A Quote by Lucinda Williams

Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.
Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.
Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.
There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.
The career has to support the making and can offer a platform, can offer you a voice in the world. And that's an incredible thing. But it's complicated and seductive and weird and tricky. I think you have to keep figuring that out your whole life.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious.
You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.
I'll tell you what you need to be a great scientist. You don't have to be able understand very complicated things. It's just the opposite. You have to be able to see what looks like the most complicated thing in the world and, in a flash, find the underlying simplicity. That's what you need: a talent for simplicity.
There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.
Mine would be Your Song, which is just one of his ones that I... I was actually glad the whole song wasn't played in this film and it's just a few bars of it because it makes me cry. You know, there are some songs that just make the hairs on the back of your neck just stand up? That's one of those for me - I put it on if I want a good cry.
At the risk of saying you should make a self-indulgent film for your first movie: you should make a self-indulgent film for your first movie.
If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Not that anyone minds--no one's paying attention to the music. Most of them never really listen to music. Practically no one actually does. Even at concerts people pay good money for, instead of a three-dollar cover charge, they talk through the whole thing. I feel sorry for them, since none of them understand what it's like to have a song just get into your soul and become your whole world. They don't know what it's like when a song changes your life.
I believe words should amaze or amuse. Only then will the listener want to understand the meaning of the song.
I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.
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