J. D. Souther Quotes

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

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

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

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.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

So one can say that I write all the time, that goes for the lyrics as well.

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.