Jenny Lewis Quotes

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

I'm a songwriter; it's in my nature to express things openly.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

Originally I was not writing songs for myself.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

I'm such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

I'm such an emotional person that when it comes to songwriting, I can click into whatever zone I need.

Composing is an emotional thing.

I don't know, I've always written songs that are mainly about attitude, not me personally.

Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.

It's inevitable that if you write an album or a song, obviously it's going to come from how you feel. You're writing it for yourself, it's just the way it is.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I don't go into any album with pressing issues. I just try to write songs.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

Everyone writes in whatever way feels comfortable to them. People write songs because maybe they don't feel so comfortable talking about whatever matters.

My work is always more emotional than I am. My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.