Lyric Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Lyric Quotes from famous persons: Maren Morris, Billy Collins, Al Madrigal, Seamus Heaney, Craig David. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Lyric Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

1

I'm not trying to dog any artist or genre, but to me, t

I’m not trying to dog any artist or genre, but to me, there is a lot of diversity missing from the radio. I miss turning the radio on and getting punched in the soul with a great lyric.

2

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, ‘Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.’

3

My daughter, who is 7 years old – I have no idea where she learned this – she made a video where she’s beat-boxing. We have no idea where the beat-boxing came from, but all of a sudden, there it was. Now we’re launched into lyric sheets for every single song that is current. They’re all over our house.

4

Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

5

When I write a song, I get the melody right first, and then hopefully I can back it up with a lyric that has to respect the melody.

6

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

7

I’ve learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

8

I was an usher at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith. You had to watch whatever play they had on 40 times.

9

Pronouns really don’t matter in a song – ‘I’ or ‘he‘ or ‘she’ or even subscribing a lyric to an inanimate object.

10

I was the lead singer in a lot of the bands I was in. You have to be comfortable. You gotta get up there and sell the song. You have to get up there and sell the lyric. You gotta be able to feel it.

11

It’s not only about the rap lyric. Today, people are buying you as a person.

Theophilus London

12

I still get a little nervous before performing. You don’t want to forget a lyric; you don’t want to make a mistake. I still get butterflies. You can try to judge an audience, but you can only really judge things by the applause.

13

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

Lou Rawls

14

I just love doing radio. I’ve learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I’ve been through books and writing lyrics. It’s a different type of experience where, if I’m writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

15

I have a card catalogue in my brain of every lyric of every sappy love song ever written.

16

Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.

17

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Salvatore Quasimodo

18

George had performed musical alchemy, distilling the essence of Christmas into music. Adding a lyric which told the tale of betrayed love was a masterstroke and, as he did so often, he touched hearts.

Andrew Ridgeley

19

Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that’s what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people’s experiences, to make them feel heard.

20

Even if I’m writing music, it’s with a lyric in mind, to communicate some kind of feeling.

21

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

22

Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.

Genesis P-Orridge

23

Sometimes I hold back from tweeting certain things. Sometimes you’re emotional, and you want to tweet a lyric or whatever it may be. I can’t do that because if I do, it’s, ‘Oh, this means this and that she must be going through this…’ It’s like, what the hell?

24

Great music is just very clear. Sonically and lyrically, you understand the point of view, you understand the melodies, you understand the vibe, and you understand the lyric pretty damn quickly. To me, that doesn’t make it ‘less than’ – it makes it ‘more than.’

25

My chutzpah was me singing to Mario Lanza. So Mario looked at me after I talk-sang ‘Be My Love’ for the first time; he took the lyric out of my hand as contemptuously as you can take a lyric out of someone‘s hand, and he sang ‘Be My Love’ back at me.

Sammy Cahn

26

How can a song all about struggling with the afterglow of fame thrust someone into fame? How can a lyric like, ‘I’m just a singer who already blew his shot,’ give a singer another shot? I don’t know… but it’s funny.

27

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

28

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

29

I have never been able to remember the number of my driver‘s license, and there have been times when I couldn’t even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.

30

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Eugenio Montale

31

The name Dirtee Stank came from a lyric I had when I was 17 or 16. Lyrical tank, like my name was Frank, going on dirty, going on stank. It sounded like a good name!

32

I usually start with a lyric or a melody and then build a song around that.

33

‘The Ways of a Woman in Love’ is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl’s house and wishing he was the one in her arms.

34

I always take notes on my phone of lyric ideas.

Benee

35

I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.

36

As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that’s what I do, too.

37

It helped my lyric writing so much studying poetry. I thought I knew what poetry was before I immersed myself in it. Poetry is meditative. It’s reflective.

38

I said if a woman sings an aggressive guy‘s lyric, it can’t miss.

39

We have such fantastic talent in India, and there are some great Marathi singers, great sound producers, great sound engineers, and a great breed of lyric writers. But the problem is that you need a platform.

40

You know, when I did ‘American Idol‘ the three times, I tried to tell these kids you have to tell the story of the lyric.

41

In those days, it didn’t take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

Phil Harris

42

I’d rather sing a good lyric written by someone else than one of my own that is terrible.

Vanessa Paradis

43

I’m always creating. Whether I’m writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I’m doing something.

44

There is an actor‘s responsibility in presenting the emotional content of the lyrics to an audience. But whether you do that in a straightforward fashion or an ironic fashion or a blase fashion is all about opportunities, and singers are missing opportunities as artists if they don’t pay attention to the lyric.

45

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it’s a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography – Apollinaire’s ‘Calligrammes,’ that sort of thing.

46

At first, I was using my sister Susan‘s lyrics, as I could not write myself, only the music. And then one day, she and I had a fight, and she threatened to take away the lyrics from all the songs that I put the lyrics to, so it was that day that I began writing my first lyric to the music.

47

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I’ve written.

Amy Ray

48

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

Claudia Rankine

49

Some of the songs on the radio are really outrageous. I listen to the lyric. If the lyric doesn’t make sense, I don’t like the song.

Johnny Van Zant

50

When I’m performing, sometimes a lyric will touch on my personal life, and it can be difficult to sing. For instance, when I sing ‘How I Love You,’ I’ll choke up.

Engelbert Humperdinck

51

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.

Hal David

52

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

Stephen Sondheim

53

I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I’ll be in the shower, and I’ll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I’ll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.

Eliza Doolittle

54

It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.

