Ken Hensley Quotes

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

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

The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody.

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

That's pretty much how every song of mine works - I start with gibberish and melody and phrasing. I speak it naturally first. And then I think about lyrics that fit into that.

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

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.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

The classic, quote/unquote, craft of songwriting still works; it still is relevant.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Sometime I write a song off a central idea, instead of emotion.