Rodney Crowell Quotes

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

I've never had trouble finding inspiration for new songs, no matter what I'm doing.

Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

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 seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

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

Sometimes when I write songs, I don't know what they're about, and it just suddenly comes to me.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

In my off-time, I do record. Once in a while, I'll just go into the studio if there's a really good song that I have in my head and want to do. I think, as artists, you're constantly in creative motion. If I stopped writing songs, then that's a part of me that would stop in my life, and I need constant motion.

It takes me, like, half an hour to write the lyrics for a song. They just come out.

The most common time I write lyrics is the middle of the night.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!