Some Quotes...

I've been reading a book called "Songwriters on Songwriting", by Paul Zollo. It is a compilation of interviews of 52 famous songwriters including Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger and a bunch of others. It is filled with lots of really interesting quotes from the various songwriters. I am only about 100 pages into it, but here are a few of my favorites:

From Pete Seeger:
"The commercial people seem to have the Midas touch. Only not everything turns to gold; it often turns to garbage. And gold is a rather unsatisfactory thing to live by. People need food and love. They don't need gold."

"As a matter of fact, I'm convinced that musicians have got a more important role to play in putting a world together than they're usually given credit for. Because musicians can teach the politicians: not everybody has to sing the melody."

"Cezanne painted a red barn by painting it ten shades of color: purple to yellow. And he got a red barn. Similarly, a poet will describe things many different ways, circling around it, to get at the truth."

"I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically."


From Willie Dixon:
"In fact, all blues are happy. All blues are the facts. The facts, whether they're good or bad, are the truth. Most people can't understand that. Of course, they've been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be fact, or it wouldn't be blues."

"And when he goes to seek the roots of American music, he's gonna find the blues. These are the roots. And from these roots come the fruits. And the fruits are the music."

"That's a fact of life too, you know. The world has made everything else and still it can't make peace. And the reason it can't make peace is because of the evil, ignorance and stupidity. I have songs that explain these facts. And that's the blues."


From Bob Dylan:
"There's two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there's good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don't mean anything, they're just pulling you around, too. It's important to get rid of all them thoughts."

"The melodies in my mind are very simple, they're very simple, and they're just based on music we've all heard growing up. That and music which went beyond that, which went back further, Elizabethan ballads and whatnot."

"No. They've got enough. They've got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares...Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story. But as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it. If you see me do it, any idiot could do it. It's just not that difficult of a thing. Everybody writes a song just like everybody's got that one great novel in them."

"Poets don't drive cars. Poets don't go to the supermarket. Poets don't empty the garbage. Poets aren't on the PTA. Poets, you know, they don't go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don't...poets don't even speak on the telephone. Poets don't even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and...and usually, they know why they're poets.
Yeah, there are...What can you say? The world don't need anymore poems, it's got Shakespeare. There's enough of everything. You name it, there's enough of it. There was too much of it with electricity, maybe, some people said that. Some people said the lightblub was going too far.
Poets live on the land, They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code. And die broke or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings."

"Do you play jazz? It never hurts to learn as many kinds of chords as you can. All kinds."

"On the piano, my favorite keys are the black keys. And they sound better on guitar, too."

"Yeah, because anything you do in A, it's going to be a different song in G. While you're writing it anyway. There's too many wide passing notes in G (on the guitar) not to influence your writing, unless you're playing barre chords."

"There's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after."

"Your life doesn't have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That's why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So you can truly write about it from the outside."

"Still staying in the unconscious of your mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way."

"Well, my songs aren't written on a schedule like that. In My mind it's never really been seriously a profession...It's been more confessional than professional...Then again, everybody's in it for a different reason."

"In America, there is a lot of repression. A lot of people who are repressed. They'd like to get out of town, they just don't know how to do it. And so it holds back creativity. It's like you go somewhere and you can't help but feel it. Or people even tell it to you, you know?"


JE