Jakob Dylan Quotes

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

I think my best songs come from me sitting at a piano, bashing my head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end to get one good melody.

I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

My songwriting process is painful. Songwriting is brilliant. It's a load of fun - when it works. It's really difficult as well.

The thing I ran up against was everybody wanted a song so fast. It took me two years to finish 'Touch Me in the Morning.'

A lot of times, a bunch of songs have to be written to get to the next really good one.

I used to feel like I wasn't a good songwriter when I couldn't finish a song by myself.

The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

Sometimes something will come along, and it feels easy and sometimes you'll get 85 percent there on a song and the last 15 percent will elude you for three years.

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 found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.

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.

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

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.