John Oates Quotes

I like to sing. I write music. Country songs. You have to if you're in Nashville. It's part of the lease. You sign a lease that says, I will write country songs and pay my rent on time.

I thought, when I came to Nashville, I was going to hook up with some of the top country writers in town and write some country tunes.

I will always really work hard to write as much as I can, but I also love sitting back and waiting on those big Nashville songwriters to send me some great songs, too.

The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.

Most of my friends in Nashville - almost all of them - seem to have had hits in the '70s, either as artists or songwriters or producers.

I wrote 'Happy Man' with a couple of boys of mine. I have been writing in Nashville for a long time. Of course I was writing songs back in Oklahoma when I was a kid.

I did the co-writing thing all through the '90s and I got one hit out of it - a Keith Urban song called 'But For The Grace Of God' - but then I got burnt out.

One of the great reasons to be in Nashville is, you get guys like Shane McAnally to write songs with.

When I started out, I was what they called corny. After a week in Nashville they were calling me hillbilly.

I fell in love with Nashville and wrote with some of the best songwriters here.

I wanted to become a better songwriter, so it seemed like a no-brainer to move to Nashville, where some of the best writers in the world live.

I don't write all my stuff. Everybody always thinks that. But in just about every album I've ever had has been about 50-50 songs I've written or co-written and other people's songs.

Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town.

I got a lot of film companies approaching me to write some songs for their films.

I like this town, it's really great. They've put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It's about the kind of music I like.

Nashville is the business center. They forget that the bottom line of it all is still the song.

I've been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-'80s, I'd begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.

It used to be that Nashville would work to develop promising artists.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put 'songwriter', never 'singer' or 'artist.' Singers come and go.

Man, I live in Nashville. I know how good other songwriters and singers are around here. There's a wealth of talent in this town, not to mention the people who shoot in for a week or two to try their hand on lower Broad or the other venues around town.

Dave and I had been song writers in Nashville, trying to get around, out hustling, trying to meet people. We randomly met Hillary out in town one night. She said she was a singer. I asked her if she would like to write some songs with Dave and me, and a week later she came over. Instantaneously we had this chemistry.

Coming to Nashville has been so motivating and inspirational. Just watching people live and breathe their music and create something that they can feel from start to finish.

I had no idea when I moved to Nashville people just were songwriters. I had no idea. So I guess I was selling myself as a singer when I first moved here. But then right after I first moved, I started writing a lot.

There's nothing like Nashville for making records.

There was a period when I wrote in Nashville for Maverick and then Warner/Chappell, and it was interesting.