A Quote by Tommy Lee

I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song. — © Tommy Lee
I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
My first song was called 'Portrait.' It would just be poetry, and I really never understood how to write the structure of writing a song. I just knew the feeling, and I knew it was supposed to break and change at the same part, so that's how I write music.
For the first records I really never thought about anything other than the song itself. I thought that this was what the job of a songwriter was. I was really approaching music from a very different standpoint. To me when I was younger the song was just the melody. I think as I've gotten older and have been recording myself I've become aware of just how many layers can exist within a song besides just the main vocal.
The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
Deep reading refers to a whole continuum of processes that include some of the most important things about thinking and how we connect thought to what we read - critical analysis, analogical reasoning, how we infer from the text, how do we take another's perspective.
I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.
When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.
My dad (Scott Swift) believed in me, even when I didn't.He always knew I could do this. I’m sure that everyone in Reading remembers how much he talked about me. I thought that was sweet, but really I just wasn’t as sure it would happen. So, I just love my dad for believing in his little girl.
Decide, before you start, that you're going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you're reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn't to persuade you to change, it's to help you choose what to change.
You don't realize - the great thing about change is how quickly we get used to it. So I'm not complaining. the more things change,the more they don't stay the same. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They might not change everywhere all at once - but there are moments when the impossible becomes the inevitable, and the rest is just a matter of time.
I've always had some sort of affinity for the ends of things. It depends on the song, I try to explore it in different ways. Sometimes when I think about death I'm thinking of it as a physical character that can teach you things and sometimes I'm thinking of it in a finite sense and other times I'm just asking questions that I can't answer. I don't really like to state my personal belief, because I change my mind too often, but I imagine something peaceful. Whether it's a rest or another world or some kind of eternity, it doesn't seem like a scary thing.
One of the great things about the longer you do a character, the more the writers start to understand your kind of character ticks and things that you like to do. The most exciting thing I think for a writer is when the characters just start speaking for themselves. You sit down at your keyboard and just stuff starts jumping out of their mouths. They just sort of wrote the scripts for themselves.
I always encourage people to start in their own personal universe, because sometimes we as parents start thinking about the big picture. How do I change what's happening in my entire school? And how do I do it in my community? And then you get overwhelmed and it's just like, "Forget it, I'll just stay here in my kitchen and wait." But, start small.
Casting couch is a demon of the world! It is just that in the industry just because people know them, it is just talked about much more but it should be completely eliminated as a concept.
I just sat down and thought, I'm going to write a song today, I'm going to give it a try. So I just stuck it on a tape like everything else. That was just another song.
Every song falls short of the glory of what a song could be. That's why the urge is there to start again and yet again. Often it's the fault of rhyme. I've discovered a hundred times that there just aren't enough rhymes to say what I wanted to say, so I said something else instead. Sometimes it was a better thing, but the thing I meant to say went unsaid. So there's an opening for another song.
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