If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.
I don't think Neil Young has a beautiful voice, but it's something that grabs you, and the songs are so good.
Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!
There's a lot of personal stuff that can go into songwriting but there's also a lot of dramatization and fictionalization. You have to do that to make a good song.
They tell me I produced songs. I just stood in the back, wore a good suit and said, Yeah, that's happening.
So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work.
'Free Fallin' is a very good song. Maybe it would be one of my favorites if it hadn't become this huge anthem. But I'm grateful that people like it.
It was that famous joke: What's the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? 'Hey, I wrote a song.'
If a song is funny and absurd, and it sounds great, it's just going to be that much funnier. And there's no better example of that than 'Monty Python.'
I was in a movie with Angelina Jolie called 'Life Or Something Like It' where I played her fiance, and I have a song in there.
I try to write relevant songs about life and whatever I'm going through and whatever people are going through.
Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.
I've always written songs, even when I wasn't doing anything with my personal life in music.
My life's far too complicated to be summed up in one song. It would take 20 just to represent one single day.
The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.
In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics.
I don't want to scream 'Immigrant Song' every night for the rest of my life, and I'm not sure I could.
Throughout my life I have cared as deeply about the songs of all peoples as I have about the rights of all peoples.
All we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It's part of learning the craft.
That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together - for me to play bass and for him to play guitar.
We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.
