Storytelling Through Music Quotes

It's easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Cry Baby is a character so I think that the next album is going to be about a specific thing in her life or another place in her world. It's going to be a bit deeper into a bigger picture.

Be serious. Folk songs are serious. That's what Pete Seeger told me. 'Arlo, I only wanna tell you one thing. Folk songs are serious.' And I said, 'Right.'

Most of the time, the songs have jokes in them, little sarcastic things, or purposely kitsch or something. So that's going along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of stuff and laughing at stuff that's serious. And sometimes it's a good idea to put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's all right just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them.

Songs are like movies to me, and so you put yourself in the movie. You become a character in the movie. The new ones are exciting because they're fresh. But if it's not that, if the story is not what you get into, maybe it's the crowd response. You hit the first chords of 'She's In Love With The Boy' and 20,000 people start to scream, you're pretty motivated. You get what you need. And it's a great story. It works.

So like what I want to do is connect all of my albums and make it tell a bigger kind of story. So the first album is very focused on her family life and her love life.

I'm lyric conscious. I like to tell stories, give advice. Instead of writing a 'Dear Abby' column, I do it on records.

I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.

I've seen music and songs used in stories, and while sometimes it works really well, often it doesn't.

The first album is the prelude to the full story of Luke James. It establishes me as an artist you can look forward to.

'Pain' is more indicative of what I like to do. I'm lyric-conscious. I like to tell stories, give advice. Instead of writing a 'Dear Abby' column, I do it on records.

I have a memory of listening to Tracy Chapman and just being intrigued by her voice. Even as a young girl, I wanted to know more about her and her story. I felt I was learning about her through her music. That was a revelation to me.

There's just something creatively fulfilling about watching a movie and writing a song for it because it helps you put on another pair of shoes.

All blues singers are great liars.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

When you make music, you're in really direct contact with your fans out there, so you hear all kinds of stories.

I'm playing my father's music and I'm a fan of Led Zeppelin. The response has been beyond what I ever imagined it would be. Unreal. Everyone seems to understand the story I'm telling.

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

A road-wise folkie with a bluesy soul reminiscent of early Michelle Shocked, Melissa Crabtree is an original storyteller and performer not to be missed.

I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.

I think the nature of songwriters is that they are philosophers, and philosophers have a bent towards poetry and songwriting, so I think that the two run around together. The nature of a songwriter could be philosophical. Looking for universal ideas, a way to say things, get the story across as a means of entertaining, provoking thought.

We made the song a big part of the story [Sausage Party ] itself, in that it's kind of their prayer that they say every morning, because we found that just to have an arbitrary song felt too unrealistic within the reality of our talking food movie.

I think Americana music is music that is generally more singer/songwriter oriented. It has more to do with the songwriting. The music, it's more like stories set to music.

When we see Rey, we want to hear Rey's theme, and when the Force is referred to or felt, we want to hear the Force theme, and so on. We hope that these references make sense to the fans and make the aural connections that we want them to have.

I think that the next album is specifically for sure from Cry Baby's perspective, but it's not necessarily about her family-life or her love-life, or anything like that, it's more about this place in this town. The place has different characters in there, so in every song there's gonna be different characters that appear.