Borns Quotes

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

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.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

When a song wants to be written, it will be written.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

Every song you write you think is the last one you're going to manage. You put everything you've got into the song, and you've twisted it and pulled at it and dug in and found a way to complete it. To get another one is the trick.

I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.

I try to write down every song that comes to me, even though I know that every song that comes to me isn't a song that I need to sing.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

I'm So Sorry' is probably one of my favorite songs that I've written... I wrote it very quickly and confidently. And then I didn't question it.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I found songwriting really hard at first, but after a while it was actually very easy.