Joe Strummer Quotes

The first time I learned how to play, my guitar was out of tune. I didn't know it; I just started writing songs.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

If it's a good song and it fits me, that's what I'm going to do, I'm not out there trying to change the world. I'm just out there trying to sing country music the best way I can.

I'm most comfortable when you just give me a guitar and I just sing.

I have this guitar on which I occasionally kill time making up rock n' roll lyrics.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

One of my big inspirations was Chuck Berry, and his playing was always about the rhythm and the lyrics. So I've always been that way in my playing, really.

Picking up a guitar - I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

Playing the guitar, you kind of lock into a rhythm and a groove, and then it relaxes me to make up lyrics and sing.

There are no rules to writing a song.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I don't think about the styles. I write whatever comes out and I use whatever kind of instrumentation works for those songs.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.

I've always been a fan of just writing songs and making music.

I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.

If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

The moment I wrote my first song, I got addicted.

My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.