Ani DiFranco Quotes

Sometimes a song can take up to a year to write, and because I waited that year and waited to work on it that day, it came up that extra 50 percent.

After writing quite a few songs now, I have not a method but a way of being patient with a couple of verses or a certain set of chords. I can match them up quicker now than I used to. The one thing you do improve is songwriting.

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.

Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing. I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs.

Sometimes you're gonna write a song and it's not gonna be right from the beginning. And you're just gonna have to work through that wall. But if you know something is there, you've gotta just keep doing it until you get it right. So, I'll work on a song for three months if I have to, to get it right.

As a songwriter, it's good to have criticism, and I like objective opinions.

I write songs on guitar and that's about how good of a guitar player I am. I can write songs on it.

I can only write songs when somebody gives me some water to swim in. Otherwise, I'm a fish on the beach.

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete.

Domesticity is the enemy of art. I don't know if that's true. You can write good happy songs. So, I don't think it's necessarily happiness. But I think self-satisfaction is maybe the enemy. It's kind of better to think, "Tomorrow night I'm gonna sing it better." There is this forward effort. It feels to me right, it feels human.

The drumming helps a lot when I'm producing songs or writing songs. My knowledge of drums helps more in that aspect, (although) I don't know, man; I'm not great at any of them.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I think that that spirit, or at least the raucousness of maybe that, is in there. And then yeah, like, along the way, you fine tune it 'cause you're thinking, like, OK, we need to now turn this into a song.

Some people, like Leonard Cohen, write one album every 10 years, and labor over a song for five years at a time.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

I wrote my first song when I was nine, and it was called 'Notice Me'. My Mom still has the piece of paper around somewhere, but I can't even imagine how terrible it is.

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.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

It takes us a long time to write a song that we all really like, so it makes sense that it would take a while for the listener to get there, too.

The songs started as a soundscapes, and then came the words and music; each song took at least a year to make.

The first song I wrote was called "You" and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist. I remember them all because I used to always write terrible poetry. I keep all my notebooks.