A Quote by Alison Krauss
Lyrics are kind of the whole thing; it's the message. Something might have a beautiful melody but if it's not the truth coming out of your mouth, it's not appealing
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Lyrics are kind of the whole thing; it's the message. Something might have a beautiful melody but if it's not the truth coming out of your mouth, it's not appealing.
Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.
I generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously.
Melody always comes to me first before words - cadence and melody. When you're humming the melody and it's incredible and words start coming out it can build into something special.
When I write, it is always the melody that comes first, and it just happens to be the case that the most beautiful tunes are sad, and the lyrics follow the mood of the melody.
Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.
[Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.
It was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady.... So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.
Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.
I certainly self-police my language depending on who I'm talking to. I try to be very careful about using filler words, about not drawling certain vowels, even when I can't say "drawl" without drawling. That's kind of sad, because self-policing inhibits communication. You're more focused on the words coming out of your mouth or that should not be coming out of your mouth than making a connection with the person you're speaking to.
I usually write lyrics first, and then when I get home or close to any kind of instrument, I usually make a melody for those lyrics.
So you have the challenge of just learning the lines, period, and not only learning them, but learning them to the extent that you assimilate them, so that you're not worried about what the next word is coming out of your mouth when it comes to doing a scene. And you're also in the trenches with the writers, just in the wonderful kind of back and forth of how is it best to say something, even if it involves four or five words. I love that kind of thing.
Do I start with the lyrics? No. Quite honestly, it's the opposite. I generally get the melody first - I kinda fiddle around on the guitar and work out a melody. The lyrics are there to flesh out the tone of the music. I've tried before to do things the other way around, but it never seems to work. Obviously, I spend a lot of time on my lyrics, I take them very seriously, but they're kinda secondary. Well, equal, maybe. I think sometimes that if you write a poem, it should remain as just a poem, just... words.
I think it's good to have a balance. Everything I write about, it's not something I necessarily might have went through, there's songs where I might have an idea, sometimes it might be a melody or something that I like, I make up a story to go with that melody. But I do think it's most important to have honest songs.
It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.
What I really enjoy is not you; it's something that's greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn't stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I'm alone, it continues to play.
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