Songwriting Legacy Quotes

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

My view is that the great songwriting happened between 1920 and 1960. We're all, in our different ways, descended from the great songwriters of that era.

Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.

I think that every songwriter would give their right arm to come up with a standard that is going to be played long after they're dead.

I always said if a man would have done half the records that I've done, we would know about it. But we don't know all the records I've done for other artists.

The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops. That includes the Irving Berlins and the Hoagy Carmichaels, the Harold Arlens, Cole Porter.

I was inspired by people like Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Stevie and "Storytellers." People that could really change the world with their lyric, no matter who sung the song, they had still been the source of that message. So that's what I really aim for.

My highest aspirations as a songwriter are that people would sing my songs or know songs I've written sometime in as far into the future as I feel comfortable seeing.