Rick Nielsen Quotes

I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.

I think to be a good songwriter, you have to be able to play an instrument.

I've been writing and composing songs since I was 5 years old.

I'm not a natural songwriter.

I've always been around musicians and always been the songwriter who doesn't end up playing the music.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

I started playing guitar when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I think that, within a week of getting my first guitar, I started writing music. I just love it.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I've never written a song in my life. It's all a big hoax.

I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.

My brother is an excellent songwriter, and I play guitar and drums.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

I never thought of myself as a songwriter. I was just an artist writing songs, and they just happened to get placed.

We pride ourselves on being great songwriters.

I like to compose, but only for myself. I write my own lyrics and compose the music around them.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too.

I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.

I started writing songs when I started learning guitar.

Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up playing on another really good song.

To me, the guitar is a tool for songwriting, and it's fun, too. The day that it's not fun, that's when I'm not gonna play guitar anymore.

Melodies are important. I always kind of pride myself on my melodies.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.

Ever since I picked up a bass, I've written songs.