Valerie June Quotes

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

We'd have made more, but I kept forgetting to write songs down.

I write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I'd written? Yes. There's many of them!

Songwriting's never been a natural art for me; it's always been a bit of a struggle.

I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

When I write songs, I like to write lyrics first, and I think that's different from a lot of singer-songwriters. But I heard Sammy Cahn was asked what comes first, the lyrics or the music, and he said, 'The paycheck.'

It was very difficult for me to be the only lyricist in the band.

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

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

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.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.