A good song has to have a great melody, and the lyrics have to touch my heart. Now, if it's just a little toe-tapper, got to make me feel good somehow or another, or when I sing it I can't make you feel good.
The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.
I realized that, for me, great records always moved me with the lyrics and the melodies. And so I said, 'I think I can do it now,' 'cause I found a team of people who understand I didn't want a record that was 'drop it, pop it, shake it' just 'cause I can dance.
Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
One of my first favorite books was 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' and I would just go up to people and say, 'I can sing 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' and I would make them sit through me reciting it, and I'd go all the way, each time. I've always hooked into lyrics.
I try to focus on the melodies and try to make everything else minimal. The melody and the lyrics are most important to me.
You have the ability to write melodies and to put lyrics that mean something: to speak about life and what people are going through in their every day ups and downs, the good times and the bad times. Country music has always talked about life, I think; that's what I've always loved about it.
I think there are some songwriters who are just brilliant who can write and then I think there are some songwriters who can like me I have a problem writing chorus lyrics but I can write a song in a story like that.
I think it's hilarious that you would give an endorsement deal to someone who you've heard their lyrics a million times and you thought it was cool. And then they said something a little messed up and you take the endorsement deal away.
When I write a song, the music comes from my spirit, which is very playful and optimistic, but then the lyrics come from my head, which is in a different space.
I think the melody is the first time I hear in a song and if I like the melody, then I'll pay closer attention to the lyrics.
The music that we listen to these days, everything is right there in your face. There's no real mystery. It's not poetic. I want people to think. I want to make people listen to my lyrics.
I know this will blow your mind, but most people would probably never ever get it, but I listen to classical music when nobody else is around. It calms me down and I can get into this, like, deep thinking mode, you know, because there's really no lyrics to it, so you're not following something that - that you're listening to a story.
I only know the lyrics to songs that I listened to between the ages of 11 and 15.
The lyrics - everything I sing, I've written.
Lyrics have become so dumbed down nowadays. People don't want to have to think about lyrics anymore, they just want to be told something. Until these great things started happening with us, I'd really given up on reaching people like that.
I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.
The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.
Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.