Carly Simon Quotes

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I write the music because I can't really write lyrics. But I can write chords like Robin's never heard of. So I provide the music for them to add the lyrics to.

A lot of times when songwriters get together and write a song... somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

It would be fun to write with Adele, actually. She seems like a fun girl to write with.

Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.

I have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

For 'Dynamite,' Max and Luke went to dinner and left me with a melody, and then I put it together.

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

I used to live with J.D. Souther, and I would watch him write. He's be sitting, he'd say something, and then he'd write it down. That's craft.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

I heard some stuff recently from Julian Casablancas, and his solo stuff is amazing. If I could write with anyone, it would be him.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.