Kevin Parker Quotes

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

That's what's amazing about songwriting: you can write a story that everyone connects to.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

The key to songwriting is just to be able to observe, and put yourself in situations to be around people, and let those ideas come to you.

The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back.

I'm a songwriter. Everything affects me.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.

I always was songwriting in high school, writing songs while I was supposed to be listening to the teacher.

If I don't feel anything, I don't write music.

We're not writing songs to solve a cultural problem. The goal for us is to express what we're going through, and it's great if people find commonality in that.

When I wrote 'Let Her Go,' it's not like I was doing anything different. I was just writing a song as I would any other day of the year; it just so happened that this one resonated with people.

Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.

People often reach out and comment on how they relate to my lyrics, which makes me feel very warm inside.

Every song I've written, it's about what I've gone through, good or bad. It kind of comes out of me, and I'm grateful for that. I've got friends who are back home who've got no way to express that, and they're kind of in a different position in life. It's alarming to me that I've written something on my bedroom floor when I was 19 or something, and then there's 50,000 people that know the words, and they've got a similar feeling. If you thought about it too much, your head would blow up.

I'm always looking for people to feel connected to me and inspired in their own right.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

A good story isn't the one that shuts everyone down and sort of leaves them in silent awe. A good story is one that, even before you finish the anecdote, you can see their eyes shining because it has so resonated with something from their own lives that everyone in the group has a version of the same story and they cannot wait to tell it, and that they're going to compete to make their version even more extreme than your version. So your version is just a seed.

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

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

I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them.

I relate to all of my songs and I'm inspired by everything going on around me. Music comes from all different aspects of my life.