Taylor Swift Quotes

We human beings are tuned such that we crave great melody and great lyrics. And if somebody writes a great song, it's timeless that we as humans are going to feel something for that and there's going to be a real appreciation.

I didn't write those songs, but I can relate to every one of them... I have.

Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.

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.

If you get music on a personal level, you are doing something right. It's not just in one ear and out the other.

To be honest, I'm always really interested when people say they can relate to our songs. On the first album, that wasn't something I'd ever anticipated or thought about.

Sometimes I do a Dylan song and it seems to fit me so right that I figure maybe I wrote it. Dylan didn’t always do it for me as a singer, not in the early days, but then I started listening to the lyrics. That sold me.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

It excites me when a person puts their whole self in a song or rhyme, or instrument. It fills me.

I think the way Win Butler writes, I really identify with it. He writes very emotionally and very cinematically, and I just connect with his sensibility.

I love Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple. People like that. People you can really connect to on the most basic human level.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it.

To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.

I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

It's amazing when I do a gig how many people of different ages come up to me afterwards and chat to me about songs. The emotions I feel are what any person can relate to. Sometimes I'm just a narrator.

When your hair is rising, that's when you know it's a good song - that's happened to me with some artists and some songs, John Lennon songs or when Nina Simone sings. It's great to make those moments yourself.

So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.

I had no desire to become a singer until I heard Billie Holiday. The first time I heard her on a record, it was a revelation. She sounded like a woman singing about herself.

Probably to me the greatest singer, female voice, is Billie Holiday. And one of the most moving for me, I don't know why - maybe it's nostalgia, maybe because my life is one of constant partying, whatever.

I really believe in the power of music.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

I've always wanted to sing. I don't think I have a great voice, but I just think that I get the emotion. It's very authentic. Whatever emotion I'm feeling, I can sing it, and you can feel it.