Carlene Carter Quotes

I never thought of myself as a rock singer. I was interested in songs like 'Heart Like a Wheel,' and I liked the others for about 15 minutes.

The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early '90s. I don't think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

If you listen to Semi-Precious Weapons' last single, 'Aviation High,' you can definitely hear that even in my old band, even in the songs I was writing then, the pop influence really started to take over.

I don't really focus on if what I'm writing is pop or not. I just write music and then I try to figure out how to arrange the things that I write.

There's a lot of people I'd like to write with, like Keith Urban or even as far out as Stevie Wonder.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.

I've covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don't think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.

I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music - I really didn't start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.

This is the bunch of songs I did first, and it's just the type of thing I do. I am a Carter Family girl, so the record is book-ended with Carter Family songs.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

Sometimes the song title comes with the songs, other times you just sorta make something up afterwards.

I usually sing a lot on my mixtapes. I sing a lot on songs that just really aren't singles. Even my first single, 'My Last,' which I feel like is more pop than anything - I was originally singing the chorus on there. I'm used to that. I've always had fresh melodies.

I have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues.

Pop songs are not as graceful as they used to be. Performers today haven't gone through the regimen of learning how to write. And of course, everyone wants to own copyrights.

Being a pop artist or making music like a jingle or something - I don't do that.

When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.

We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.

When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.

I love pop music. I listen to it; I think you can hear it in my songwriting and my album. I'd definitely say it's country-pop music, but it's country first.