Eric Carmen Quotes

I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of good songwriters, and I try to actually work on the craft of writing a song rather than just leaving it up to inspiration.

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

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.

Finding fresh song topics can sometimes be quite difficult.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

Working as a musician, I have to constantly generate new material, so school keeps me sharp. Reading and writing all the time helps me to be a better songwriter.

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

As a songwriter, you always look for guys that you can write good with. Show up, have an idea, knock it out of the park.

I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.

But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.

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

I've been writing music since I was a teenager. I play keyboards. I'm not much of a player, but I can write. That will come along. I'd like to do a musical.

Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.

I was feeling really restless in my hard-rock band. I wanted to learn more about storytelling in music, and that's what country music is.

I used to help Viv with the chords and melodies sometimes.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Usually, my rhymes are just in my head. I start off with a theme, and once I start rapping and writing and singing, the chorus and all that, it just starts flowing. Then it's done in about an hour! I write a lot of songs.

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.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.