Kacey Musgraves Quotes

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.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

You're always going to write and draw inspiration from things that you're feeling, things that you've felt. It's kind of impossible not to unless you're writing a song and there's an exact scenario that you're trying to write a song for.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

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.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

What happens is things come to you - director, script - and if you respond to it, it's because it's tapping into some part of what's inside you, and different roles tap into different parts.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

My faith is a huge part of my life. I don't force it into my music, but it's in my experiences, so it comes through. People pick up on what they want to pick up on, but any way strangers connect to a song that I wrote is awesome.

I write most songs randomly. They don't always deal with something I've been through but something I think is important to tell.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

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.'