Gordon Lightfoot Quotes

If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.

When you first sit down to write the first song, until you've maybe got three or four under your belt, it's always, to me, like a mountain to climb. You look at that one blank piece of paper and you think, 'God, how many songs do I have to write here?' It always feels like pressure.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

The roughest part for me when I'm writing a song is staring at a blank page. Where am I going from here? If you're a songwriter, you have to do that every time you start a song.

I edit as I go. Especially when I go to commit it to paper. I prefer a typewriter even to a computer. I don't like it. There's no noise on the computer. I like a typewriter because I am such a slow typist. I edit as I am committing it to paper. I like to see the words before me and I go, "Yeah, that's it." They appear before me and they fit. I don't usually take large parts out. If I get stuck early in a song, I take it as a sign that I might be writing the chorus and don't know it. Sometimes,you gotta step back a little bit and take a look at what you're doing.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot.

Quite often when I record a song, writing it and making a demo is the big thing and, after that, I think, how do I actually translate this into real life? A lot of the time I think I can't be bothered.

Lonnie says it doesn't take long to write a song if you're stricken with a severe case of the Tennysons. He wasn't necessarily talking about a chart-climber.

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.

One of the nice things about being in a band is that you depend on each other for ideas, so it's not all up to me to do everything myself. There's always that fear that you'll run out of stuff. The most difficult part for me is writing lyrics, and that starts to get difficult after you've written, like, 120 songs.

I think from a major-label perspective, if you were on the flip side of things and that's the world you were used to working in, your interpretation could be, "Oh, they're having trouble writing songs," when really it's like, "No, I'm not ready to write songs, I don't want to write a song right now, if I did write a song, it would be forced."

When I start to write a song, I have the words and I have the melody, and then it's just a matter of making it to the end. I think if I have something that I could identify as a talent, it would be that I can finish a song. I kind of know intuitively where the melody should go.

To create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish.

I've been writing songs since I was a wee child.

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

I used to try to write a song a day. I've been so busy lately.

There's a lot of hurry up and wait. But it gives you time to write a song.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

If I start writing a song and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

I hope people hear my songs and realize that writing music is kind of easy, or that taking your sadness and turning it into a beautiful song is worthwhile.

I was writing "Diamonds and Rust' and it had nothing to do with what it turned out to be. I don't remember what it is, but I think I was writing a song. It was literally interrupted by a phone call, and it just took another curve and it came out to be what it was.

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.

I think that anyone really can write songs, it just takes having an idea and a feeling and chasing it, and you can learn more about it. I think that's why I go to so many sessions. It is a craft that you can learn from other people. I find it to be the most fascinating thing. So I write a lot, yeah!