Song Quotes

I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.

I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.

I've never written a song in my life. It's all a big hoax.

A song called Never. Which we never play. But it's a great song.

They keep the song as street as it needs to be. It's got a good catchy hook where it can do what it needs to do on the radio, but they keep the song street where it will keep credibility in the hood.

Like I can't cry for myself so I will let this song take all of the things inside I can't let anyone else see and offer it up, as if the sound were some kind of god, and my pain is some kind of sacrifice.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I try to look at most of my solos as a musical piece within the song, not, say, showing off.

I'm sure every song has some kind of undertone of what I was going through with Chris. It was my life.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

It's nice if people ask to use your song. You have to make a decision as an artist how you feel about that.

I wouldn't have a No. 1 record or song if I wasn't a hardworking person.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing - if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.

I just decided to play make believe, memorize it like it was just some kind of song and just take the emotion out of the words. And I did. I goofed a couple of times.

The real danger of writing a great song when you're on something is that it might get you thinking that the only way to repeat that is by only writing when you're high.

I think for new artists the hardest thing is putting the face with a name. People maybe heard our song on the radio or something but until they get several impressions of who you are - from whatever it is, whether TV or a live show, I feel like they don't quite connect the dots.

Some of the press who speak loudly about the freedom of the press are themselves the enemies of freedom. Countless people dare not say a thing because they know it will be picked up and made a song of by the press. That limits freedom.

The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn't been any such thing.

One Long Year was just a song here and there, and it was meant to reflect the mood that I was in but unfortunately it also reflected too little of any particular thing rather than hanging together as a whole album.

I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

I consider the piano my 'main' instrument and have been playing for as long as I can remember. It seems to me that I might have come up with something resembling a song as early as 4 or 5 years old.

It's not that I don't love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

A good country song takes a page out of somebody's life and puts it to music.

The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.

I was asked by a group to write a song on the theme of brotherhood. This was before women's liberation, when brotherhood meant men and women both, so I wrote the song. Since I had always been very fond of the Passion Chorale, I wrote words to that great piece.

When you write a song, a song has longevity.

If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song.

I make no claim that Jewish culture is superior to other cultures or that the Jewish song is better than the song of my neighbor.