Kelly Jones Quotes

Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

I don't really care about how good a song is, I only want them to reflect what I felt when I was writing them

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I always draw from things around me that people around me have gone through... The story that could be taken really literally is not from my life exactly. But bits and pieces are, and the sentiment behind it is.

Whenever I'm obsessed about anything, that becomes the subject of a song.

The inspiration to write a song comes to me when something has happened to me more than once. If it's happened to me more than once, it's probably happened to other people.

I realize that 'Postcards' was like input, and 'Ghostwriting' was output. I had all these frustrations and feelings before I did those two projects. 'Postcards' was something that brought new life and creative inspiration into the record, while 'Ghostwriting' was relieving myself.

I've been a huge fan of Adele, Sam Smith, and Ed Sheeran, and those amazing artists draw inspiration from their present and past experiences; they write songs from their heart.

The writing process for us is different with every song. Sometimes they come from our lives, or someone else we know may be going through something that we choose to write about.

When you're writing songs for yourself, as all artists do, it's about 'me.' It's about what you feel and your emotions. You're trying to get something out of your system about your experiences.

If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around