Dennis Lloyd Quotes

It's so interesting how you can take a bad situation and make a great song out of it that somebody else can listen to and have a completely different perspective of the song and have their own meaning. That's what's great about it.

In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life.

I write songs for myself, but I never keep them. I'm like, 'O.K., that was my therapy - it's out of my body now. I'm going to give it to somebody else so it can be their therapy, too.'

I know that I'm dealing with some kind of wound through my music.

Rap helps me connect emotionally.

I suffered a bout of depression that pushed me to reevalute things in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and the world and my spirituality. I sat at a piano, and the ideas fell into my head. I started playing, and I felt comfortable with my music for the first time.

For 70 nights, right across America, I've been getting out there with two ex-lovers and we've been playing songs which are so specific about each of us, you just wouldn't know. We're friends now but we can't forget what happened between us.

You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.

I sing because it soothes me, and I write because I want to let others know that they're not alone with their problems.

I turned to music originally because of my past and needing a release or an outlet to get out anger or frustration or hurt.

If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.

Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.

I've always just had sort of a dark take on life, I suppose, and hopefully, the music transcends that in a way.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

My songs are basically my diaries. Some of my best songwriting has come out of time when I've been going through a personal nightmare.

Songwriting is like a therapy, it's a connection that you have with another person, and I'm not scared of it at all for some reason.

I think anything that's creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that I'm going through in my life. If you're going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, it's a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent.

Any of the rewards or accolades or any of that are very nice and everything but the music is what saves me. And it did. I would write my way out of any kind of depressing period.

I didn't never have to go to a therapist. I just always put it in a song and you heard me.

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

Everybody feels up sometimes, they feel down sometimes, sometimes they feel sideways, sometimes they feel weird. And the beauty of music is you can express all those different feelings in all the different songs you write. And hopefully, people can identify with those.

For me, music is therapeutic, so the songs that came to me the easiest came from the most devastating moments of my life.

I was going through a lot of upheavals in my brain. The only way I could really get stuff out was to write songs.

You know the way you tell your life story to a friend? I just told mine to a piano.

Most artists - painters or writers - I think create out of stress or negative situations. Look at rock music. It's about getting things off of your chest, and it's a means of venting in many ways. That's what my work is about.