Juliette Lewis Quotes

Writing the songs is always emotional and most of the vocals on there are the first three takes from the demos, because they give so much more. You're in that moment, so it speaks for itself.

Some people can sit down and write a song, but they can't go on stage like I can.

I don't write songs for myself anymore. I only write songs on assignment. It's purely a business, but it is still so important to me emotionally.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

I think the more emotional you are, the better. I'm sort of writing [songs] as I go and I can never tell how it's going to be or how it's going to feel until I get into the studio. But I definitely think it will. I probably can't help but have the emotions in my voice.

I write songs on a course of time that's comfortable for me. I would probably never write a song from start to finish in the course of a day, hell probably not even a week. My mind is always going to change and my emotional state will also change on a daily basis.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

I'm not one of these people who sits down and writes to say I'm gonna write a song about this or that, or a specific subject. The songs actually kind of write themselves.

I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a typewriter even to a computer. I don't like it. There's no noise on the computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist. I edit as I am committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me and I go, "Yeah, that's it." They appear before me and they fit. I don't usually take large parts out. If I get stuck early in a song, I take it as a sign that I might be writing the chorus and don't know it. Sometimes,you gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you're doing.

I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.

Most of my songs are pretty sketchy. There's not a lot of bass sections. I don't write big bridges. Sometimes I'll try. But it's hard for me to focus that way, because I always think it's more interesting to just see what will happen next.

I don't really know how writing process happens, how these songs are arrived at. One of the things I like about the writing process is, I don't necessarily know where it's going, and even if I think I know where it's going, it'll turn out different. I find that exciting and rewarding.

New songs are why artists go on the road. That's why I go on the road. It's a three-prong play. Writing: You're intrigued. Recording: It brings it to life. And then you want to share it.

I've had my fill of "One Way To Rock" or "I Can't Drive 55." Those are guy songs to me, and I'm cool with that. But when you write a great love song and you start seeing that 50 percent of your audience is beautiful women, that's much more rewarding, than having a bunch of guys out there.

It's easier to write songs when you're single.

I am not an evangelist. I am not a preacher. I am a musician. That is what I know how to do. I know how to write songs. I know how to write things that relate to my heart. I feel that I talk about God in every song, in everything I do - all of it! I really do not know how to respond. I do not relate to that.

There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

I think the more that I can find myself getting out of the way - like you said yourself - trying to get out of thinking too much, and sometimes something truly special can happen. That's the beautiful mystery of song writing - that you really don't know where these songs come from exactly, and you don't know how you came up with them - and god bless it that you should have the gift of channeling that.

It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.

I guess it would be if I wanted to, just lay back and predominantly write songs when I can't go on a stage anymore.

I write songs from the point of view I had at a time;I'm not tryingto write songs from a young person's point of view.That only ends in disaster.