John Mayer Quotes

The reason you write [songs] is because there's something you want to say that is important to you - enough to go through all the torture of writing.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.

We're all posting and clicking and sharing, but we're not devoting enough attention to get anything meaningful from it all.

We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.

I had to take a bit of a break and fast for a while, but then I found myself very, very hungry when I got back to [song-writing].

I learned early on that I could get a lot of attention by singing and writing little songs, so it was like throwing nuts to a monkey... I just couldn't get enough.

I used to wish I could write songs like the others - and I've tried but I just can't. I get the words all right, but whenever I think of a tune and sing it to the others they always say 'Yeah, it always sounds like such a thing' and when they point it out I see what they mean. But I did get a part credit as a composer on one - it was called What Goes On.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it.

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.

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

I don't think I ever wrote a song. I can write a lot of jokes, but when I try to write lyrics they're the most direct, non-figurative words, like, 'I like you, I like you,'... and that's it, for the whole song. People would go, 'Ooh, this guy's Dylan or something.' It gives me a lot more respect for songwriters, actually.

"Diamonds & Rust" started off as another song. Then the words started to morph. When you write a song that deep, the words come from some place else. But when the songs stop coming, it would be so contrived to try and force it. Since then I've just been doing other people's music.

In the morning I'd write these essays, anything that I'd feel like writing, and in the afternoon, I'd spend time with my guitar. I had decided after listening to my last four or five albums that my biggest weakness musically was melody. the reason I had been singing in a monotone over the chord patterns in my songs was that I never practiced doing melodies.

When I listen to my songs, they seem like pieces of music or art, like a painting that you look at. The reality is that, yes, when I wrote the songs upstairs or wherever, I was writing very specifically about my life or a specific subject matter that's very personal. I've never shied away from that. The vocals and the performance that come after the record, I don't think of that as confessional, but the core of the music is completely. It makes sense that people would see that as being the main thing. I guess not everyone is able to speak so candidly.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.