I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.
What has worked before is never as good as something that has never been tried before, even if it doesn't work.
We as songwriters are in the same position as a professional fisherman. Our fishing grounds are kind of fished out.
The people who are making money are the ones who are writing and singing their own songs.
Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. . . . Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.
Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.
I gave my heart to Jesus when I was five-years-old and since then it's been a special relationship. To me it's not a religion; it's just talking to God, reading his word, and doing my best to honor him in everything I do.
Here honor binds me, and I wish to satisfy it.
Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.