Neil Young Quotes

Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist.

I'm creating songs. I do it most of the time, in the car or in the house.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

When I used to write songs, especially on my own, it was just me and a guitar.

There are still songs that I'm writing. I like to write. I like to take a long time to do my songs, not even the actual writing process, but conceptualizing, getting into the songs. That's why I stopped doing mixtapes.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

I could write all songs all day long about what I think about the music industry or music in general. Sometimes I gotta be like, "Let's write about something else." You don't want to say the same thing over and over again. In a lot of ways, I look at records as a year or two of my life encapsulated in songs. They're almost like journal entries.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I have a tape recorder, and I just sing into it. I like to write that way. Sometimes I'll just get melodic ideas, and then I'll go home and sit down and add the lyrics. Or sometimes I'll get a lyric idea that I love. Usually it's pretty combined. Usually I get some kind of a lyrical concept and a melody and work with that.

I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.

The pre-chorus always flows and the chorus is always a little bit harder for me because I put pressure on myself. I didn't know that there was a proper way to do these things, so I just write what sounds good to me in my ears and then I hope to God that someone else likes it too.

For me, music always leads. Lyrics are only about how they sing. It is wonderful if they read well, too. In the very best scenario, sometimes a lyric will pop out with a melody, simultaneously. That's a lovely thing, but you can't rely on that.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

We write so many songs, it is difficult to narrow them down.

I never stopped writing music, I just stopped writing songs. I've been writing music continually ever since the last album of original tunes, "River Of Dreams" in '93.

I have a few songs that I'm figuring out and writing. I'm still figuring out the whole concept and how it's gonna connect to Cry Baby, but I have some ideas, yes.

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.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

I write my own lyrics completely on my own. Sometimes I have people helping me with concepts or like choruses and stuff sometimes, but mostly I write all my own songs by myself, especially the verses and a lot of the choruses.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

It's like a dream sometimes, a song just pops into your head and you can't tell if it's something you heard or it's new and you got to write it down.