Sevyn Streeter Quotes

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.

I think that the best way you can get honesty across in your music to connect and relate to people is to be motivated by personal emotions, stories and feelings.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

I can't believe when you write something from within, how many people relate to it.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.

I put my emotions in my music and I want people to relate to that.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

If you have tapped into something that is real for you, chances are you are going to tap into something that is real for someone else.

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.

When I can write a song in a way where I feel like other people can relate to it, and I can take it past being cathartic just for me, that's when I know I can share it. Otherwise, I'd just feel like it's selfish.

Yeah, 'Mine' was inspired by a person, but it became much deeper than that. I obviously pulled lyrics... from stuff I was actually saying to this person and feeling about this person, but it was for people. I didn't want to make that song to impress that girl; I wanted to make that song to make people feel better.

From the beginning, my songwriting was from writing in a journal; it was completely unfiltered. I don't know if I really meant to show everyone this side of me, but when I saw how people resonated to the things I was saying, some of the questions I was asking, I realized I was not alone.

I suppose my job is to describe spaces that are honest to me. And the goal, I suppose, is that the listener can hear themselves in some way in that song and also, in some way, hear me. And so if the listener is able to identify with my honesty then I'm being the most helpful I can possibly be.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

When you do something that's going to speak to people, it's going to be because you're really allowing all of yourself to the table in an accepting way.

Maybe if my songs feel personal, that's very nice. I like that. I take that as a great compliment.

Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.

The songs that you start to write that you are a little scared of can be the ones that you have to tell.

If I found out some gal was trying to steal my guy, I'd want to give her a black eye! Instead, I wrote this song. At the time I was writing each song [on this album], you could figure out the frame of mind I was in by listening closely. With every song I've ever recorded, I'm in it. I wouldn't write about it if I wasn't in it.

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 would feel really dishonest writing a song that was really sassy, or really confident, because I'm not a supremely confident being. I think that's what people find interesting about what I do; it's very different lyrically.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.