Bill Callahan Quotes

'Hatful of Hollow' and 'The Smiths' were lent to me, and they made me want to create music that might make another person feel like they made me feel - to have an effect on someone.

My music is like a diary. I use every experience.

All my songs encapsulate a particular emotion.

I'd like to think that what I've written over the years and what I'm doing now means something to people. People in the street all the time are saying "love the new record" or "I love that record," this tune or that tune. It means an awful lot, or it's been a big part of their lives. As a songwriter, what else would you really want? You're trying to connect with people, people's emotions, and maybe say something about their lives or feelings. That's probably a good enough compliment to receive, really.

Songwriting is actually a really great outlet. I kind of recommend it. You get to sum up whatever is going on in your life in a song, then perform it really passionately.

I think that's my gift in this world is to put experience into music.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

There's only so many things to sing about, so what's going to make a song appeal to you more than someone else's is just a unique way of saying the same thing.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I was touched by the magic of music. My way to communicate was through my guitar and music.

I really, really love music. I'm affected by it and uplifted by it, and made to laugh and cry, and almost fall in love with the person who has made me feel so brilliant and communicated so profoundly to me.

I think people do want to relate their entertainment to what's going on in their lives. Not everything.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

I just want to make art that connects with people and moves them on an emotional level. Any time I can put out music and place a story behind it and have people watch it and go, 'Wow, I was affected by that,' to me, feels like I've done my job.

Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

Basically, any time you have a real life experience, that can be a song. Because no matter how crazy or weird you are, somebody's had an experience just like you, somewhere.

For me, that's one of the best validations as an artist. To have a stranger come up to you and say that something you've created and put out there in the world has had some sort of impact on other people's lives.

I think there are times when a song can be a spiritual experience - just making music, in general, is pretty much that.

I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.

Songwriting is like a therapy, it's a connection that you have with another person, and I'm not scared of it at all for some reason.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?

I always go in very emotionally when I'm doing music. Sad or happy, I'm always into it. I have a hard time writing for other people, writing with someone else in mind.