Songs Quotes

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

That's why these songs have lasted as long as they have because they're just about feelings that don't change. They are love songs, they are not specific, those kinds of feelings don't change.

I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.

Downloading songs is not good.

Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain... you hear them and they're affixed to you.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm now in the business of making spiritual records and using my voice for that purpose. I'm not going to be singing songs that I made in the past. I closed the door on that incarnation of Sinead O'Connor.

I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

When I think about putting together an album, the process of listening to hundreds of songs each time and picking out the best 10 or so that will go on the record, it really sinks in as to just how many songs I've listened to all these years.

The only thing they really get to pick is the single. But I get to pick the producer, the songs on the record, the final masters, the artwork. Basically, I hand them a record.

A Minor is one of my all-time favorite keys to play in. It's a very moody key, and also 'A' is the first letter of my name. It just represents the songs through my eyes.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.

I've been writing songs since I was 14 years old, and that's my true love.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.

I find the greatest songs in the world come out of pain, and I don't like it! Here's what it does: It strips away all of your facade. It makes you so honest. It's cleansing.

I love story songs because I've always loved books.

Working with Yahoo! allows us to give our fans a chance to listen to our songs, check out the video, purchase our new album, win tickets to our show, and chat with us all in one place.

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters.

My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs - it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

Usually, I cut songs by other people that are artists that I already love.

And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.

Jewelry should not upstage you. I pick one hot point on my body that I'm going to highlight. Let one area do the singing - you don't want to hear three songs at once.