Bonnie McKee Quotes

Lyrical content is very important to me. I'm always trying to make sure the lyrics and music complement each other perfectly.

The whole industry evolves around a great song.

I think that a good song is catchy, and a great song is not catchy - but it has a deeper meaning.

For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It's a chance to get some really good words across.

For me, singing was always about the lyrics. I'm hopeless at singing songs that don't have a core.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll.

Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter.

The difference between a good song and a great song is a good song is one that you know, you'll put on in your car or you'll dance to it. But I think a great song you'll cry to it, or you get chills. I think a great song says how you feel better than you could.

I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.

When I start to write a song, I have the words and I have the melody, and then it's just a matter of making it to the end. I think if I have something that I could identify as a talent, it would be that I can finish a song. I kind of know intuitively where the melody should go.

I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.

With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.

I think my music is definitely country but it's got a little bit of that rock flair about it. I always try to find the things that everyday people deal with in their everyday lives and situations in the songs that I sing.

I'm so thankful I can write songs. I can capture all those memories in my songs and keep those memories alive.

The best songs just come unasked for. You don't have to think about them. Summer is a good time for songs.

There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.

I love writing songs where the name is the title.

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.

If I was talking about making a song special, I probably meant getting the lyrics and arrangement together, or getting some instrument that's going to tie the whole thing together. That can take months, or it can happen really fast.

Morrissey writes wonderful song titles, but sadly he often forgets to write the song.

I think the first song I ever wrote ... was called "Can't Help Thinking About Me." That's an illuminating little piece, isn't it?

Writin songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along. There are just some ideas that you get that are really hard to edit out; it's hard to stop thinking about some bad ideas. So you just finish it and you end up putting it on a record.

I've done so much songwriting and I know how to do it.

A song without a hook is like a train without rails. It skitters all over the place, bangs into everything. Boom! Crash! There goes Grand Central Station. Crushed by a train.