A Quote by Ian Svenonius

I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted.
Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same.
It's always amazing seeing the song-writing process. A song just starts off as just an idea or a story you want to tell. It keeps building and building when you add the lyrics, the instruments, the vocals until you finally reach the finished song other people can enjoy.
There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.
I would say a great song [is where] you like everything in the song. The lyrics move you, the beat makes you want to dance and you feel invincible when you listen to that song. A good song I think you can listen to but you get tired of it really fast.
it's about a love song to myself, and a love song to the universe, kind of like the way that Song of Solomon consists of love songs to God or like the way Sufi poems are erotic love songs to God, I kind of wanted something like that. Because I was getting to know myself more deeply at this point. I've always been on this track where I wanted to be enlightened.
It's always been based around the song, and guitar-playing in the service of the song... The sensibility is about songs. I like to think of it as kind of 'refined primitive.'
I'm so bad at lyrics. I'm always trying to get better. Sometimes, the song can restrict your lyrics - if you're trying to make a poppy song, you don't want to sing something that sounds like it could be on an At the Drive-In song.
The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?
I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
I've always had a tendency to keep an emergency exit in a song. I can't remember ever writing a song that is completely and thoroughly depressing; there's always been a way out somehow. A sense of hope in song, regardless of the subject matter.
Every song that I record, I love, it's like my new favorite. But one that really stands out to me is a song I debuted on tour with Trey Songz called "Angel". It's a really acoustic sounding and it's a really big song.
I think the difference between a good song and a great song is... honestly, I think the lyrics, because if you have a really solid melody and solid track and everything is there but then the lyric is just okay, then you've got a good song.
I should attempt to write a love song, I have written lots of poetry about love so I could turn those into lyrics. I'm a sucker for romance - always have been, always will be. I love walking down the beach and listening to my iPod and belting them out. What would we do without love songs?
The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.
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