A Quote by Stephen Sondheim

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it. — © Stephen Sondheim
I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.
In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.
When you do a lyric for 'April in Paris,' those who have heard it before can hear it in a different way now. It can add perspective to a great piece of music that does not have a lyric and may be inaccessible to lot of ears because people don't deal with complex music very well.
Writing a lyric is writing a lyric, whether it's sung or recited. Perhaps the question to ask should be, has playing in a band for three years affected you? The answer to that is you bet.
I don't really love to perform in music. Some people like it more, but it's not my thing so much, but just the writing, when you get the lyric, and the lyric just goes just the right way, or you find the right bridge that takes you to the solo, and those moments are tremendous, and it's difficult to portray.
When I'm writing a lyric, I totally forget about the music. I'm just looking at the lyric and thinking about it almost as a separate entity. And then I'll go to my keyboard with all the lyrics printed out and try to think of how to make this a complete musical thing. I've got a very basic keyboard with some presets.
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.
Lyric helps invoke the core person. And, without lyric, it is difficult to touch the core. Lyrical music is the music of India.
I think what we find fascinating and interesting is when people take our music and turn it into emotionally something else. And weirdly, Lorde's version of 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World,' the production really goes with the lyric more than our version does, because our version, albeit the lyric is dark, the music is quite uplifting.
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 don't think there's a problem. First of all, I don't think music turns people into social liabilities. Because you hear a lyric - there's no medical proof that a person hearing a lyric is going to act out the lyric. There's also no medical proof that if you hear any collection of vowels and consonants, that the hearing of that collection is going to send you to Hell.
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.
Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.
I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.
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.
Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.
I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun.
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