Kathleen Hanna Quotes

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 you can treat a classic like a museum piece -stuffed and mounted- or you can make it a living, breathing narrative that is unfolding right then and there.

I think it's good to have a balance. Everything I write about, it's not something I necessarily might have went through, there's songs where I might have an idea, sometimes it might be a melody or something that I like, I make up a story to go with that melody. But I do think it's most important to have honest songs.

I see rock music as the best example of modernday storytelling that exists in our society. Songs are narratives that help the listeners cope with the reality of life that can't be easily spoken about in everyday conversation. It is a hugely powerful process of helping people find themselves through music.

I think the best music videos are the ones that have nothing to do with the song. Those are all my favorites.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.

I have to paint fast on television because of the limited time, but I don't want people to see what I'm showing them as work, something to worry and fret over. This is supposed to be fun.

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.

Sometimes I think I'm more comfortable onstage than I am in my own room. When I get onstage, it's kind of like your chance to let go and be something that you're not maybe. It's your time to dream.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, "I could sing that song. I've got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs; it is actually important to do songs they're familiar with. Also, I love those songs. In a way, I think I've changed people's perceptions of what a cabaret show like this could be.

I sing my song for a living, and I don't really worry about who listens or what they think. But it seems to make a living.

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.

If I was an actor, it would be like a part that was me. It has to be real to me. I have to make it mine. I really enjoy taking a song I feel that way about, and sometimes it can take a long time to come up with just the right touch. I think that's really my greatest talent, interpreting.

I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.

Live shows are where I can just go off, I do the most. I can recreate songs live and take one element and build on that that for like 40 minutes and I like seeing people's faces when I'm making something live.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.

When recording, whatever you first think about, you come out with something totally different at the end of it. Whatever plans you have you throw away, because it's always going to end up sounding pretty different from what you initially thought of. I probably only had about five or six songs when I started, and it just sort of flowed from that.

I can introduce new parts because when you are on stage in front of a very happy audience or people who love what you are doing, you are able to do extraordinary things that you yourself didn't think you could do before.

Taylor is a musician who does things under her own name and tells her own stories-her songs and her albums are her.

Storytelling with music is a really powerful device.

What you don't want is to repeat a formula over and over or impose a formula to a movie that...when you impose yourself and you impose a formula and you're not open to explore and to find what is right for the movie, I think you're doing a disservice to the story and what you're trying to express.