Elvis Costello Quotes

I've always been into writing love songs.

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

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

I was drawn to love songs, but I was just drawn to great music - no matter if it's hip-hop, pop, R&B or whether it's rock n' roll or country. It could be a Garth Brooks song, and if it's a smash, then I'll love the different wordplay and different melodies. That's what I'm a fan of - great music.

But over a period of time It's the melodic things that are in my head all day.

There's definitely a visual aspect and an emotional aspect to a song. And that harks back, for me, to theater.

My songwriting process, and maybe loads of other people's, is just this sort of smashing together of emotions and stuff to make some music. It's kind of simple and really complex at the same time and, as you can see, incredibly hard to explain.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

I've found an extraordinary thing happens where I flash an entire finished song. I could be walking along, say over that bridge, and I see and hear the whole thing, words and music.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

You never know what little idea or joke, what flame flickering really quickly, will become a song. That first idea, it can come any time. If it's in Spanish, you go on in Spanish. If it's in French, French. If it's in English, English. Or Portuguese. I'll try to do my best. I like Italian, though I don't speak it much.

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.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

I can still write blues songs because I remember everything.

My album focuses on unrequited love quite a lot because I don't think it's spoken about enough in music. I've been through it myself and I found it hard to find songs that were about that, so I've definitely tried to make that a part of my album.

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.

As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written - but not really of how they played. So I'd daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them.

When I write songs I write for myself...I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

A song ain't nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.