songwriting
I want records to be like newspapers. I’d like them to come out at least once a week, or twice a week. With this song [‘Instant Karma!’], we wrote it in the morning, recorded and re-mixed it and got it out in a week, here and in the States, which was pretty fast and moving. I want it to be like that, you know. I want to be able to put it out as it happens. I write songs about what’s happening to me at that moment and I want it to be out at that moment. I don’t care what name goes on it.
1970 interview with BBC Radio host David Wigg, quoted in The Beatles: Off the Record, by Keith Badman (London: Omnibus Press, 2008), 487.
If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs.
Twitter, Dec 15, 2011
For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school. You learn by listening to tunes, and you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too. You know, and you just do it by picking up the needle and putting it back down and figuring out how these people did this magical thing. It’s like—it’s rather mystifying when you think about songs, where they come from and how they’re born.
Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR, October 31, 2011. [full transcript here]
A song is a prismatic thing, nonlinear. Writing songs, you are looking for rhymes that feel right—things that come to you even as you are singing. They come to you quick-like. Sometimes even in a scatological way. You don’t have time to distill meanings or ideological fallout. You want to make sure that the feeling is there, but you can create feeling out of tone, texture, and phrasing, not only words. You want to make sure that there’s camaraderie between the lyric and the rhythm. That just has to be, or you wouldn’t have much of a song. All that profound meaning stuff—that comes later. And truthfully, that’s for other people to experience. Believe me, the songwriter isn’t thinking of any of those things.
Bob Dylan in Conversation with John Elderfield, Spring 2011
Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. [Tom Waits] believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ’em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.” In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.
“Play It Like Your Hair’s On Fire,” GQ, June 2002.
Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.
Induction speech, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, originally broadcast on Fuse TV, March 20, 2011.
I don’t always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It’s more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It’s closest to the choreography of a bee.
Pitchfork, interview by Amanda Petrusich, posted November 27, 2006.
With most of the songs I’ve ever written, quite honestly, I’ve felt there’s an enormous gap here, waiting to be filled; this song should have been written hundreds of years ago. How did nobody pick up on that little space? Half the time you’re looking for gaps that other people haven’t done. And you say, I don’t believe they’ve missed that fucking hole! It’s so obvious. It was there staring you in the face! I pick out the holes.
Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 304–05.
We sat there in the kitchen and I started to pick away at these chords…. “It is the evening of the day.” I might have written that. “I sit and watch the children play,” I certainly wouldn’t have come up with that. We had two lines and an interesting chord sequence, and then something else took over somewhere in this process. I don’t want to say mystical, but you can’t put your finger on it. Once you’ve got that idea, the rest of it will come. It’s like you’ve planted a seed, then you water it a bit and suddenly it sticks up out of the ground and goes, hey, look at me.
Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 142–43.
I used to have a few girlfriends in Chastilian Road days, though it was purely platonic at the time. I always remember one gave me a kiss. We were about six or seven. “But keep it dark,” she said. I still haven’t written that song. Chicks are always miles ahead. Keep it dark!
Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 32.