exactly what I've been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us.

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.