Sonita Alizadeh Quotes

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

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

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

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

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.

Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.

I push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

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

I can't say that I'm always writing in my head but I do spend a lot of time in my head writing or coming up with ideas. And what I do usually is write the music and melody and then, you know, maybe the basic idea. But when I feel that I don't have a song or just say, God, please give me another song. And I just am quiet and it happens.

When you work with a band, obviously you've got to present them with something they can get a hold of, so it has to be a little more fleshed out as a song. And then where it goes is more collaborative, obviously; it's more political possibly, certainly more a conscious process than a subconscious process, which the painting can be.

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

The melody will tell me what the song should be about, the tone of the song. That's when the intellect comes in. Because I have a list of possible titles and concepts, and I expand on that.

It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

When it comes to production and the overall sound, I don't really have a lot of intentions with it. I start off with melody and a lyrical idea, and then build off of that story.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.