CD's are amazing because you get the artwork, you get to look at the lyrics, you get to look at the behind-the-scenes photos or something.
When I'm writing Broadway, it's for a character, a man, a woman, an old guy, a kid. In the band, you're talking in your own voice in the lyrics, saying what you think or feel. On Broadway, you're expressing that through a character.
I had only heard about Fall Out Boy a couple months before we contacted him. I heard 'Saturday' and 'Grand Theft Autumn' and thought the lyrics were smart and the singer was insanely talented.
I think every generation has that movement of hip-hop that you know you're playing it and you definitely have that moment of like, "Why am I saying this so enthusiastically? Why am I so stoked and psyched to say these lyrics?"
I come up with the ideas for my videos, and I write the lyrics and choreograph them, and I direct them and tell everyone what to do and how I want them to sing the parts and do the tongue pops and eye rolls and stuff like that.
There's a long tradition - certainly with country, but in all kinds of genres of music - to have humorous lyrics. Certainly with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and, if you look at country, Roger Miller and Jim Stafford.
When you're looking for good lyrics, you turn to Kendrick Lamar, you turn to J Cole, you turn to Wale, you turn to Chance the Rapper, you turn to Rapsody. You don't turn to Post Malone.
Of course, no lyrics are ever unintentional, but I think bands like Wolf Parade and the Arcade Fire have a tendency to touch on big themes without really following through on them or tying them in to a particular logic.
Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process.
It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"
I don't think any of our lyrics have ever been erotic in a sexual term, because I haven't really written, touched on, that subject too often. But, uh... I mean, I suppose they could point the finger at us for violence maybe in certain songs.
As far as the lyrics go, I think I was negotiating a moment in my life where I didn't feel happy. I think I had some existential frustration and I was wrestling with that on a few different levels. I was feeling like I wanted to change a lot of things.
In France, disco was an artistic progression that might not have had the same social stakes. Also, the language barriers - like with hip-hop, in France, the focus is more on the personality, of the flow of the music, rather than the lyrics themselves.
I think Mighty Moe really got me into a whole different style of MCing. There were a lot of people with simple lyrics and simple word play- he really pushed out the boat.
When I was preparing for '1994,' the song for Deena and Sam was 'Fast Car' by Tracy Chapman. I just really love that song so much, and I think the lyrics really hit home and reminded me of their dynamic.
When I first started writing music, it was all really angry, angst-y lyrics. But then there was a point where I realized that people are clearly listening to what I have to say, so if I have the power to bring somebody up, why would I bring them down?
I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn't necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn't ever really seen before.
When I first started making music, I was all about wordplay and how fast I could rap, but over the years, I've really gained an appreciation for melody. What's cool is that when you're singing, you have to be concise, and when you're rapping, you have the opportunity to be really detailed with your lyrics.
I like collaboration because, first of all, I'm good at writing lyrics. I don't know how to make beats. I don't play instruments. I'm not a good singer. So even when you see a solo album of mine, it's still a collaboration.
I do pinch myself, like when shows in non-English speaking countries are sold out, and people are singing my lyrics. I don't think I'll ever lose that; I'm always appreciative every day of the support I have as an artist, because I'm not a commercial artist.
Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.
If you write your own lyrics now, and those are the main focus in the EP... people tend to approach it as Americana, which is wild. That's what leads people to it. But it's just whatever people want; as long as they like the music.
Having been familiar with "drunk" once or twice myself, that lick just came to me - and yeah, it sounded very drunk, so I presented it to Alice [Cooper]. It felt like he wrote the lyrics in about a minute.
Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.
I'm on this planet for another forty years at the most and I got a baby and a wife and I'm worried about their future and that kind of fear, that anger is spilling into my lyrics, I can't just sit back and talk about myself until I'm dead.
Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?
The fact that our message and my lyrics can have a positive impact on someone's life is really astounding. It definitely makes me appreciate what I do even more because I'm not just doing it for self-gain, I'm doing it to help others.
I speak three languages - English is my third language - so I take my time with lyrics. It's almost like having a conversation with somebody. If it's really important, you want to think about what you wanna say with that person, especially if it's for the last time.
One of the lyrics from Bono that always sticks with me is 'Where the Streets Have No Name.' Just the name of the song, that sort of oneness, and there isn't any division in yourself, and your just at peace and fired up at the same time.
In most of my films I write the music into the script. I'm listening to songs and lyrics that empower the themes of the film. There's a lot of Indigenous music that has not been heard widely and I love the idea of giving that music to the rest of the world.
