Henry Mancini Quotes

I never finish a show without singing 'She's Gone.'

I think of my songs as there to be something to move people emotionally.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I just try to tell a story with a song, and be able to try to transmit the emotion to you. That's all I'm really trying to do.

As a songwriter, that's really what you hope for - to make that connection with your audience.

For me, I feel like the most important part of music is the storytelling behind it, and that's my favorite; that's what makes my favorite artists my favorite artists, having the story that I relate to the most and that helps me the most.

Whether it's an inspiring song or whether it's an entertaining song - whatever it might be about it - I just want people to feel the emotion that I put into it because I think emotion... is everything.

All that really moves me is music.

We write songs that hit different people at different ages where they live.

Songs I do have to strike an emotional chord the first time I sing them.

If you can write a song that makes people have emotions and show their feelings, that's a powerful thing and a beautiful thing.

Music is something that's so powerful and means so much to me.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.

My concern has always been to write songs that my audience, my fans are able to identify with.

Most people who ask me what's my favorite song, expect that it's 'Midnight Train' or 'Neither One of Us.' But actually, it's always kinda been 'The Need to Be' because of what it says. I love the way that song was written, I love the melody, I love everything about it.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

It doesn't take me long to write songs.

In hip-hop, I wasn't very focused on delivering a message. It was just a string of lines that didn't connect. What I wanted to do is write stories... and affect someone's emotions with that song. I think as a soul singer, I'm able to accomplish that.

It doesn't matter what age you are, an effective song will move you.

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.

So much of my career has been about saying things the way people say them, using melodies not that I can sing but that the people can sing.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you.

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.