Songwriting Collaboration Quotes

George was getting alot of independence for himself in those days. He was writing more, and wanted things to go his way - where, when we first started things basically went John and Paul's way. You know, 'cuz they were the writers.

When I first started, I wrote some songs with Linda Perry. She's so instrumental in a lot of artist's lives, listening to you and then helping you write songs that are you, that bring the most of what you are out, whereas a lot of producers might put their stamp on you. I gained confidence because I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

When I first got into the major label system, they were like, 'Hey, you're great - now write with a million people so we can get songs.' That was something I hadn't done before, and the songwriters I was working with had worked on some massive numbers - like 'True Colours.' One of the guys wrote 'Livin On A Prayer.'

When you're writing a song and there are five people invested in it, it's easy for one person to say, 'Oh, this song is about this and that', and everyone has to hear the idea and see if they can do better.

Basically, there's a good friend of mine who works at EMI Publishing, a publishing company. He had asked me - he was like, you know, do you know this girl, Amy Winehouse? She's in New York for a day. She's kind of meeting people to maybe work with on her second album.

It was really hard to find people to come over and play guitar and sing and write songs together. So that turned me into a songwriter that way, just so I could be able to play with other people.

I would imagine after the first recording session with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and Atlantic Records I began to realize that this is going to be like this for the rest of my life and I knew that what, what they were doing was going to be successful because with each session that we would do, it would get better and better and better, the songs would become better, the, ah, the feeling of success was there and we were all in the middle of that as well.

I will always really work hard to write as much as I can, but I also love sitting back and waiting on those big Nashville songwriters to send me some great songs, too.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music...I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.

I think great songs can come from anywhere and you constantly have to be able to look out for those. I think a lot of the times people will try too hard to write everything themselves and therefor miss out on great songs that way.

Being a songwriter, my job is just to write songs for people. I'm not attached to them.

One not-to-be-mentioned major said they would sign me if I worked with a team of songwriters to help me finish songs, ha! Of course, in hindsight, I should've done it just to see what that would have been like.

I wrote 'Happy Man' with a couple of boys of mine. I have been writing in Nashville for a long time. Of course I was writing songs back in Oklahoma when I was a kid.

I'm working with a producer, Scott Jacoby, who co-wrote "Trouble" off No Beginning No End. Without giving away too much, it's a definite pop/r&b vibe, pretty strong melodies, and definitely about songs.

'In Case You Didn't Know' was written in Mexico, actually, on a songwriter's retreat.

Back in the early '90s, I started going to Nashville to do a lot of co-writes. One of the first people I met there was Keith Follese. Keith and his wife Adrienne are both songwriters, and we wrote some songs together.

I'm kind of a little allergic to that whole, 'Let's go to L.A. and write a bunch of hits.'

A lot of times when songwriters get together and write a song... somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.

I will write a verse or a story and bring it into a songwriting session, because that's what's big in Nashville - the collaborative part of songwriting.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It's almost about the marriage of the band.

I'd love to try and teach Donald Trump how to write a song. I'd love to put him in a room with another person - someone who's protesting him at the Women's March. I'd put the three of us in a room and all write a song together. If that can happen, it proves we can get over our differences.

If you're writing songs by yourself, who's going to tell you if it's good or not? But if you're writing songs with somebody else, you get that immediate feedback.

I think if I could ever write with someone, I'd love to write a song with Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton.

I was always so jealous of a band like Fleetwood Mac, for instance, where Christine McVie would sing a whole bunch of songs even though Stevie was the obvious lead singer. It added variety to their shows.