Rakim Quotes

As a lyricist, I'm really trying to raise my level of quality.

I see myself as a songwriter and a poet.

I think I'm a good lyricist.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I used to live with J.D. Souther, and I would watch him write. He's be sitting, he'd say something, and then he'd write it down. That's craft.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

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

I always write lyrics first and the rhythm and the melody come from the lyrics. It always comes from the lyrics: words have rhythm and words have melody.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

I'm not a fast, stream-of-consciousness lyricist at all - I know some guys who are, and if there is one skill I wish I had, it's that.

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

I'd say almost that words come first, melody second.

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

Lyrics are really, really hard, I think, or at least they're really hard for me. Some people can channel lyrics faster. I find them very hard to find, so because of it, they take me a long time, and I really think about them.

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

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

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

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 deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.

I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.