Michael Franti Quotes

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

I'm not afraid to use my personal experiences and put them into a song. I think that's when you get the best stuff anyway, when it's real emotion.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

All my songs come from me because I only seem able to write about myself and my experiences.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

I don't know, I've always written songs that are mainly about attitude, not me personally.

When you write, what's going on in your life shines through in the songs.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feeling like I need to write by myself.

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.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

When I started to write a tune, I just wrote the nearest at hand, which was what was happening in my own life.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.

I never dreamed that the little ditties I wrote about annoying customers or bagel recipes would turn into a full-length musical comedy. But a very wise person told me to 'write what you know'. So I did.

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

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.

You don't have to be singing specifically about things that are going on in your life, but because of the nature of music, because it is this incredibly emotional phenomenon, everything that you are feeling or experiencing is relayed in the music you put out.