Neil Young Quotes

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it's pleasure, but you don't get wiped out.

I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.

I actually had a week where I literally wrote four songs and all of them are on my album. But sometimes you'll go a week where you'll write songs and they never see the light of day. So that process takes a long time.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

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.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

I wrote my songs despite the fact that I was a drunk, not because of it.

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

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

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

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

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

At times, I will get in the studio and force myself to just write an entire front-to-back record, and 'Let Me Go' is one of these.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.