A Quote by Tony Joe White

When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it.

Tony Joe White

Quote Topics

About Around Aware Before Going Gotta Know Like Never Receiving Song Songs Station Write

Quote Author

Tony Joe White
American - Singer
Born: July 23, 1943

I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, 'You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.' You gotta write 'em to get to it. You never know what's going to be a little song or a big song.

Mary Gauthier

I usually don't write songs by people calling me and saying, 'Write a song about this.' Usually I'm just going with what I want to write, so you never know.

Diane Warren

The traditional country music stays because it's such an all-around good format and it's fun to write songs like 'Oh Susannah.' I just feel along with that you gotta talk about what's going on today.

Eddie Rabbitt

You've just gotta go in and write from the heart and write the best material that you can and put it out. If one hits, hey, great. It keeps the legacy going. But you've gotta keep doing new material. It's the future of any band.

Rickey Medlocke

I always try to write the best song I can in the moment, and those songs are often going to end up on Death Cab for Cutie records. I don't set out to write a solo song or write a band song. I just write, and where that songs ends up is kind of TBD.

Ben Gibbard

When you're like, 'Yo, we gotta write a hit song, we need a hit song right now,' that never works. Every time that happens, I never write a hit song.

Benny Blanco

Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.

Dan Bern

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.

Laura Nyro

Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I'm going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It's always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.

Bruno Mars

I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.

Benmont Tench

I gotta defend, I gotta protect the rim, I gotta rebound, I gotta set good picks for the guys, finish on offense, and I think that is not going to change much.

Ivica Zubac

As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job.

Kenny Chesney

I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.

Laura Jane Grace

In our business, you never really know who you're going to get and who you're going to work with. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's awful, and you gotta do what you gotta do.