Stevie Nicks Quotes

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 would probably work with Drake as he is massively inspirational to me as a writer as well as an artist. If not him, then Susan Boyle!

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

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.

Conway Twitty was always our local hero while I was growing up. He had a series of good bands. I wanted to sit in, if Conway would let me. And he did a couple of times.

It took a long while for me to even put out a record because there were so many options of how to do a song, and in some respects, I'm never totally happy with the outcome.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

I've just always been around great songwriters. To me, they were the standard.

I probably get most of my inspiration through music.

Seeing what kinds of songs work in other cities and other parts of the world was pretty eye-opening. I know it changed how I approached the second record big-time.

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

Me and Kurt Cobain were both listening to a bunch of Lead Belly and diggin' it. We thought, 'Let's do an EP of all Lead Belly songs.' We did a couple, and both of us were like, 'Nah, this is a bad concept.' We set it aside.

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

Getting to write a song with Steve Vai - he was my first support.

I want to write just as much as Kanye may have for whomever Kanye has written for.

Over four or five years, I did six albums with three people: John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Patti Smith. I felt that if I could care as much about their music as they did, I could be useful to them. I really cared about their music and their lives.

When I did 'Hand Cannot Erase,' I didn't have a specific singer in mind.

Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.

A couple of days working with Joe Jonas, I thought, 'This guy is a slayer of a singer; he's really funny, goofy, and sexy. We need to write that.' And that led to 'Cake By The Ocean.'

I think I see a lot of artists struggling to make their first album perfect, and I've been there.

You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.

We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.

It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.

Mentally, I write myself a little story. Of course, sometimes you have a song that says, "Do that." My best example is Singin' in the Rain. Arthur Freed had insisted that the song should be in the picture, but he was very anxious about it.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.