Tracy Chapman Quotes

Every song that I've done is me in one way or another.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

I'm not afraid to use my personal experiences and put them into a song. I think that's when you get the best stuff anyway, when it's real emotion.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

I don't really like to talk about what my songs are about.

I've written songs before, and I don't want to share them with anybody. It's really personal for me, that sort of creative outlet where you put your emotions to paper or put to song. I don't do it that much anymore, but to let someone in on that outlet and to have it susceptible to judgment is scary.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

I will say that a lot of songs that I've written are from my own personal experiences which are special to me.

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.

If you meet me, you might not get to know me. If you hear my music? You'll get to know me.

It's a really personal thing for me to write a song.

I am an open book through the songwriting.

People should listen to my music if they just want to know me better.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me - they're too personal.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

I don't like to be entertaining. I don't like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it.

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.

Most of the songs I wrote are personal.

I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.