Amy Tan Quotes

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

I really believe in melody.

Once you really get into a song, other than just listening to it, it forces you to go 'oh, they did this. I never would have thought of doing that,' when you deconstruct it. It's something you really can't do sometimes when you're just listening to a song. You have to really get into it.

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

I wanted to write songs that were as good as the covers.

A concert is a concert is a concert is a concert. An album is an album is an album is an album. Musically, both have nothing in common.

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

You know, when I hear music, I just hear the whole thing.

I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of good songwriters, and I try to actually work on the craft of writing a song rather than just leaving it up to inspiration.

I had 10 years of lessons at the conservatory in Belgium, studying classical music. I learned how to sing, play the piano, and all the theory that I needed. By the time I left, I had confidence in my skills, and I knew that the experience had prepared me to become a real professional.

Jeff always had a huge part in making a song a record. You felt like you were capturing lightning in the studio. It was never boring. He always was there to serve the song.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

Every song with lyrics is lyrical.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

I guess there are two things that make me like songs generally, of ours, and that is if they groove well, or if they have a jam that can go somewhere.

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.

I've always felt like every note of a song is of equal value.

Will you make a song for him?' the woman asked. 'He has a song,' the man replied. 'He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

I've always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody and I am there to provide the lyrics. You want the lyrics to match the melody, because if you are composing a song or recording a song, it's cacophonous if they don't match.

If you're a songwriter, you want to write a song like "Oh Yeah" that radically shifts everything. You can definitely retire on that song. You want to have something you can put in your songbook that everybody can recognize, whether it's a good or bad thing.

There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that's the bottom line.

It's different obviously with a song when you're talking about narrative, you're talking about the verse leading into the chorus or whatever it is, but you have to have a sensibility of how something would flow either way.