A Quote by T Bone Burnett

I want to write songs and play them for people - live. — © T Bone Burnett
I want to write songs and play them for people - live.
I want to write songs, and I would like to play and sing them. I'm not a politician; I'm not a comedian. I hate coming up with bits to do between songs.
Well, you know, when you're putting together a show, you've got to be careful not to load it up with the new stuff. We have to play the songs that people want to hear, too. People may come thinking, "Oh, I've just got to hear this song." Or maybe they'll write me a letter saying a certain song is really meaningful to them, so we'll be sure to play those songs.
I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.
I had my whole life to write a bunch of crappy songs and then play them in front of people and think, 'All right, that one out of these seven is really good; it's a keeper.' But on this second album, to be honest, I probably wrote about 50 songs where I was just trying to write a hit.
It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
I didn't want to play these people any more songs and have them say that they weren't good enough. So my response was to just not be able to write anymore. I know that's not the healthiest of responses.
I like to write sad songs. They're much easier to write and you get a lot more emotion into them. But people don't want to hear them as much. And radio definitely doesn't; they want that positive, uptempo thing.
The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.
I don't want to sing songs and write songs that need to have images behind them that are of a specific time. The times we live in today - I mean, there's a lot to work with. But I think that if I was my age in 1975 or 1985, I would have felt the same way because that's what I gravitate toward.
We don't want to name our songs after the choruses, so we sometimes come up with random titles. We don't care if people don't know the names of the songs, we want them to play it and never get sick of it. We want it to be exciting, melodic, heavy and emotional. It can make you cry and laugh and be angry.
There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.
I bought a guitar when I was twenty. But I didn't write a song until I was 25 or 26. I never learned to play others songs. I learned to play my own songs while I was learning how to make them better.
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!
People want more real artistes. They want girls who can actually sing and play an instrument and write their own songs - that's not fake and manufactured anymore".
In a very broad statement, or mentality, you just want as many fans as you can have of your music. You want people to write songs for and connect with and play shows for.
Usually I write the songs at home and then I bring them in to the band; when we play them as a band, that's kinda how we figure out the feel of how they're going to be presented on the record or live.
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