Robbie Robertson Quotes

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

I have not made many conscious efforts to "re-imagine" songs. I just let them happen the way they're going to happen.

I don't really like over-explaining the songs. Everyone constantly asks what the songs are about, and I think the thing is that the songs definitely all have stories in them; it's just nice to let people decide what they are. I think it's important that people hear it themselves rather than having me annotate it.

The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.

Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

I only write about stuff I know. I don't have a lot of experience with boys and stuff so I write a lot of songs about interesting and strange subjects that people wouldn't write songs about.

I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.

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.

I wrote my first song when I was seven and that was kind of country. Now I'm just like 'No! Why did I play country?'

The fact that I'm a performer helps me enormously as a lyricist.

If I can entertain people and get them to open up a little bit, then they're much more conducive to any ideas I might have, whether they're about relationships or politics. The most interesting songs, I think, are the ones where the two overlap.

I want to make great songs.

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

In all my songs, I take on roles and play characters. It's a unique way to explore ideas and decisions I might not think or make in real life.

I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through.

I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.

I'm always so pleased when I can get a song or be given a song that really speaks to me and I can interpret, but if given the opportunity to really write from the heart and try and bring some personality to whatever this genre would be, it was a great opportunity for me.