John Lennon Quotes

I think one of the reasons that I love the fans that have stuck around, because I really enjoy writing different kinds of songs. I don't know if I write them well or not, but I can write them.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

I am not an evangelist. I am not a preacher. I am a musician. That is what I know how to do. I know how to write songs. I know how to write things that relate to my heart. I feel that I talk about God in every song, in everything I do - all of it! I really do not know how to respond. I do not relate to that.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.

I never really thought about my music being universal. When I set out to write, it was just a feeling that felt good to me. I never thought about being able to reach everybody.

The music is in the lead here, and a large part of this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel a closer bond with the craft of songwriting, stronger than I ever have.

Songwriting is such an intricate part of me as an artist and as a person; I couldn't just let someone else do it.

When I started writing songs at 18, I wrote about 100 that were crap. One was called 'Dog In A Disco.'

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

I never had this ego where I must write everything. I'm not Bob Dylan.

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

You never forget where you were when you write a song; it's a very proper memory, so I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing for each track. It was like going into a time machine.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

There's no way to learn how to write a hit song. There's no formula for it. You just have to have it inside of you.

I know my fans look up to me and that's why I make my songs so personal; it's all about things I've experienced and things I like or hate. I write for myself and hope that my fans like what I have to say.

I'm not sure if the next song I write is going to be about love or a song about a tree.

Music has fed me a lot of ideas... The film BLUE VELVET came out of Bobby Vinton's version of the song BLUE VELVET.

Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.