Dawn Richard Quotes

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

My songs are somewhere between story and situation. There's also character and mood. I'm an intuitive writer, both with instrumentals and songs with words.

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

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

I'd say almost that words come first, melody second.

I write everything. It's my favorite part of what I do. And lyrics are my favorite thing.

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.

It's not just music. To me, it's songwriting more than anything. A lot of people say it's expression, but to me, it's more than that.

I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.

People don't stress enough that when they're writing lyrics, they are writing.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

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

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

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've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.