Lapsley Quotes

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

I had written lyrics to a song called The Silent Extreme, which Alex later renamed Humans Being.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.

I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

When I'm in a songwriting phase, it's a phase. I don't just suddenly feel inspired and then write a song, because I always write with a co-writer.

Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.

We all write the lyrics together, but Frank really shines on 'em pretty good.

I really don't believe in going too far out of your way to hunt down somebody to do a song.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I think a lot of the Mothers stuff that we recorded was written while we were on the road.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.