Colin Hay Quotes

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

I don't know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it... In the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays, there's three of us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all into one album.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.

We really try to make sure that the band writes the songs, not just one person.

Black Sabbath was written on bass: I just walked into the studio and went, bah, bah, bah, and everybody joined in and we just did it.

I used to have a protest folk band in high school, and I wrote all my own songs. Then, in the B-52s, we would write collectively.

Keith Richards has some sort of quote that says 'it takes two people to write a song,' and I'm of that school of thought, too.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

It was really hard to find people to come over and play guitar and sing and write songs together. So that turned me into a songwriter that way, just so I could be able to play with other people.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I was just fooling around with the piano and Todd [Phillips] was like, 'Hey there's a great spot in the movie [The Hangover] where we need a little bit of a breath in the narrative. You should write a song and stick it in there.' And I was like, 'Well, what should the song be about?' And he said, 'The tiger.' 'Oh, okay.' So I went off and I wrote this song. I came back and Todd and I tinkered with it a little more and then we shot it right then. It all happened in a day.

What I hope is to really focus on being a songwriter. I'd love to write songs for other people; that's something I'd really like to start doing.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.

I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.

I write my own lyrics completely on my own. Sometimes I have people helping me with concepts or like choruses and stuff sometimes, but mostly I write all my own songs by myself, especially the verses and a lot of the choruses.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.

When you're in a band and write a song on your own, it isn't fully realized until it goes into somebody else's ears.

There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.

Being a producer is a very different experience than writing my own songs.

I've always been in bands writing songs with friends in order to play shows or record a future record.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!