Jenny Lewis Quotes

Our perception of songs that we've written... the meaning changes from day to day... to whatever stage we're at in our life and careers.

You gotta live life before you can talk about it. Sometimes when things don't work out in life, they work out on stage.

The first record I spent five years writing and it was an amalgamation of all the things that happened in my life from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty.

My writing has a lot to do with who I am, and what my life is like, and my relationships to people.

I can achieve that by personally relating the words that I am saying to something I have known in my life.

I think I've lived a pretty hard life. What I mean by hard is that... I've been kind of reckless with things. I'm a passionate person. I'm a super passionate person. I think there's definitely been sorrow in my life, good and bad. I think it comes through. I hope it comes through in my writing because to me that's what artistry is.

I realized I was tired of singing about trees and flowers. I wanted to sing about real life. From then on, nobody could tell me anything was better than blues.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

Basically, any time you have a real life experience, that can be a song. Because no matter how crazy or weird you are, somebody's had an experience just like you, somewhere.

In order for me to write, I have to experience life. I write the songs based on real life, and I perform them from a very real place.

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

It Might As Well Be Spring... I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.

The roles that have come into my life have taught me - and in that time period maybe I didn't even know it, but whatever came up or whatever it is that you have to express at that time, has benefitted me in a particular way.

One of the hardest things I've encountered whilst working on 'Pippin' is the consistent irony, as a reflection from the core material of the show, within my own life.

After I left college, I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.

'Control' had to do with my own life a lot, and that's why that seemed to be a film I could be the director of, because I had an emotional attachment to the whole story. And because of that experience, I feel that I can try other films. I didn't set out to become a director.

My goal is to play characters that I feel I can contribute to and also ones I can contribute back to my life.

Songs are really interesting in that way. Sometimes, they grow with you. Sometimes, you outgrow them.

Music is first for me. How the music makes me feel, it's like energy. It has to match my life. What's happening around me or to me. That's where it comes from.

All of my records have their own vibe, depending on what was going on in my life.

I've had a lot of people come up to me after shows and tell me that "Dollhouse" really helped them with whatever they were going through with their families. I thought that was really amazing, that it could mean one thing for me but another thing for someone else.

I look back at my career when I was younger and can connect what I was going through at the time with the characters I was playing. I see the similarities in them reflecting on my life.

People say to me 'You've changed.' and I say 'Haven't you?' People change, it's just life.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

I was wiser at 30 than I am now. My judgment was better at 12. If you look out the windshield of a Hyundai or a Bentley, you see the same road.