Lee Ranaldo Quotes

With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.

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

I'm definitely still putting effort into my lyrics, for them to be emotional and tell a story.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I write lyrics based on music, on a musical flow, and what sounds good at the time.

I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

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 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.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

I find it harder to write the lyrics afterwards because then you're just trying to fit them into something that's already there.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

Even if I'm writing music, it's with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

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

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

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I actually find a lot of pleasure in writing lyrics.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I write everything. It's my favorite part of what I do. And lyrics are my favorite thing.

Sometimes, I feel like my lyrics meander a little bit, and our songs are so big I need to write more words than are necessary.

You work very hard on the lyrics. Getting them to fit the contours of improvised melodies.