Al Jarreau Quotes

People take songs so literally.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

I feel like emotional content is the most important of any song, for any artist.

I tend to explain my songs.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.

Songs are often character studies.

My songs are self-explanatory... somebody pointed out to me that... my songs pretty much speak for themselves.

Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.

It's not like making records is terrible. Still, I do find the writing of the songs and the live shows to be the things that give you the most clear picture of what it's all about.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

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

We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.

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.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

But when you get to a song, not only do you have to do a vocal melody, you have to write words and not be redundant and make some semblance of a story.