Nick Cave Quotes

Song Sung Blue took a lot of compressing and refining, and it has one of my favorite lyrics.

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.

Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

Writing songs is really about writing. It's not about necessarily focusing on one particular style or making it one particular thing.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.

I pick up my guitar and play. Something might come, and then the pen comes out. Then an edit, until something comes out that you're actually satisfied with.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

For me to create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish. But I get to some really good stuff after a while.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

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 push myself in a lot of aspects when I write a song. I write a piece and where most people would stop and say, 'Oh, that's the hook right there,' I'll move that to the first four bars of the verse and do a new hook.

It's very hard to write a song alone. It's only by jamming that you can get a song together.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.

If you write 50 songs, you're bound to write at least a dozen good ones.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

The melody will tell me what the song should be about, the tone of the song. That's when the intellect comes in. Because I have a list of possible titles and concepts, and I expand on that.

I had a really pleasant time composing music for 'Raaga.'

After writing quite a few songs now, I have not a method but a way of being patient with a couple of verses or a certain set of chords. I can match them up quicker now than I used to. The one thing you do improve is songwriting.

I'm usually just writing lyrics alone in my room, but I'm happy to be producing and writing chords anywhere.

I teach songwriting a lot, and I always tell my students, 'You gotta write the little songs sometimes to get to the next big song in the chute.' You gotta write 'em to get to it. You never know what's going to be a little song or a big song.