Charli XCX Quotes

I just love ballads. I am obsessed with them, so I've written a lot of those. They just kind of touch on all the different types of emotions. Though, I think poppy, feel - good songs are underrated and not seen as artistic enough.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

When I hear somebody like Hayes Carll write a song that's touching and poignant and sad and funny all at the same time, it motivates me to step my game up and try to figure out a way to get more different emotions into one line or one song.

All my favorite artists were pretty serious in the sense that their music was something I could sink my teeth into, from Peter Gabriel to U2 to these artists that made me want to read the lyrics and dig into it.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

The pop musicians often leave meaning in the dust and substitute it for cartoons. The deeper artists - the grunge artists in the world and the emoticon people - tend to leave all of the happiness out of life like it just doesn't exist.

I think 'Rather Be' is an amazingly written pop song with incredible production.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

And I'm not trying to write heavy songs.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

I don't own an ABBA album, and I never had the urge to go and buy one. If you're just talking about well crafted pop songs, they were fantastic.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I'm not the best at choosing what's good and what's bad. I wouldn't even know what's a good pop song and what's a bad one. With that said, I wanted to say what's true to me. Some people might say that the Skrillex record was pop, but that was just about the chemistry between me and my boy.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song. I guess it was just because I was really into music as a child, and I wanted it to say more. It was the thing, wasn't it? And now it isn't.

That's what we get to do as songwriters, right? You get to explore stuff.

I've been training myself and listening to other artists and seeing where their emotion comes from, singing a heartbreak song when they're in a happy relationship.

I listened to pretty much anything that I could really feel, where I felt like the artist had to write those songs, where you can feel their soul and the pain and the happiness and love and everything.

Cry Baby is very close to my heart. I feel like I am her in a lot of ways. I want to continue making music from her perspective.

I listen to a lot of songs, and they aren't talking about anything. I don't connect with them. I'll listen to something like Musiq Soulchild's 'Just Friends,' and I'm like, 'Wow, I really feel what he's talking about.' That's how I want people to feel about my music.

I know, deep down, that what makes my music what it is are my words. It always starts from me wanting to say something. Once I've run out of things to say, I'll be done.

I want people to really recognize that this is what I am naturally good at: I'm really good at making music and describing your feelings vicariously through my experiences, through my past and my future. I want people to relate to me in multiple ways and be versatile in my music.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.