Paul McCartney Quotes

The only way to have longevity is to have good songs.

The choice that I made was from my best music, for the songs that I knew that the public liked. Then, when I recorded my new songs I found that my old material had not faded, it was still current, the music was good and the songs were great. I sat in my house and listened, got the chills, and I thought, how great is that? It hasn't dated, it hasn't gone anywhere, and it's great.

We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs.

If music sounds dated, it means it wasn't very good in the first place.

I think that a good song is catchy, and a great song is not catchy - but it has a deeper meaning.

The fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing.

And it's been a process of digging through the songs and trying to make them born on stage again. I think they are very different. I think they come off very differently. I think they come off, I don't know if it's masculine or outward, extroverted than introverted. I didn't know. It's just been a process.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything.

I think there's thousands of good songs in the world - the songs that we can all sing along to, songs that are just so catchy they end up being in your head. But I think a great song is something that emotionally engages with you and connects with you.

I usually have a song in my head. I'm thinking music, I'm thinking lyrics. Music helps me get to those moments. The moments between the moments.

Songs need to have the ability to change and to grow for sure. They take on lives of their own. Some songs just don't have that capacity. They're locked within a period of time. And as soon as you take them out of that period of time, they die very quickly.

I think that that spirit, or at least the raucousness of maybe that, is in there. And then yeah, like, along the way, you fine tune it 'cause you're thinking, like, OK, we need to now turn this into a song.

What makes that song, I think, is how stark it is.

When I write a song it's always from the point of view: makes the song the best it can be.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.

As a musician, you write and make music as you go. It's definitely in a great sequence. When you release songs, you think, "Let me make sure this goes with this so it's like a story."

I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won't change that much.

I think a lot of that album ["Tonight" ] is still very good . . . the songs, but I think I was indifferent to the arrangements.

I think that, when you're writing your songs, there's always a debate about whether, is that you in the song? Is it not you in the song?

I think I'm a maker of songs, and songs are like films or a picture: You put them over there, and they have nothing to do with you.

I would play all the parts of the song, show them the way it went together. Then I'd basically break down an arrangement - I wouldn't plan endings or beginnings - so they knew everything that was going on. I had the lyrics on a prompter so that I could remember everything I'd written, and I was able to just get into the groove and play with them. I think "Peace Trail" is one of the exceptions, where it's a later take. It just happened really quickly.

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

With every song, all the elements have to work. First, the beat has to be great - you start there. You start with the music, and then the ideas follow. Then you start thinking of rhymes, and then you record it, and sometimes - this happens to me a lot - it doesn't come out as good as it did in my head when I first wrote it.