Tom Lehrer Quotes

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.

I want to be just a musician and songwriter, and hopefully known as a very good one. I love a lot of music that's considered folk music, but I also love a lot of music that's considered punk or considered rap. I don't mind being called a folk singer. But it seems a bit limiting. I want to be able to write whatever kind of song I want.

He's a fantastic actor, Kelsey Grammer. You don't have that kind of career without having a talent, without having something to say and to give to an audience.

I can rap, I can sing, I can do whatever, you know what I'm saying? I can do rock.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs.

By the time I was ten or eleven, I had a song-book and I was writing everything down. It used to just be my hobby but now it's like my diary, it's where I can go in my own little bubble.

The songs that I'm able to write are the songs I'm able to write, whatever they may be. The path I've cut for myself is pop music - love-y pop music. That's what I enjoy doing. And I don't think I'm going to get sick of it anytime soon.

Any young, aspiring musicians out there, if music is what you want to do, if music is what you love and your passion. It doesn't take a fragrance, it's not about the tabloids, it's about you putting in the work, practicing every day, practicing your vocals, practicing your instrument, practicing songwriting. Hopefully one day you write the song the whole world wants to get down to. I promise you, if you go out there and sing and you put your heart and soul into it and you follow your dream, one day you're going to be sitting next to Ellen DeGeneres talking about how you broke records and rocked the Super Bowl.

I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song. It may be easier to put out a fake jazz album, as Sting does from time to time.

From an early age I've written songs and played the piano.

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

Yeah, I think it's like any God-given gift. You writers have the gift of perception. If you don't use it, you're going to lose it. And it's the same thing with you [Lorraine], it's God-given.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

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.

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

I'm blessed, because I enjoy every part of my life. I enjoy writing songs. I've been trying to write songs since I was five years old.

Mentally, I write myself a little story. Of course, sometimes you have a song that says, "Do that." My best example is Singin' in the Rain. Arthur Freed had insisted that the song should be in the picture, but he was very anxious about it.

When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can't force them to like it.

I used to rap as a kid and people were impressed by it, so it gave me the drive to keep going. Everybody has at least one talent. I guess this is my talent.

Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.