Neil Peart Quotes

That's what's amazing about songwriting: you can write a story that everyone connects to.

In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I think what happens with a lot of writing and art is that specificity ends up being relatable while universality becomes vague.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

People want things that address their everyday reality, and that goes for stuff that isn't political - with singer-songwriter music, people want things that touch them.

My main goal as a songwriter is to make something that inspires people. To write things about my life that people can relate to. Whether it's a whole record or just one song for someone, I hope it can do that for them. Knowing that I have the ability to do that is inspiring to me.

In songwriting, I needed language. And I always believed in singing about what I do.

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

To write a good song, an artist has to drawn from reality. There has to be some spark from realism that communicates a real feeling to someone else. You have to be real. Or you have to be a really good storyteller.

I think I take little pieces of inspiration, then kind of do what's real to me and what's going on in my life or what I observe from other people's experiences and hope other people connect with it, too.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.

I write my songs because I've lived them.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

Music is emotional. Your job is to make people feel something. The best way to do that is to sing and speak from something they've personally been through. That's where I write from.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

The inspiration to write a song comes to me when something has happened to me more than once. If it's happened to me more than once, it's probably happened to other people.

I think that's the only way I know how to write songs, is to think about my life, and also to think about the words at the same time.

I want people to really recognize that this is what I am naturally good at: I'm really good at making music and describing your feelings vicariously through my experiences, through my past and my future. I want people to relate to me in multiple ways and be versatile in my music.

All of my surroundings influence my songwriting. It's autobiographical, although I leave enough space so it's relatable.

A few things I've noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that's continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they're songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.