Eddie Vedder Quotes

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

All my songs are based on personal experience, and 'Lost Without You' came out fully born.

There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

But I did that, and I created another blues scene, another something I can sing about.

I listen to a lot of songs, and they aren't talking about anything. I don't connect with them. I'll listen to something like Musiq Soulchild's 'Just Friends,' and I'm like, 'Wow, I really feel what he's talking about.' That's how I want people to feel about my music.

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

I'm not done writing songs about you yet.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I started writing cheating songs when I was too young to have any idea what I was writing about - broken hearts and things like that. I just think it was something I already knew, something I had experienced in another lifetime.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.

Sometimes I write from personal experience, but so much depends on what mood I'm in. If I'm in a good mood, I'll write happier songs.

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one.

When you write a song about a place, you are writing a song about a place that might be in a hundred years, or a place that has been, or that was - in your imagination. I think that also embodies the American spirit. You are looking for what you can call "a place."

My brother & I have always said that to write a song, it takes all the experiences of your life, plus the time it takes to write it! To be specific, yes, sometimes a song takes place in one session - together in one day.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

The first song I wrote was called "You" and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist. I remember them all because I used to always write terrible poetry. I keep all my notebooks.