John Mayall Quotes

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter, but I think I've learned a lot about it, and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

If you can take a piece of life and put it in a song, it's going to be a good song - especially if it's from the heart.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

As a singer-songwriter, what I do is write about how the human feels.

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 write when I have to; I write when the song is done and I deal with the idea and I just go with it and I'll become what that song is all about until I have finished it. And when you do that, it makes the song more visual, it makes it more personal.

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

In songwriting, I needed language. And I always believed in singing about what I do.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

That's the great thing about songwriting: You have that time to have perspective and look back and think about all the things you'd want to say.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

I write everything. It's my favorite part of what I do. And lyrics are my favorite thing.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.