I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
When you're looking for good lyrics, you turn to Kendrick Lamar, you turn to J Cole, you turn to Wale, you turn to Chance the Rapper, you turn to Rapsody. You don't turn to Post Malone.
MCs are authors, and rock musicians who write lyrics are authors, to a degree.
I think, in reading a few sentences of text, you can just tell the tone, and that's something I love in prose writers but in lyricists as well.
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.
A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.
I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.
When it comes to writers and poets, for me it's Vinicius de Moraes. He's one of the greatest lyricists ever.
Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire 'troubadours.' I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L'Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.
If you had asked me, in the days of me dreaming about what would happen in the future, who I would want to write my first original musical, it would hands-down have been Pasek and Paul.
I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.
If you look at most of our roster, we've got great singer/songwriters. I'm always attracted to that.
I'm not really a comparison dude. Even when people say 'Big or Pac?,' because they're two totally different types of lyricists.
Before the Beatles, songwriters were very anonymous people and nobody paid any attention to them.
I've always done music with so-called thug- or gangster-type lyricists. I've always been associated with that because I'm from the West Coast.
The Songwriters Hall of fame, that's the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.
[Jeffrey Lewis is] The best lyricist working in the US today.
As a songwriter, I was influenced by David Bowie - a great writer. A class above everybody in so many ways. Lennon and McCartney, of course. Class stuff. David Cousins was my favorite lyricist.
Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.
Composers and lyricists are making songs that are approved by the producers and directors.
Lyricists play with words.
The best rappers I know are, like, air-conditioner men.
[Composers] Mark [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] are unreal.
Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated.
When I came into films, I found a vacuum in the field of lyricists, writers and composers.
