Song Length Quotes

I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.

We are really in a rut with the three-minute song. You know where it's going to go. If you're trying to get your message across sometimes it's wise to say, Why don't we stop here and have a moment of silence, then go in a completely different direction?

I've never worried about how long the song is.

All these different groups of people that are put right in the path of billions of dollars of American tax payers' money. If I had enough time I could have named all of those people [in the song], too! The song would have been 400 minutes long.

It was just the next logical step from making succinct pop songs. What do you do after that? You make pop songs that are longer and more epic, that push the envelope. Imagine your favourite song, or something that you play over and over in the car, except that you don't have to start it over as much.

If you thought Stairway to Heaven was a long song, dear god you should listen to it played on a lute.

When I put out 'Video Games' in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

If a piece of music is under three minutes long, it's rock. Over three minutes, it's classical.

My favorite period is when we lived in the land of the three-minute song. The Motown thing - I thought they were genius in knowing that's as much as a listener can take.

In the early days, Porter Wagoner would not exactly scold me, but he's say, 'You're writing too many damn verses. You're makin' these songs too damn long.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, but I'm tellin' a story. I have a story to tell.' And he'd say, 'Well, you're not going to get it on the radio.' If I start writing a song, I'm writing it for a reason. People would say that I had to have two verses, and a chorus, and a bridge. I tried to learn that formula.

Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

Interestingly, songs used to be short, then they became longer, and now they're getting shorter.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

'Close To The Edge,' we actually had played it from beginning to end before we recorded it in the studio. So we knew how long it was, and we knew it would fit on the album fine, so we didn't do any editing.

Songs being nine to 10 minutes long? Everyone is scared to to do it.

Lately I've been falling asleep listening to 'Common One' by Van Morrison, specifically the song 'Summertime in England.' It's 15 minutes long, so to make it through the entire song is a real task unto itself, but Van has that emotional payoff that makes even his most tiresome songs more powerful than most people's entire catalog.

Songs used to be short, then they became longer, and now they're getting shorter. But otherwise, music is about a beat and a message. If the beat gets to the audience, and the message touches them, you've got a hit.

It does make sense to put on some songs that are relatively short, because radio usually only plays songs that are less than 4 or 5 minutes.

If a song is longer than three and a half minutes, it'll need something to keep you entertained.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.

We were interested in this notion of compression- a lot of the songs were really short so that you'd absorb them in memory rather than when you're actually hearing them.

There was this discussion to know how long the human ear was really receptive to the music. A 74 minute CD is too long. We thought about making two CDs, 35 minutes each... But the songs need to breathe.

That's one of the reasons I got into country music: because of the craft of that lyric and how much you could put into three minutes.

I don't have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.