Jason Isbell Quotes

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.

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 don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

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.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

It's pretty amazing to write under any circumstances when someone gives you an assignment to write a song, even if it doesn't get accepted. I've written songs a couple of times, some for Disney, that haven't actually ended up in their films, but then you're left with a song forever.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

When I started out, I was definitely writing about experiences that I hadn't had yet. The songs were just based on my influences, songwriters that had written songs before me and that were more experienced and 20, 30 years older than me.

I've always tended to write songs prolifically.

I'd never written a song before 'The Blood'; I didn't know it was going to be a song.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I like the Sci Fi channel and 'Science Fiction Theatre.' I've been doing a lot of television-watching and thinking about good songs to write.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

The first song I wrote was called 'You,' and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.

I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

Songwriting is something that's very daunting until you have your first successful song, I think.

Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.