A Quote by J. J. Cale

If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself. — © J. J. Cale
If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself.
The only piece of advice I've ever given anybody is learn to write songs and write as many songs as you can. Because it's never gonna hurt, and when you run into that problem of, 'God, I don't know what I want to say,' or the opposite problem of, 'I know exactly what I want to say, but no one has written it,' then you can just go write it yourself.
I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.
I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.
I can't stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There's a lot of people who don't want to finish songs because they don't think they're any good. Well they're not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won't write bad songs. You're thinking they're bad so you don't have to finish it. That's what I really think it is. Well it's all right. Well, how do you know? It's not done!
Sometimes touring can warp reality because you're never in one place long enough to get a feel for it. You don't interact with people long enough to know what real life is. That's why a lot of artists write songs about longing and missing people when they're on the road. I do my best to keep my mind open and I read a lot when I'm on tour, so I hope I have good things to write about. I'm constantly in the songwriting process.
I don't think I was ever thinking critically about my aesthetic, I think it's enough when you're little just to understand that you can give yourself the permission to try and see things differently or create something original, even though you probably won't make anything original for a really long time.
I write good songs out of fear... fear of failure. Because if they're not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.
My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.
With Free, we had phased out all of the blues material and wanted to phase in all original material, and the only song that stayed from our blues past was 'The Hunter' by Albert King. People just loved that. And I said, 'We have to write a song that will top that - otherwise, what are we doing here?' That was the birth of 'All Right Now.'
As long as there are annoying people in the world, I won't run out of material.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
Throughout all of the changes that have happened in my life, one of the priorities I've had is to never change the way I write songs and the reasons I write songs. I write songs to help me understand life a little more. I write songs to get past things that cause me pain. And I write songs because sometimes life makes more sense to me when it's being sung in a chorus, and when I can write it in a verse.
Believe that you can run farther or faster. Believe that you're young enough, old enough, strong enough, and so on to accomplish everything you want to do. Don't let worn-out beliefs stop you from moving beyond yourself.
I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.
Having room to run and having just the space to use your imagination and create stories out of everyday life, I think that had a lot to do with me wanting write. And write songs
I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.
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