Enya Quotes

Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.

I write anywhere. I'm always banging around on the dashboard. Whatever I'm doing. I can make music out of anything. Whenever a song hits me, I'll pick some sort of melody or rhythm out on it, and kind of enhance the song.

What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help.

I'm by no means a pianist. I think that's safe to say, but the piano, for me, I would say it's the enabler. It gave me what I needed and gives me what I need in order to write a song. And I think playing or improvising on the piano is where I feel most liberated and sort of less conscious of all my insecurities or inadequacies.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

I enjoy songwriting. It's slow-motion improvising.

As a songwriter, I go into the studio, and I just try to write a great song.

I'm not sure if the next song I write is going to be about love or a song about a tree.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

I just write all the time. In my whole life I've never had what I've heard people talk about writer's block. I've never had that. Life is like a song to me. I just hear everything in music, so I have never once thought "Well, I'm never gonna be able to write again." I've got thousands of songs.

If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.

Sometimes I dream song ideas. I write a song in my dream, the melody and everything. But then sometimes I can't remember them. I think later on, I probably do.

I'm not here to write a song for you, I'm here to help you write a song for yourself.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

When I start writing songs, and they come easily, I'm always very suspicious. That usually means they're reminding me of something I've already done before. When the songs become unsettling, and I feel anxious about what I'm doing, that usually means it's going to be more interesting later on when we actually record the stuff.

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.