Bo Burnham Quotes

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

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

It's pretty amazing to write under any circumstances when someone gives you an assignment to write a song, even if it doesn't get accepted. I've written songs a couple of times, some for Disney, that haven't actually ended up in their films, but then you're left with a song forever.

My mom eventually told me if I wanted to be in the music industry, I should start writing my own songs. At that time, I was in junior high and had no idea where to start - I was writing joke rap songs with friends. Eventually, I wrote my first song in high school, and my mom took me to go record it with one of her band member friends at his house.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

For example, after developing a sound similar to an elephant trumpeting, I wrote the song Elephant Talk which gave my elephant sound an appropriate place to live.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

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

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.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

It's hard to know exactly what it sounds like to me. I'm in the studio and I write it. and that's it.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

Originally I was not writing songs for myself.

I keep this crazy notebook of song ideas.

I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.

I've composed a fair amount in my life, and some of them have made it on to the screen, some compositions that I've done, a few. And I like doing that. I had never really considered doing a full-length thing. I've worked with other people creating full-length pieces.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.

I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.