David Berman Quotes

If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.

Lyrics are no more important than the music. There's no point in forcing them on people.

Lyrics are really important for me.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

Lyrics are so important, but they're really underrated.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

I always write lyrics first and the rhythm and the melody come from the lyrics. It always comes from the lyrics: words have rhythm and words have melody.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

I am very into lyrics. I start with what the words are saying, what the storyline is saying, like a good script. It should really capture me, do something for me. If I don't get it, it's not going to move people, and if it's not going to move people, it's not going to happen.

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I'm definitely still putting effort into my lyrics, for them to be emotional and tell a story.

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.

You'd think, of course, it's about the melody - that's a given. But really, I'm no good at singing a song unless it has a good lyric.

In my early years, I was much too ignorant and didn't realize how desperately important it all is, how really important the lyrics are. And for me as a singer, I am a lady who takes the lyrics first.

Music is closer to poetry than anything.

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

They're very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn't think they would be, but they are.

When I make my socially conscious songs, I go hard with the lyrical content; I go hard with the imagery.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.