Ray Davies Quotes

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

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

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.

I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that-stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders...I think domesticity certainly doesn't make it easy to write, you know, because you've got a lot of distractions and I think a writer is always looking for distractions.

I'm not one of these people who sits down and writes to say I'm gonna write a song about this or that, or a specific subject. The songs actually kind of write themselves.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.

I'm inspired to write songs in many different ways - it can come from a melody, a word or phrase or something I have seen on my travels around the world. It's one of the great bonuses of my job in that I get to meet so many people and experience different cultures and it would be hard not to be inspired.

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like "Ain't No Chimneys in the Projects," which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim - I get a percentage.

It's easiest to write songs when I'm either really in love or really mad at a guy. It's just always best when I'm feeling superemotional.

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant. ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

I like drawing people in the airport or on the bus or in venues. I like catching people in the moment. It's a similar inspiration for me in terms of songwriting.

Growing up in Memphis and listening to all kinds of music and dreaming... So that was one of the first times I wrote a complete song and set it to music and the whole bit. From then on, I was busy with it.

A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.