Lou Barlow Quotes

Most of the songs I wrote are personal.

I'm a songwriter; it's in my nature to express things openly.

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

Although rap is about boasting, it's also about honesty and expressing your emotions.

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

I mean Gorilla was really our first sort of goes at songwriting.

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.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

I'm self-deprecating, but I'm an artist, too. I have to write new songs to chronicle stuff for myself. I write a song like 'Middle Age' or 'Responsibility' or 'I Just Work Here,' and it's about how bleak life can be. But it's real.

Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there.

If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

The beauty of being a musician is writing songs. That's the best part. It's therapeutic and honest and private.

I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I like the purity of telling stories now because not a lot of people are telling stories in their music. I wanna tell my specific story: what I see right now.

I feel like a lyricist is somebody that writes their own lyrics. Now songwriters and lyricists are two totally different things. You can't really be a lyricist if you didn't write your lyrics. There's no passion, there's nothing in it coming from you. It's somebody else's feelings and you just taking it and running with it.

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

The people I'm inspired by and I listen to are all ballsy, and I feel like I'm closer to an artist when they're open and honest.

I feel like I try to write from an honest of a place as I can - without scaring people off too much, I guess.

In the songs that I write, that's where I get to be really brave and outspoken.

Singing your own songs is all about individual expression.

'Birdman' came from a very beautiful side of me, from a part of honesty and surrender about things.

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

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.