A Quote by Tommy Shaw

I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not. — © Tommy Shaw
I wrote songs all my life, where anyone wanted to hear them or not.
I was clear that I wanted to do music and I wanted to write songs. But I wasn't clear about how I was going to make that happen. I wrote loads of songs but didn't want to show them to anyone.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was, in a way, very basic. So all I wanted to have was drums and another guitar pretty much playing what I wrote on guitar, and I was just going to sing.
I clearly remember writing songs [when I was young] and the power that it gave me of feeling like somebody. My whole life changed when I wrote those songs, even before anyone ever heard them. It wasn't a commercial thing.
That's very hard because there's three of them that mean a LOT to me equally. 'Lissie's Heart Murmur' was one of the first songs that we ever wrote - it was one of the first songs, at the very very very beginning of our band and I've always wanted to see and hear that song recorded and turned into something and it finally was and is!
In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.
I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.
People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.
'Unbreakable Smile' was based off one of the songs I wrote for the album - it was actually the first song I wrote for the album without realizing it yet. I think I wanted to name the album that because it seemed like that was just the theme of that chapter in my life and just the theme of all the songs put together.
The beauty of Billie Holiday is that she gave every singer after her the license to interpret and perform music in ways that were unique to each of us. Her uniqueness was very much a part of the way she sang the songs, the story she wanted to tell through the songs. I didn't really have a full understanding of Billie until I left home -- until I'd lived a little, shall we say. At different seasons of my life, when I'd sing her songs or listen to her albums, I'd hear things I didn't hear before. Wherever you are in life, you'll hear different things in her songs.
I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, 'cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else's songs.
When you hear kids singing your songs it just validates them, they sound like real songs when you hear them back, it's quite refreshing. Like songs that could have been around for a hundred years.
By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them.
I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them.
I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good.
You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.
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