With 'Someone New', I was at my rawest, and I didn't want to cover it up. And same with 'You Should Know' and 'Under the Table.' I wanted it to be the lyrics and the chord progressions, and the intricacies of the guitar of 'Someone New' are so delicate, sometimes that's all you need.
'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.
Yorke's lyrics make me want to give up. I could never in my wildest dreams find something as beautiful as they find for a single song - let alone album
after album.
After I wrote 'Sweet Summer Day,' Jihyo did the guide recording. We did that in our apartment, revising the lyrics together, allocating parts to members and discussing the song together.
I've never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process.
When it comes to 'Maruvaarthai,' I have said many a time that Carnatic music drives my creative influence. In that sense, Darbuka Siva gave me a lot of room to breathe with the melody. The instrumental, however, was grounded. The lyrics is just poetic, and phonetically, they sound beautiful.
Rachael Sage is a marvelous young artist- and I am a fan!! 'Haunted by You' has a beauty that shines through her lyrics and melodies-- poignant, tender and tough. These are stories from the heart that will lift you up and carry you to places you had never dreamed.
When you go through tragedy, you can either let that destroy you and you become bitter and never let it go, or you can let it make you stronger and let it make you grow. And that's what I did. My lyrics are coming from a place that I want people to relate to and feel that they're not alone.
We're going to sing about things that matter to us. The balancing act is to present these ideas but also make the music exciting and sort of fun enough that even if you're not paying attention to the lyrics, you might still like the songs anyway. That's the idea.
We didn't start Theocracy because we wanted to be cool like so-and-so and make money. Our songs aren't trendy, and our lyrics hopefully make people think about certain concepts in a new way.
My interest in the theater led me to my first writing experience as an adult. My husband David wrote the music and lyrics and I wrote the book for a children's musical, 'Spacenapped' that was produced by a neighborhood theater in Brooklyn.
With Prisoner of Conscience, the focus was - I've worked with Madlib, High Tech, Kanye West, J Dilla. I feel like I've worked with some of the greatest of all time. That's been overlooked. That's been overshadowed by the weight of the lyrics.
I write in the weirdest places. I wrote 'Girl on the Coast' in my car with the kids in the back and Eric driving. I just wrote the whole thing on my phone. I just typed out the lyrics.
I'm good at melody - I'll write the top-line melody and ideal words I want to go with it. But I'm not that good at writing lyrics. I bounce those back and forth with songwriters or someone who can sing.
Success is good, but I have seen the other side. I don't think much about it. I just work towards making a good melody, with catchy yet meaningful lyrics, and as I'm a music producer and arranger myself, I know the sound I need.
Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material.
It's been really cool to me to watch someone like Sam Hunt, whose lyrics and roots are in country but you can hear that he listens to Drake and Justin Timberlake - and that's OK. It allows songwriters to be more honest because it's like, 'This is who I'm listening to.'
Running is very rhythmic, and I have written a lot of lyrics while out running. It's a very musical exercise, and sometimes I like to sing when I run. Your whole body is doing the same thing.
I first bought a Buffy Sainte-Marie record when I was 12, and her music has always remained with me. In the 1960s, as a political activist, Buffy's lyrics were fearless, and I'm very grateful for all the risks that she took.
I've seen people who like a certain song write on their Instagram what they think the lyrics are - which they aren't. I'm like, 'Oh, that's interesting - you can create your own adventure with some of these songs.' Which is really cool.
With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
I'd much rather talk about guitar playing. I hate it when people ask me about my lyrics. I always feel like telling them to just go and read them.
With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.
I like to write music. And I think exploring with lyrics and figuring out how to make complete songs is fun. I think I have a take on it. I don't know if it's great, but it's an interesting take. It's original.
I always thought that was very important, to be able to deliver great lyrics and also put on a great performance, to have that type of visual where people would take to it, where they'd want to dress like you or have pictures of you hanging up on the wall.
Some of the fanmail is interesting! Some of it's the lyrics to the songs and stuff, and they'll like, send me their favourite lines, which is cool to...know what people are liking. Most of them are really cool to read.
I live alone in a house, so for me it's very good to just be able to re-charge and just disappear and escape from reality and that's usually when I write most of my lyrics and my songs. It's a very happy productive place.
Nobody wants to sit there and study lyrics the whole time, driving back from work when they just got their check after a long shift. It's not the same. Everybody just wants to be happy with life.
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