Lyrical Creativity Quotes

At the age of eight, I discovered that I could write songs. My dad used to take them to the notary and register them so that nobody could steal them from me.

I will say it's great - that Method Man - Cliff Smith - plays a rapper in a laundromat who is working out some lyrics sort of to the rhythm of a washing machine. And something about hip-hop culture and hip-hop is the ability to use current language and slang and reference details of life is very, very strong for me.

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.

Morrissey writes wonderful song titles, but sadly he often forgets to write the song.

I want to make great songs.

Gavin DeGraw - his first record is the reason that I wanted to start writing music. The way that he says something that everybody says on a regular basis but he says it differently. It makes you kind of perk up and listen.

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.

Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter.

All I know is when I start getting serious about songwriting... it's like a playground. All responsibilities slip away and you're with your essence. There can be delight there and self-discovery. You can dance there... I think of it as my serious playground.

Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist's eye and a human heart and soul. His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details. Deep stuff. And they get better every time you listen to them.

Having been familiar with "drunk" once or twice myself, that lick just came to me - and yeah, it sounded very drunk, so I presented it to Alice [Cooper]. It felt like he wrote the lyrics in about a minute.

The first song I wrote was "Look Both Ways Before You Cross" from Imaginaryland. I started the song by singing a bass line, "hoo hoo hoo hoo."

I'm really good at melodic and sonic things, but I don't really think I have anything to say. But I really enjoy the puzzle-making of taking words and adding a melody to them.

That's the beauty of song writing. You never know when inspiration will come or how it will hit, you just gotta kinda grasp a hold of it and make sense of it somehow.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

Songwriting ability is a gift. After a while, you come to realize, "I've really been blessed. I can write these things and it makes me happy, and it makes millions of people happy." It's an obligation, it's bigger than you. It's the only true magic I know. It's not pulling a rabbit out of a hat; it's real. It's your soul floating out to theirs.

I love when rappers have a off-beat, very abstract timing, and he certainly did.And any rapper who really approaches rapping with the art form of songwriting melodically - I know a bunch of rappers who actually go in before they write the lyrics and come up with the melody. And you can hear and feel that difference so much when that's the case.

Rock n' roll is the music where you can get away with pretty much saying everything, and it's OK. You can say truths in really interesting and good ways and really express yourself through it.

One of my favorite lyrics is 'Clams on the half-shell and roller skate, roller skate.' So they can be just really party-inspiring lyrics or just something brilliant like 'Tutti Frutti.'

I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it's not all up to me to do everything myself. There's always that fear that you'll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you've written, like, 120 songs.

There's a lot of craft in songwriting. The divine inspiration is when the idea comes. It may be a riff. It may be a word. It may be a phrase. It may be a title. Sometimes, in the best of both worlds, that divine inspiration extends through the whole song. I've literally sat down and written a song from beginning to end, almost complete lyrics and everything without ever stopping...in two minutes. The chorus of 'She's Gone' was like that.

Lonnie says it doesn't take long to write a song if you're stricken with a severe case of the Tennysons. He wasn't necessarily talking about a chart-climber.

There's no way to learn how to write a hit song. There's no formula for it. You just have to have it inside of you.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.