Top 1200 Cover Songs Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

My mind was so geared towards being a performing artist, singing all these classical pieces, but the sense of loneliness I got when I moved from New York to El Paso meant that writing turned into singing. I'd sing all these songs, and they'd make me feel better. Songs that crafted the way my life was going to go.

It's hard for me to always explain my songs, and people always expect a meaning and to know what it's about. Sometimes when I write these songs I'm feeling a particular emotion, so to then come back and explain what I was feeling or put it into words is quite difficult.

You can't judge a book by its cover, can you?

We would play songs live on stage, and then we'd watch their reaction we were receiving immediately, if people were dancing and singing along. If they weren't, then we'd go into the dressing rooms of the different NBA teams that we were playing in their arenas, and we'd change the songs right there.

Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

I have sung songs for several actors in movies, including Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. Unfortunately, even after singing songs for their movies like 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan' and 'Raees,' the two actors have not lip-synced them on screen.

All I can do now is cover the mirrors.

There is a silver lining to every cloud and there's some awesome songs that have come from some really like bad experiences, but they're great experiences 'cause then I've got some good songs so it's all good for me.

I started listening to The-Dream a lot. That's when I really got into writing songs. I like the way he put lyrics and makes his songs. So I was like, 'All right,' and I just started writing. That's when I started wanting to be a songwriter.

You're always moving and thinking about a whole bunch of things. But those traits work well for me in studios and in meetings about creative ideas. If you listen to the songs I write, they are the most ADHD songs ever. They have five hooks in one and it all happens in three minutes. I figured out a way of working with it.

Don't judge a book by its cover

I took a lot time to do the first album, and I was really happy about that album. I co-wrote the songs and it was a learning process. When I was working on that album I realized, for the first time, that I could write my own songs.

I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.

We've gone further on this album, where we have a Big Band song, kind of a Sinatra-type song; we have a couple songs that have electronic music on them. We've got a couple rock songs, maybe a little heavier than what we've done. So the title 'Jekyll & Hyde' really covers the breadth of the record.

I wouldn't exclude writing another song in German, but I don't want to translate songs anymore. We used to sit down and literally translate every song word for word - it was very technical, and the songs would lose so much along the way.

I had no interest in music. But now, music means everything to me. I have no words to explain how beautiful music is. It is where you can create everything, like beautiful songs to sad songs to almost anything.

If I were doing a real rock show, slapping the phone book in time to the music, grooving with the songs, then it would matter to know how I felt about what I was playing. You can't fake it in that situation. But I'm just counting them down as they appear on the chart, 1 through 40. What really matters is what I say between the songs.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.

When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.

With every album, the approach is find the best songs you can find, write the best songs you can write and try to sound better.

I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.

A song is a song. But there are some songs, ah, some songs are the greatest. The Beatles song 'Yesterday.' Listen to the lyrics.

Songs are songs, and to reduce them is to waste them.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

I had this talent for these stupid little teenage songs. I just couldn't get anyone to sing my songs, so I had to sing my own tunes. ... The thing is to be able to outlast the trends. ... They are actually manufactured entertainment groups. They are a product of technology. What you are listening to is technology.

I'm more of a songwriter. I love writing songs. I love writing my songs. It's always been writing for me, and it makes it different when you're writing for yourself.

We have some very personal songs; songs that are a little more close to our hearts, that speak our story a little more.

The songs are inspired by my experiences. Sometimes they are more than my real-life and, conversely, my life is more than just my songs.

When it comes down to the song writing, I'm just very slow - very slow. Because the songs are about my life, so I'm doing emotional work on myself. As I'm writing these songs, I have to learn these lessons and dig real deep into my heart to write this stuff.

When I started writing songs for Temple of the Dog, I went to my room with my acoustic guitar, and I was happy staying in that mode. It was more chordal based and more lyric driven. I enjoyed not making riff-based songs built around a guitar idea.

I don't think songs have to be like these super-#1-smash-hit-sounding songs, because I think it's more important that it's like, 'Hey! This is coming out of me. This is something I connect with. This is something that I like to sing.'

