Keren Ann Quotes

I love to write honest songs that name real people, then get up onstage and live out those emotions in front of 15,000 people.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I'm inspired by artists like Robyn, just because she writes amazing pop songs, and they're not throwaway. When I listen to a Robyn pop song, I don't feel like she's just kind of saying something and not thinking; I feel like it's really emotional.

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

A good song deals with the human condition, and the truth of the human condition.

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.

There are times when I want to be plainspoken about my feelings in a song. But there are other times when it's really good to try and get my head around different kinds of song structures, or maybe I might get turned on by trying to write a song that would fit in this one scene in a movie. And by the end of all this, you just end up with a bunch of different ideas. And songs are really just ideas.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

I think the more emotional you are, the better. I'm sort of writing [songs] as I go and I can never tell how it's going to be or how it's going to feel until I get into the studio. But I definitely think it will. I probably can't help but have the emotions in my voice.

Great art can only be created out of love.

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art. ... A lot of my songs are very serious, I'm like dead serious about certain things and I feel that I'm writing about the world, through my own eyes. ... I have a love for simple basic song structure, although sometimes you'd never know it. ... Most of the songs I wrote at night. I would just wake in the middle of the night. That's when I found the space to write.

Every song has a piece of you in it, because just general regret, love. You have to basically zero in on the truth of those particular emotions.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.

I would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I don't really care about how good a song is, I only want them to reflect what I felt when I was writing them

Sometimes I think as an artist you tend to go toward the heartbreak and the sadness because those are the deepest and heaviest emotions you can pull out as an entertainer and as a singer.

I never utter my real feelings about anything. My lighter, superficial side will always be too quick for the deeper side of me, and that's why it always wins.

There's a truth to the fact that it's hard to be real. It's easy to be indulgent. It's easy to be bubble gum, but it's hard to find a real thing that really makes your soul tick. It's painful and honest. It can be more challenging than just a sad song.

First, in a love song, or any song for that matter, using a plastic word like "inhibitions" is just completely without feel or texture. It demonstrates a tin ear for communication.