Adam Schlesinger Quotes

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.

Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.

The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

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

I try to write catchy hooks but, at the same time, things that mean something that will provoke thought.

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.

I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

'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.

People tend to put too much focus on the lyrics. It's not the be-all and end-all of our songs.

Whenever I write anything, I do sing to it, to try and make sure it's interesting or compelling to sing to. I've gotten in the habit of sharing that with other, more charismatic vocalists.

I've been singing since I was two. Music was my first passion and I love writing, singing, creating and being creative.

Yeah, I've always sung, and I always try to find a way for music to be in my life.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

But enough joking. I am singing. This is all my life.

I always saw songwriting as the top of the heap. No matter what else you were going to do creatively - and there were a lot of choices - writing songs was king.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!

When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.

For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.