Nancy Wilson Quotes

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.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I start with the subject matter I want to write about. Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last.

A lot of times when songwriters get together and write a song... somebody will come in with a hook and a lot of times they come out with something that sounds a little crafty.

If you can take a piece of life and put it in a song, it's going to be a good song - especially if it's from the heart.

A couple of days working with Joe Jonas, I thought, 'This guy is a slayer of a singer; he's really funny, goofy, and sexy. We need to write that.' And that led to 'Cake By The Ocean.'

You know, I've written many of my songs while driving - which is against the law in many cases.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

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.

I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics.

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.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.

I sat down one night and wrote the line rock, rock, rock everybody.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

I'm a songwriter. I need silence to hear the melodies, so I don't fill the days with a lot of sound.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.