Jerry Only Quotes

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

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.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

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 have to have a guitar sitting around. I sing in the shower. I sing around the house. The music comes secondary. The lyrics come first.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

I've always tended to write songs prolifically.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I draw inspiration from anything and everybody and that's what country music is to me... real life stories and real life emotions.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

I write in the studio.

If you're a songwriter, you have to do homework. You can exist for a while on the inspiration, but at some point, you have to sit down and have the discipline to write - to finish the poem, as they say.

I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs.

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.

In Fall Out Boy, we were all playing with our pop punk influences, so that was always within that kind of framework.

When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.

I am never without my lyric book. If anything inspirational happens, I have it there so nothing's forgotten.

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

Music is an important part of my writing process.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.

My life would have been different without Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley. They would have to be the greatest on my list as an influence to my life at 11 years old.

I keep a journal and just kind of take notes. I don't really so much sit down and write songs - I just take a lot of notes, and sometimes I sit down and put them all together.

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

I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I've gotten into writing story-songs.