- Dance
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- Nov 07, 2020
Song Quotes
The feeling behind every song.
These song quotes emphasize sincerity as the key to a performance that actually reaches an audience, along with the idea that a song can capture a live moment as it happens. One entry recalls a song tied to an early anti-drug campaign, showing how songs can carry a specific message. Related picks continue in our Feel quotes.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Night
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- Nov 07, 2020
Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've never gotten money from most of those records. And I made those records: In the studio, they'd just give me a bunch of words, I'd make up a song! The rhythm and everything. 'Good Golly Miss Molly'! And I didn't get a dime for it.
- Nov 07, 2020
The very first song I ever wrote was called 'I See Between The Trees,' when I was 9. It was really bad.
- Children
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- Nov 07, 2020
There's a variety and depth to the song topics I get to write about in children's music and books: being able to write about things I wouldn't normally write about, like a disappointing pancake, or monsters or opposite day is really different than writing about heartbreak and relationships.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.
- Love
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- Nov 07, 2020
Lionel Richie, love song, OK, thank you very much, good-bye. And all of a sudden I realized that, in my career, what has made my career has always been the surprises.
- Father
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- Nov 07, 2020
I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Certain social situations make me feel like a square peg in a round hole. Realising you can connect to the human race through song makes me feel less alien.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
My parents' generation was definitely pre-telly, and they knew how to entertain each other. Everybody knew something that they could do - a song or a poem, or a piece of music. At school, I remember being a cat and then a budgie and then a bumble bee. I obviously thought all that was marvelous.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've had many songs where I've gone, 'Oh, my God, this song is going to be huge!' but it wasn't the right artist, or something just didn't happen. It didn't make the song any worse. It just didn't line up. That does happen.
- Moment
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- Nov 07, 2020
When I was asked to do a song from 'In the Heights' at the White House in 2009, I chose instead to do 'Alexander Hamilton' because I felt like I was meeting a moment.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
I know the video platform so, so, so well. I know the perfect mixture of how comedic a piece has to be, what the video has to be like, what the song has to sound like, to make it successful.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
I don't really see how any song can not feel contrived if it isn't honest, and how could I write honest songs if I don't write about stuff going on in my life and how I'm feeling?
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have never been more physically tired than after that first song of my first concert.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
You hear a lot of rap songs about spending money. I thought, wouldn't it be funny to make a song about saving money because it's ironic, but beyond irony, I genuinely have pride in saving money.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
'Ex-Boyfriend' is a really funny story that is that much funnier when you have visuals attached to it as opposed to just hearing it. I couldn't let a song like that go un-videoed.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020