Nick Lowe Quotes

Believe me, I wish this song was yours instead of mine.

What I really search for is something that I really love hearing, something that's my own private game: If I find a song I really like, I try to do a definitive version.

For me, getting my personality across is so important in getting that connection for people that enjoy my music.

I'd rather people interpret the songs and get whatever they can out of them instead of thinking about me crying in a room with a guitar.

Sometimes performing someone else's song is more difficult than writing your own.

My style is so tightly tied in with our songs that I don't think you could even ask me to quit Radiohead and play guitar for another band. I don't think I could do it. It would probably reveal me to be the bluffer that I believe I am. That's how it feels. I wouldn't have the confidence to do anything but this.

I always believe that every song tells a story, so the last thing I want to do is edit out like the meat of the story. I would pick songs based off a), whether I felt like I could do anything with them, and b) whether I felt like I could keep the story intact. And then you sit in with one of the piano players and one of the vocal coaches and kind of work out your arrangements that way.

I am not an evangelist. I am not a preacher. I am a musician. That is what I know how to do. I know how to write songs. I know how to write things that relate to my heart. I feel that I talk about God in every song, in everything I do - all of it! I really do not know how to respond. I do not relate to that.

A song to me is a very tangible thing. I can feel it with my hands and see it with my eyes.

I think "artistic" simply means there's more of the creator in the thing. Whether it's painting or song or movie or game, the creator puts more of themselves into the piece, so when the audience see it, they feel something real, they feel something human, they feel something that's like a person.

I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.

I don't consider myself a sociologist, I consider myself a filmmaker, among other things. Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker.

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

I'm far less a leader than a writer.

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.

Whether you're writing a book or a song or whatever, you've got to be involved in it. It's got to come from the heart I think...that's what it's all about.

I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well – but never quite perfectly, you know?

I think it's important to be able to write stuff that's personal to you and stuff that you'll really be able to understand what you're singing about and be able to truly sing it. Because if you're singing a song that someone's written for you and you really can't relate to it, it's hard to sing that song.

I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.

You have to create different things, either through lighting or changing the format of the songs and how you're going to sing them, and even sometimes props.

It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves -- I'm thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.

Every production must resemble its author.