Paul McCartney Quotes

Cacie Dalager's voice is beautiful, and her lyrics break my heart.

On Christmas Day 2016, the greatest singer songwriter of his generation, an icon of his era, George Michael, was lost. A supernova in the shining stars had been extinguished and it felt like the sky had fallen in.

I love every song that I did with Pancham and Gulzarbhai.

At 82, Nelson (who wrote the song "On the Road Again," among a thousand or more others) is the elder statesman of country music, a steadying and powerful voice in the industry and on environmental issues, and he's still on the road much of the year. The music keeps calling.

I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty.

Not too many songwriters, when they write songs go for broke. When someone does who's really good, it's astonishing. There's a reason a three-minute song can devastate you, or make you get up and dance, stop what you're doing and go, 'What is that?' It just hits you. And it's a very potent thing you're playing around with.

If you write great songs with meaning and emotion, they will last for ever because songs are the key to everything.

If I were to die tomorrow, I think they'd say Newman 56, composer of the hit song, Short People. Jumped off a mountain today.

If we're bringing up kids that are so stupid that they kill themselves because of a song, what good are the kids in the first place ?

That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

I do not view suicide as wicked, just terribly sad. There is only one death, but it is like a stone cast into a pond - the ripples stretch far. Such an act must leave a burden of sorrow, guilt, shame and confusion on an entire family. A natural death, such as my father suffered, is hard enough to deal with. A decision to end one's life must be still more devastating for those left behind. I cannot imagine the degree of hopelessness someone must feel to contemplate such an act.

A lot of deaths feel sad. Philip Seymour Hoffman's feels like a robbery.

There's always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it's a healthy tension.

It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.

Rock stars are like prophets. There's something about somebody who can get up on a stage and sing. And then when they write you songs, forget it, okay?

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

I can write a song in the back of the bus, where I am right now, or in my living room, and I can perform it that night and have an instant reciprocal exchange - an emotional, impactful exchange - and it's a less technical medium. It's a pure expression from my soul to other souls.

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

No, it happened. And right when your song ended, I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner,' Peeta says.

Every person I've met has influenced my songs.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

There is a lot of fun to be had when you try and fit as many words as you can within a three-minute song, but there is also a lot of fun in trying to get that message across in three words, or better yet when the music can overpower the words and convey something really pure and perfect that affects our psycho-emotional space.