I’ve got my interests and my life experiences as I’m putting lyrics together. And if you start looking at patterns, you start thinking, ‘Well, what am I really singing about here?’ A lot of it seems to be a battle for some freedom against oppressive forces. That seems to be a theme in a lot of the albums I’ve done.
With Mr. Bungle, I’d lay down a really rough demo of my vocals and then play them for the guys without telling them what I was saying. Our drummer at the time had the coolest takes on what he thought I was saying, so I’d ask him to write out what he thought the lyrics were.
I get mad about something, and then I have this melody in my head, and then afterwards, the lyrics come.
My fans know to treat my lyrics like a T-bone steak – you know you can’t chew on it unless you cut the fat off.
I first came across Langhorne Slim when I saw him play live, and he’s an incredibly infectious performer. The way he works the crowd is mind-blowing. You can listen to his music without really listening to his lyrics, but it pays off if you do.
When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics – I was literally singing before I was talking.
To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is not that abstract of a thing when I think about how my brain works – I feel like it’s almost more realistic. That’s how my brain works.
Cacie Dalager’s voice is beautiful, and her lyrics break my heart.
We’re thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.
I’ve always wanted my lyrics to say something meaningful and, you know, you always want to tell a message with your art. So yes, as I continue to write music, I will write about things that are real and things that I feel aren’t written about a lot.
I carry around, like, a little journal with me and just write all the time. Not necessarily, like, actually sitting down and writing lyrics – just freeform writing, whatever’s going on in my mind. I write a lot on airplanes, actually, because it’s completely isolating.
I love writing for dancers. You don’t have to worry about the lyrics. I think to write words without music must be so frustrating. It must be always be so good, so perfect.
In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics.
I was, like, 12 or 13; the first hip hop song I tried to rapping to was Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop,’ and my English was so bad, but learning to rap to different songs really helped me with my pronunciation, and looking at the lyrics on Rap Genius and stuff like that.
I don’t like lyrics to be overbearing. I like them to say something. But I’m not trying to change the world overnight. Something simple and understandable that people can relate their own everyday experiences to.
I like country music. Sometimes I’ll just type in ‘country’ on Pandora and listen. I really like the passion in the lyrics.
Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
People know my lyrics; they know the stuff I’ve written, and it’s all about life, love, happiness, and these big euphoric moments. It would always bug me when I’d go to a club, and they’re playing some chick on a stripper pole on the monitor behind me. I’m like, ‘So that’s not what I do – that’s the other guy.’
Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.
There’s an honesty in our lyrics, and that will never change.
Sometimes, to be honest with you, our lyrics were written a day before the vocal had to be done.
I don’t like to get too specific about lyrics. It places limitations on them, and spoils the listeners’ interpretation.
You can’t ask me to explain the lyrics because I won’t do it.
When I published my first novel, ‘Slammed,’ I included lyrics at the beginning of each chapter from one of my favorite bands, The Avett Brothers. The overwhelmingly positive response from readers to those lyrics really surprised me.
I record into my phone as soon as I hear a track. Melody comes first for me, and then my gibberish usually forms into lyrics and a concept from there.
I like reading Ball Tongue lyrics and all that stuff. And they published a book, and I wouldn’t give my lyrics, and it’s all wrong in the book, and I giggle. It’s funny.
I don’t really have a favorite genre. I could listen to a rock song, a metal song, jazz, pop music, whatever. For me, whatever style it is, it always depends on the chord progression, the lyrics, and the melody used.
I’ve actually had a melody on my guitar since the day I learned how to play it, back when I was 7. And for some reason I can’t add lyrics to it.
I just love working with Eminem. He’s just one of my favorite rappers, and his lyrics – he’s a true poet, and I enjoy that about him.
You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.
I changed the lyrics of ‘All I Need Is the Girl’ to ‘All I Need Is the Job’ for an audition years ago. It’s a great ice-breaker – people want to laugh.
It’s been neat to find out different writing strategies. I’ve been in the room with so many different writers. Sometimes, you write with tracks, and other times, with acoustic guitars. That’s been really a cool thing, because it brings out different lyrics with you.
It took me a little while to get sorrow under the belt enough to understand country music’s lyrics and strengths.
There are some things that I write that I know are personal in a way, or the gag is so obscure that it’s just for me, and there’s other things that could basically be for anybody or be anything, at least until the lyrics start to get written.
‘Float On’ was a fine song, but I was still writing the lyrics on the last day we were working on it and deciding if it was something we wanted to put on the record.
I want to bring that old soul back, the meaningful lyrics and all of that. And I can’t think of a better way to do that than through Motown.
People come up to me with tattoos of my lyrics!
It’s strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, ‘What?’ I’m really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It’s cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted people to focus on the content.
Adam does most of the work when it comes to videos and he basically does the same as I do with the lyrics. The videos are his visual interpretations of our music.
Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.
Whether someone wants to learn the words to a new Lady Gaga song they heard on the radio or to verify the lyrics to ‘Blinded by the Light’, the LyricWiki community delivers.
To a bookish boy in a Boston suburb in the mid-1970s, the lyrics of Cole Porter came as something of a revelation.
There is an actor’s responsibility in presenting the emotional content of the lyrics to an audience. But whether you do that in a straightforward fashion or an ironic fashion or a blase fashion is all about opportunities, and singers are missing opportunities as artists if they don’t pay attention to the lyric.
Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It’s a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.
I didn’t grow up listening to The Smiths, but now I am a fan. I love his music and listened to so much of it for the film. It’s not a regular biopic; they picked a part of his life that people don’t really know about. You learn what informs his lyrics.
The biggest thing is to just keep your voice in shape so that when the emotion hits, it’s there to have the colors to paint those pictures with the lyrics as well as the sound.
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.
Growing up, all I cared about in a song, before I really listened to lyrics, was that beat.
Rap lyrics are really the only thing I’ve ever written.
It’s weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can’t really get behind what you’re saying or what you want them to say because they didn’t experience it.
When you look at the lyrics of ‘Sometimes When We Touch,’ it’s really very much an adolescent song.
I think having artwork, lyrics, credits and such like are things that people really value. It’s hard work to come up with something like that, but I think it’s worth it.
So we’re considering doing a new Christmas album, because there’s been Christmas episodes since then, and maybe finally do the version of ‘The Most Offensive Song Ever’ with lyrics intact.
It’s such a rush doing a concert and seeing people actually mouthing the lyrics.
