Vince Staples Quotes

A song is a poem set to music.

Once you really get into a song, other than just listening to it, it forces you to go 'oh, they did this. I never would have thought of doing that,' when you deconstruct it. It's something you really can't do sometimes when you're just listening to a song. You have to really get into it.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.

Some of the songs on the radio are really outrageous. I listen to the lyric. If the lyric doesn't make sense, I don't like the song.

There are many songs that have become popular and people sing along with it without knowing the meaning of its lyrics.

'Bitter Sweet Symphony' is one of the biggest hip-hop records of all time once you actually analyse it.

I really like when the lyrics in the music have an interesting relationship between one another - where they contrast each other.

"Love Walks In," it was the same thing. That song is about aliens, by the way.

I am nervous that the craft of songwriting is taking a nose dive...And since I'm a songwriter and I connect with an interpretative, you know, interpretation of a song, I miss it. I just miss it.

I think the world likes to pick apart different songs and play doctor with songs sometimes and make them into this big controversial thing.

So if somebody writes a song that appears to have some meaning then everybody thinks that it's a really heavy song.

When you listen to the music in this film [Despicable Me], it's working on the level of melody, but the other key element is lyrics. There are a number of songs in the film where the lyrics themselves are very much speaking to the essence of what Ted Geisel was setting out to do.

"On Script" is one of my favorite songs I've ever written. I'd just been jamming on it one day, and again I was struggling with lyrics. I'm still figuring out what it's about. I've seen a couple of reviews that are like, "It's about the monotony of playing the same songs every night," because I say, "On script every night/Like a well-rehearsed stage show." It's not about that at all, but I find that funny, how people project what they think about me, or songwriters in general.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I'd basically break down an arrangement - I wouldn't plan endings or beginnings - so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I'd written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. I think "Peace Trail" is one of the exceptions, where it's a later take. It just happened really quickly.

The moment someone says, 'Hey, everyone, listen to the words in this song,' your party is over.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

Songs have some kind of structure that connects with people's hearts.

Chestnut brown canary, ruby throated sparrow, sing a song, don't be long, thrill me to the marrow.

I also tried to focus on songs that Billie Holiday wrote, songs that she had a hand in shaping, like "Strange Fruit"; songs that were written for her or songs that she wrote herself, like "Fine and Mellow" or "God Bless The Child."

If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll.

Sometimes the lines in a song are lines you wish you could text-message somebody in real life.

I love finding songs, going through them, tearing them apart, and seeing if I can find anything wrong with them.