Passenger Quotes

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

There is a formula that allows you to write a decent song. But a song like 'You're All I Need to Get By,' it just writes itself.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back.

A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life: to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by.

Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

If at noon you sit down and there's just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn't exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There's something empowering about that.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

Songs do write themselves through you; I know people find it hard to believe, but it's true.

There was never an 'a-ha' moment when a spider bit me and I knew I could write songs. For that reason, I don't know if I'm always going to be able to. I want to write songs forever, but it's an elusive thing.

I'm never not in the studio creating; it's like my second home.

You're always thinking about making new music.

It's not that I'm trying to write another '7 Years' or a new version of 'Mama Said.' Songs just kind of come out of nowhere, and you need to catch them when they do.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

I try to write down every song that comes to me, even though I know that every song that comes to me isn't a song that I need to sing.