‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.
I will write a verse or a story and bring it into a songwriting session, because that’s what’s big in Nashville – the collaborative part of songwriting.
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle – it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
The worst thing that happened to me at a gig was when the microphone wasn’t on one time, and for the three lines of the verse with Chipmunk, you couldn’t hear me.
Sometimes I write from the end of the verse to the beginning of the verse.
I’ve written so many verses and keep on writing so many more that I became afraid that if I didn’t write them into one big book, I might forget some of them.
We’ve seen violent responses to ‘Satanic Verses.’ We’ve seen violent responses to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in an evil way.
The only band I was really over-into was Cream. And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff ’cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes, come back and do a chorus and end. And I love the live jam stuff, the improvisation.
I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.
Common would come to my house and give me a freestyle verse. I’d make a new beat for it and put it with something else. That’s how I met Eminem – he came to my house back when he first started. He gave me a bunch of freestyles, and that’s how we built a relationship. Everyone came to my house.
Like most kids, I grew up singing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.
The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.
The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, ‘To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.’ Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it’s a good slogan, I think.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
I don’t really write music in the traditional sense of chorus, verse. It’s more experimental sounding. The process comes from an experimentation with noise.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
I just write verses. I don’t write all day long. When I have something that needs to be said, I just write it down on my notepad in my iPhone.
On the second verse of ‘Tears to Snow,’ I talk about rappers and the way they view me now, rappers in the underground world who I might’ve know for a little bit, or they might’ve opened a show for me. A lot of them talk crap about me behind my back, and they’ll smile in my face.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
When I wrote ‘Mushaboom’, I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.
As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.
You even called me stupid in your verse, and I’m almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you’ve walked into air.
If there’s a track that’s rhyme friendly, the verse will basically write itself. If the track is less rhyme friendly, you have to put forth a little more effort to get the song out.
I write about whatever turns up. Every single day, I’m sitting down for three to five hours in the evenings wrestling away and producing far too much verse.
The Qur’an, throughout all of its verses, aims mainly to establish and confirm four basic, universal truths: the existence and Oneness of the Maker of the universe; Prophethood; bodily Resurrection; and worship and justice.
Just checking up on someone with a, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ usually means the most to someone. I try my best to regularly check in with friends who are musicians just because I know we go through things where we feel like people only hit us up because they need something from us like a verse or a promo.
Loads of verses don’t make it into the finished song.
With ‘Love Shack,’ once we put that chorus in, it did have more of a song structure. Even though the verses are all kind of different, the chorus was there along with ‘The Love Shack’ – I think that really made it a hit. Once we heard it in the studio, we played it for R.E.M., and they were like, ‘Yes this is a hit.’
The heroes of our youth grow old – ‘the boys of summer in their ruin’, in Dylan Thomas’s verse – yet we seem the same.
The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.
I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.
My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.
My first name – I have no middle name – was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.
My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They’ve lived here long enough.
I would tell a young Jadakiss, learn the game as much as you learn how to rap, as seriously you take a 16-bar verse, take every contract and every meeting and every opportunity to listen and learn, you know what I’m saying. Keep that at a parallel.
I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun doing anything in my life than trading verses with Daryl Hall on ‘Private Eyes.’ That’s as fun as it gets.
The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I’ve read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.
You can always hear me breathing during my verses, but that breathing becomes part of the music.
All I really want is a beat from Kanye West. I’ve met him, and I think he’s real cool with us. If I get that beat, I’m going to rap the best verse I ever dropped – even if it’s his worst beat.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it.
I’ve always loved the mixture of crushing live drums with a programmed groove, that really cool blend, like in the verse there’s a really funky drum beat that is programmed then it comes in to the chorus; you’ve got that enormous human feel where the band kicks in.
There’s a Bible verse that says if you believe, you will be in the presence of the Lord in the blink of an eye. And I know Dale was a believer, and that means that he saw his son and his friend going to win the Daytona 500, and he was in heaven all within the blink of an eye.
Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.
The turnaround is when you have a solo in betwixt the verses. You stoppin’ to have a solo.
A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.
The Qur’an not only lacks any earthly punishment for someone who abandons Islam, it even includes verses that imply that such a change of heart should be a matter of free choice.
Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It’s about tempo and change and pulse, whether you’re doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
With ‘Sierra,’ this mean girl had all these kids bullying me – and I wrote the first verse and chorus the night before Tae and I came to Nashville.
I’m skilled in the Twitter and Instagram sense of the social media verse.
I’ve written probably over 200 songs that have a verse and a chorus and that’s it.
In Islam, the word of the Prophet is final. No true Muslim can disown these verses or say that they would rewrite the offensive verses of the Koran. If they do, then they would have to run for their lives.
