Top 355 Melody Quotes

In the past, I’d sort of know before Ozzy sang something, what he was going to sing. I’d know what sort of way a melody was going to go ’cause of the way he’d approach it.

Bacharach has such a brilliant ear for melody and his music has a completely timeless feel to it; I thought it would be great to do a whole album of his music and to record with a full orchestra and big band which is something I hadn’t done before.

If you break down most rock songs and look at the lyrics on a piece of paper, it’s all about melody. It’s all about presentation. And a lot of bands are really great, but you can’t understand a word of what they say.

A chance to work with the guys from Isis sounded like a lot of fun. I’ve always been into the atmospheric sounds they had created with that project and felt my sense of melody would meld well with theirs.

I’m all about the melody.

I would go visit my mom on Sundays, and my brother was working on stuff. I’d go in there and sing a little melody, then we started working with words and the next thing you know it was just born organically without really trying.

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.

In ‘Kill Rock n’ Roll,’ the choruses came about at the moment I was listening to a lot of the Supremes, and if you listen to that part, you can hear a melody and a harmony there that’s not too far away from what the Supremes would probably be doing, but there’s heavy guitars in the back.

I think dissonance in music makes you think. It isn’t, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty melody I can whistle.’ You have to sit down and listen to tell it apart from other things.

If you can whistle the melody, then the song will stick. But if you need a bunch of machines to make it sound good, you’re probably not writing anything that’s going to last a long time.

Yes, when I come up with ideas on my own, it’s almost always a melody, just as often an instrument or bassline as it is a vocal. But it is a single, linear, monophonic thing. Something you could hum or whistle.

I wasn’t writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I’d listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We’d put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies.

There’s a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.

The clarinet is not so dominant in Israeli music as it is in klezmer. I heard klezmer when I was growing up, but for some reason I avoided it. I listened to Louis Armstrong instead. But the sense of melody is the connection between jazz and klezmer.

We knew that we wanted to play heavy music but I hadn’t gotten into melody and things like that.

I love to explore melody.

A lot of times, that’s hard to capture: what you sound like in person versus what you sound like on record. If I had total control, I would do a lot of the old songs – not only my songs but Sam Cooke songs, Luther Vandross, melody songs. That’s what I would really do if I had an opportunity to do a record.

What makes a great song – you don’t put it into words. You feel it. The perfect lyric. The perfect melody. It makes you feel something.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

I’ve always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you’re a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can’t fit as much in. I’m just a big fan of storytelling.

I really love things with melody.

One of the dumber things my manager said was, Stick to the melody. But I can’t.

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.

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.

A good theme – like the ‘Pink Panther’ or ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ – can work all the way through the picture, which is what I did with them. So, for me, a good melody is not just a pretty tune.

Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it’s pleasure, but you don’t get wiped out.

I used to be just a total jazz freak. People used to say, ‘Where’s the melody? Is there a melody in there anywhere?’ Now I let the music follow the song.

People in the West want to hear Indian melody, not someone who is aping the West.

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.

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody… I am old fashioned.

I don’t like using fourths and fifths. Instead, I’ll come up with a harmony line made up of major and minor thirds above the melody, then I’ll drop it down an octave so that the melody is on top and the harmony line is major and minor sixths below it.

I remember Green Day came down and played this South Florida club called the Plus Five. I think I was too young to go – I think I was 12 or 13. It was before Green Day were on a major label, but I loved them because they were this band who were a punk band, but they had melody.

Some people are great lyricists, but they’re terrible at melody. But I could do melodies till the cows come home.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

I like to always do my best to make music catchy, so I think a very catchy melody is cool.

I think my best songs come from me sitting at a piano, bashing my head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end to get one good melody.

My music is based on melody and when I play the piano, it’s as if I’m singing with them. When you try to transform that into a vocal, there was very little adjustment.

Remixes come very quickly, because you already have the melody and the vocals. I have a great passion for music, so it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a remix or an original production. I don’t think about it as, ‘Well, I have to spend three hours on a remix or I have to do something all original.’

Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

I can’t be bothered to learn Final Draft. I’m not a technical person. Like, when I sing, I just want to sing the melody and write the lyrics.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

I guess I’d like people to be able to forget a lot of things and just enjoy the beauty of harmony and melody for a moment.

Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

Anyone can sing badly, but to sing badly on purpose and make it believable is harder. I listen for the actual melody in my head but sing right underneath or above it out loud. It takes a lot of concentration.

I’m asking questions that most people are asking, but just putting a melody or a song to it.

Essentially I’m a melody person in a rhythm age, and that’s what Broadway is really about, the songs.

I really enjoy listening to players on the cusp of swing into bebop like Charlie Shavers, Clifford Brown and Clark Terry. They balance immense facility on their instrument with rhythm, melody, and more complex harmonies of the time.

The sensitive ear of the musician detects a certain musical note in every city which is different from that of another city. He hears in each little brook a new melody, and to him the sound of wind in the treetops of different forests give a varying sound.

I love melody more than any other part of music.

If you’re going to start with melody you’ll need some tympani, I think.