Lyrical Quality Quotes

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

Etta James takes credit for writing some of the lyrics on 'I'd Rather Go Blind,' which I think are some of the most phenomenal lyrics I've ever heard. There's arguments now about who wrote it, but she always takes credit for it in her live performances.

There was no real poet in the band, but we tried.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point?

I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people.

Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.

Rappers should sit down and construct quality lines.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I have a thing about inane lyrics - the world doesn't need them.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.

I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.

My goal every time I make a record is just to make the funkiest, the best music I could possibly make, both lyrically, and music-wise.

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.

I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know. I think people miss that.

That is the difference between a good song and a bad song lyrically - if you can listen to it and put yourself in that place, or see that person in that place, normally it is a pretty good song.

It is very disappointing to see the Punjabi music scene of today. The lyrical quality has deteriorated; it is only people like Sartaaj and Gurdas Maan Ji who are sticking to their roots.

You can have a great lyric and a so-so melody; it's going to be a tough sell.