A Quote by Lou Rawls

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me. — © Lou Rawls
A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.
I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.
You’re going to tell me that last night shouldn’t have happened.” No. I’m glad it happened. For too long, I’ve been telling myself that I could spend all this time with yo and flirt with you and not have it mean anything. It does mean something. You mean something to me. But I’m not in love with you.
I just said, you know, this is a great track but this lyric, I don't believe it. It sounds like I'm trying to say something, instead of it naturally coming out of me, like I was saying something that I already knew. Anyway, I can't remember what it was. And either I threw it all out or I threw 90 percent of it out, and kept a line or two. That's happened a couple of times to me. Not too often, but a couple of times. Very aggravating when it does happen.
I look at other people's tats for probably the idea, or like, where to put it or something. But, at the end of the day, all my tats gotta mean something back to me. The moment you get something that don't mean something to you, you're gonna regret that tattoo.
For most players it's hard to accept you've ended your football career and that you have to go out and do something else. But the way it happened to me, so suddenly... I went into depression and had to deal with that, being depressed, something that had never happened to me in my life before.
When I fought Kampmann, something happened in that fight and to me, it's still the most epic moment in my career. I was losing and something happened and I flipped a switch.
Sometimes people will request a song I haven't played in a while and I'll play it and singing the lyrics will mean something different to me as a 35 year-old person than they did when I was 25. I know I'm still that person who wrote it and thought I knew what I meant when I was writing them. They meant something very exact to me in that time of my life. But it's really cool when those same lyrics can transform into something else and mean something entirely different to me.
It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen --4000 dead and starving lying around-- and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp --it didn't mean a thing.
The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power.
Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.
I'm much better at fixing or changing a melody to suit me than I would a lyric. But for me, everything is lyric. It has to be true for me to say it.
Something happened in the studio that was between me and Tyga that ain't supposed to escalate, but it did. Something happened with a song we did, and he ain't like it.
I've come to some balance now and calmness. If anything happened to me and I got hit by a bus - I hope this doesn't happen, but if something happened - my body of work is something I could rest on. I don't feel, "Oh God, I have to hurry up . . ."
You rhapsodize about beauty, and my eyes glaze. Everything that I love is ugly. I mean really, you would be amazed. Just do me a favor, it's the least that you can do, just don't treat me like I am something that happened to you.
I am not going to sacrifice that for something that doesn't mean as much to me as kids mean to me. The kids mean the world to me. If I have to make a decision to cancel some things, I will do it as a man.
But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan. Overnight I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to the expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew.
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