Lyrical Authenticity Quotes

It's been really cool to me to watch someone like Sam Hunt, whose lyrics and roots are in country but you can hear that he listens to Drake and Justin Timberlake - and that's OK. It allows songwriters to be more honest because it's like, 'This is who I'm listening to.'

I like all different kinds of music. I never heavily molded myself after rappers. Sometimes they say when you think something and you go to say it, you lose a lot of color about what you're trying to say, so to me the best rappers are the people that don't lose that color.

In the beginning of Audioslave, I was very honest. I said, 'We make great albums and write great albums - but don't be under the impression I'm going to be a lyricist that writes anything other than what strikes me as inspiring in the moment.' The lyrics weren't going to be focused politically.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

The experiences I go through... everything you hear in my lyrics is real. Good or bad, I take it all in and put it all on the mic.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.

If I was going to do Fall Out Boy, I wanted it to be a real outlet for my writing.

I try not to agonize over my lyrics, though, because that can come across in them. Some lyrics come more easily than others and some you have to spend a lot of time on, but I think you have to watch that you don't take the life out of them by worrying too much.

Sometimes a song just has to cater to whatever's goin' on. A well-written song is a song that stays true to the subject.

Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken!

You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else.

The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.

I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.

I hope that my lyrics have a way that they're so specific they become universal, and they go, 'Oh I've been there, I know what that's like.'

I'm much better at fixing or changing a melody to suit me than I would a lyric. But for me, everything is lyric. It has to be true for me to say it.

So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."

I don't believe people when they say their songs have nothing to do with their personal life.

This 'Making Mirrors' album is far more personal, even if there's a character element to the sounds I'm working with. Every song on this album I stand behind; I feel like I have a close relationship with them. There are older songs where I can feel myself writing a story, so this is the first album where I'm proud of every lyric.'

Well, you know, it's a younger person, and it was maybe an effort to be a little more sincere and adult about the lyrics occasionally, which is a good thing. It's nice that it's not too self-conscious like some of our lyrics could be.

Nobody thinks mystery writers go around killing people, but they always seem to assume singers are singing about themselves, especially if you write melancholy songs like me.

I listen to a variety of music. The only common point is strong lyrics; I'm more obsessed with lyrics than music. I need to hear a form of truth, and if it's a hard truth, even better.

I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.

I love story songs. It's just, for me, they're harder to write, and sometimes they sound too intended or something.

I had an unspoken treaty with myself to never lie in my lyrics, so, for a long time, when I wrote love songs, I would use genderless pronouns, like "dear" and "darling" - like some kind of granny!