Gillian Welch Quotes

All of a sudden there's a song - there in your hotel room playing your guitar - and you write it, and two or three years later it will come true. It keeps you on your toes.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

I think that the song, the song "Stand By Me" is one of those songs that... and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about? It's something that, songwriters just write songs. It's like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It's not, it's not about how many of these painting I'll sell it's just how they feel at the moment. And that's how I wrote "Stand By Me".

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.

There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

It's funny when you write a song - it's easy for me now - but there's almost a second stage where you take control of the song. You start writing it, and if you're not careful, it just finishes itself and it might not be what you wanted. It's very strange, it takes over itself. It has its own life.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

I think the way I write is kind of naturally rhythmic. If there's anything of my own in my writing, I think that's my own thing. Like when I start a song, I almost hear the rhythm more than the melody.

I don't really know what emotions are going to come out in songs when I'm writing them until I step back and listen to them as a whole.

So when I wrote 'Down' - when I sang the melody, I sung the word 'Down' for no reason. I don't know why. That's how I came up with the medley. I was like, 'I don't know why I said down, but we got to write a song around it.'

The fate of a song is often established in the first 15 minutes of writing.

I don't find the songs; they find me. I just strum my guitar and wait for a lyric to come.

I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.

Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of songs from my head. A lot of times a melody will just occur to me and be my companion for a couple of months.

A lot of my songs, they're like puzzle pieces, and there's just one way to put them together. You could, if you needed to, get the scissors out and cut up things to make them work. But I don't want to do that.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

There's only one proper way a song should go, but you've got to be patient enough to let them come together time wise. Sometimes it's lightning in a bottle and you got the song. But oftentimes it shows up.

This is the city that taught me how to write all of these cool songs. Yeah, you guys definitely need a royalty.

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

Whenever I have a bunch of tunes written, I always find a kind of uniform that accompanies the songs.

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

I've been writing a lot of songs in twos, songs that are like twins in my mind.