Growing up as a singer, and a cast member, and now as an adult, a songwriter, I get the luxury of choosing the kinds of songs that I want to sing, because I'll write, you know, hundreds of songs. Even though only 12 appear on the album. That's 12 that I've chosen to sing of my catalog.

I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

I love the balls-to-the-walls rule-breaking approach the Beatles had in the studio (which I emulate), although I don't try to make my songs "sound" like their songs. But every time I crank a knob of some piece of equipment, or plug an instrument into the "wrong" amp/effect, I am channeling the Beatles.

If the songs were in lumps, then you would expect to understand what was going on in the plot. Which is not a realistic goal. And also the instrumentation is different for every show, so it's more varied sonically. And people are free to make up their own plots, of course. There are pretty dense and complicated plots, and they're simple songs.

I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it... I could only do little riffs and whatever.

In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.

It was just the next logical step from making succinct pop songs. What do you do after that? You make pop songs that are longer and more epic, that push the envelope. Imagine your favourite song, or something that you play over and over in the car, except that you don't have to start it over as much.

I like mash-ups, taking contemporary songs and making them old... old songs, making them new.

A lot of the hardcore fans wanna hear the deep cuts - songs like 'Orion' or maybe like a 'Disposable Heroes' - you know, songs that we don't play all the time - and then, of course, they wanna hear 'Sandman' and 'Nothing Else Matters' and some of the hits.

I always work on the songs all together up until the very end. I never mix a song and think, "Okay, now that one's done." I think that's why it feels like songs are really connected, and I like that. They're all worked on kind of like a little family.

A song is a song. But there are some songs, ah, some songs are the greatest. The Beatles song Yesterday. Listen to the lyrics.

But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.

There's so much more subtlety to this new recording. There's a subtlety in the playing. There's also a subtlety in the way I approached the singing. The band was able to really capture the feeling of the songs and not really trade anything that we had sort of arranged for the live presentation, but the songs just aren't as loud.

It's interesting what a new song can do to the other songs. A new song can be the grout of the record, tie the songs together, and define a new room in the house, helping the other rooms make sense.

I grew up in a household in which they'd always play old skool classic R&B love songs - Al Green, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye... And my mom has even said that, when I was in her womb, she'd put the headphones to her stomach and play those songs to me!

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

I will say that the difference was that when you're an Army journalist, as opposed to a civilian correspondent covering the military, you're very often either a public relations agent or expected to perform that role. I would say that one of the most unexpected benefits of that job was being taught to never try to cover anything up, but rather to get any bad information out right away, so that there would be nothing more to come out later. This was a wonderful lesson to be taught because often the effort to cover up a story becomes a bigger story than the original one.

It's always been about the songs for us. It doesn't matter about all the image stuff. We're really about making songs that people can relate to, that we love, that they will love, that we will enjoy playing live.

I think great songs can come from anywhere and you constantly have to be able to look out for those. I think a lot of the times people will try too hard to write everything themselves and therefor miss out on great songs that way.

It's almost like a theater, where I can play a character in every song, 'cause Kamelot songs are very... There's always a narrative going on. There's a story within albums and in songs, so I get to play a character and sing it in a different way than people might recognize coming from me.

I do not like people writing songs and then other people singing them. A lot of people don't even sing their own songs anymore. It's like producers these days have ghost producers; 'I don't produce, but I am a producer.'

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.

You can't judge people by their cover.

Yeah. My singing and my songs were very influenced by all of that. People would come up to me and ask, Is that a Billie Holiday song? I'd say, No, it's my song. The lyrics would be in my style, but the songs would be very jazzy.

I am one of the few composers who has been lucky enough to manage to do songs with female singers, despite the labels and producers wanting otherwise. They don't believe that songs with female voices can work and often push us to work with male singers.

Because of things like 'The X Factor' and 'Autotune', the real art of communicating a song is not treasured any more. But singing other people's songs can be an intensely personal experience. I want the songs to be vessels that people fill with their own imagination, the same way that I fill it with my thoughts and feelings.