Sharon Van Etten Quotes

I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.

All of my records have been very personal, just writing more and more songs, you get better at being able to say what you feel.

I don't think my music has changed to reflect getting married or having kids. But... if you want to continue to write your own songs, you've got to find deeper stuff to write about. You've got to go to different places.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

That's what's great about the arts. Everything inspires you, and you get a chance to grow from watching other people and how they do their work.

It took me a long time to learn how to write a good song.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

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.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.

The artists realise it will take time. It is an upliftment process.

Most of my inspiration comes from mistakes, so every time I make a massive mistake, that usually affects me so much that I have to process that via song.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game.

I think it's a great document of John Stevens' originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it's pretty obvious.

The first song I ever wrote was when I was 12, and it had, like, four lines in it. You progress and get better.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.