Pete Seeger Quotes

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

Sometimes I start with a great title or idea, sometimes a great melody will run through my mind; but the higher percentage of the time, the words and music pretty much come at the same time.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

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

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

I've got so much material; like, it feels as if every day I'm coming up with so many riffs.

Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days.

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.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

Songs do write themselves through you; I know people find it hard to believe, but it's true.

I get a lot of my songwriting done while driving around Nashville - sometimes it comes to me that way.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in. The beginning makes no sense whatsoever. It just, like, rhymes. And then all of a sudden I'll go into, I am an old woman named after my mother.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

I called the guys from Promise of the Real, whom I've been playing with, and they were all on the road. Right after I hung up the phone, I wrote another song and started writing another, and I'm going, "Hey, I can't wait. I should be doing this now!" My experience tells me that when it's there, it's there, and you can't make it wait. So I got Jimmy Keltner and Paul Bushnell, two good guys, and went in and did this record ["Peace Trail"].

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.