A Quote by Rachael Yamagata

I don't really usually write sort of a cheerleader-type lyric. — © Rachael Yamagata
I don't really usually write sort of a cheerleader-type lyric.
My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.
When I write a song, that process is sort of entwined with a lyric or a chord progression that suits the vibe, and that'll work off each other.
I don't have some songwriting formula that I kinda go by. Usually it just comes by way of inspiration. Sometimes I'm inspired by a melody first and sometimes I'm inspired by a lyric. Typically, I'm inspired by an idea for a lyric and then after we get the lyric going then we write a melody to it.
See, I'm not the type of writer that has 400 songs in a suitcase someplace on the shelf. I'm sort of a rise-to-the-occasion-type of writer, so when I know I'm going to record, I get in the mood to write.
I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.
Some of the songs on the radio are really outrageous. I listen to the lyric. If the lyric doesn't make sense, I don't like the song.
Sometimes it starts with a random lyric idea that sets the tone for the whole song. Chords and sounds build from the lyric and rhythm, kind of. Sometimes it's a track I fall I love with... but writing my own songs, I rarely write on tracks.
I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.
It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
It all starts from the lyric with me. If I work really hard on the lyric and get it right, then it will tell me whatever else to do, where to go.
My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.
I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.
I was lucky enough to be a "type." Sort of a bad-guy type at the time, because I was tall and I had dark eyes. A lot of times, you don't have to be good; you just have to be the right type.
For me, a song doesn't really take flight until it has a lyric on it. ...Without a lyric that I'm happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn't have any resonance.
I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.
A cheerleader? Do I look like a guy who'd be interested in talking to a cheerleader?
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