Lou Gramm

55

When I’m writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.

56

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.

Dinah Shore

57

A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be – with the right vocal cords – brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.

58

Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.

59

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It’s the music.

Robin Coste Lewis

60

Ladies love a soppy lyric. There’s a real winner in ‘Carry You Home.’

61

After using four different languages on an album, it’s tough to decide which one I’m gonna actually learn to speak. I always study the lyric, make sure I know what I’m singing, and try to get the pronunciation as perfect as possible.

62

Sometimes I’ll be driving and a lyric will come into my head, and I will have to pull over and record it on my phone.

63

Lyric helps invoke the core person. And, without lyric, it is difficult to touch the core. Lyrical music is the music of India.

Dayananda Saraswati

64

I want to suggest a feeling. It’s ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.

Danielle Dax

65

When I write a song, that process is sort of entwined with a lyric or a chord progression that suits the vibe, and that’ll work off each other.

Michelle Zauner

66

A lot of times when I’m performing a song, it tends to take me back to where I was psychologically as the lyric was being written.

67

Every night we all felt grateful to be there, stunned at the amount of people that are there, and stunned at their reactions. They go crazy; they know every lyric from eight years of age to eighty. It’s unbelievable.

68

When I say a spoken Hebrew sentence, half of it is like the King James Bible and half of it is a hip-hop lyric. It has a roller-coaster effect.

69

Really, music is what I’m interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing.

Adam Schlesinger

70

Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

Carole King

71

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man’s expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

Salvatore Quasimodo

72

I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I’ll just record it there and then.

73

No matter what road I take, I can never get too far away from the conscious lyric and the socially conscious content.

Raheem DeVaughn

74

I’m not saying everybody has a social responsibility of what art they create, but art should be open-ended. I just feel there’s a lack of consciousness and understanding of impact and reach. Just maybe, for a second, just think of the effect you could have with a lyric.

75

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on ‘Pretty Hate Machine,’ came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

76

You know when you hear a lyric and you can tell that the person means it? That is really hard; that is so much harder than it seems: to find the topics that you’re passionate about and have it come across as like, ‘Yeah, that guy needed to sing that song.’

77

I don’t really get shaken very much. People could heckle me, a spotlight could go out, I could forget a lyric… I’m not operating on somebody’s brain, you know what I mean? So I just think it’s all funny.

Harry Connick, Jr.

78

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

Fernand Leger

79

There are some songs where I’ll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That’s not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.

Tim Finn

80

I understand that transposing a song a half step can effect the believability of a lyric.

81

In my fiction, there’s a lot that’s borrowed from music. It’s never like I’m taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. ‘The Boy Detective Fails‘ was like listening to ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

Joe Meno

82

What I love is when I play gigs, it’s just me and a guitar – very simple, very direct and intimate, and you hear every lyric, and you hear every detail.

83

I’ve wanted to do a Christmas song for years but thought every lyric and melody had been written.

84

He doesn’t make it so complicated but just really allows the lyric to come through even though there’s a lot of production going on. I think that’s the key and that’s the magic, it’s making sure that people could still connect with the lyrics while they’re on the dance floor.

85

I grew up the biggest fan of the Cure. Knew every lyric, had every album, B-side, single, poster, everything. Then cut to fifteen years later, and we’re working on songs together. Ridiculous.

86

I can’t bear a trite lyric: sometimes this can be overlooked, but rarely.

Liza Tarbuck

87

I have a lyric journal that I write in a lot. When I’m going to play, I just sit down and have my books with me and my notes and tapes and whatever I need to refer to. I just play and try different things. It’s a kind of discipline.

Amy Ray

88

Singing for me has always been a joyous but private pleasure that connects me in a lyric thread to my beloved grandmother Alice.

89

What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.

90

Music is creation. In reggae the lyric, the music itself, arrangement, that vibe, such melody – everything within the music moves the people, understand?

91

For me, whenever I choose a song to sing, it’s about the lyric first.

92

I don’t really love to perform in music. Some people like it more, but it’s not my thing so much, but just the writing, when you get the lyric, and the lyric just goes just the right way, or you find the right bridge that takes you to the solo, and those moments are tremendous, and it’s difficult to portray.

93

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics – maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it’s much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.

Adam Schlesinger

94

Everything that Traffic ever did, I’d give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically.

Jim Capaldi

95

The title song of David Bowie‘s ‘Young Americans’ is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.

96

That’s one of the reasons I got into country music: because of the craft of that lyric and how much you could put into three minutes.

97

The most amazing thing is being onstage and watching the audience sing every song lyric for lyric.

98

There’s been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it’s used as a joke – isn’t it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

99

The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and ’30s, ’40s and early ’50s were written by veterans – mostly men who’d had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven‘t really lived life?

Rudy Vallee

100

The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

James Broughton

101

Growing up, I was listening to a ton of Motown music, Otis Redding, Aretha, and then there was the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. These were all people that I felt as though they truly felt every single lyric they said, and they weren’t afraid of imperfection.

102

Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.

Malcolm Mclaren

103

I’m not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that’s more what entertainment and music should be.

104

I’m a real stickler for a great lyric, or what I think is a great lyric. It’s almost impossible for me to sing a song I don’t love. My thing is: If it’s a great lyric, you can do anything with the song.

105

I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?

Jim Capaldi

106

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

107

I am never without my lyric book. If anything inspirational happens, I have it there so nothing‘s forgotten.

Gabrielle Aplin

108

I just want people to listen to the music and get something from it, whatever it may be. Whether it’s a catchy lyric or a whole situation.

109

My mum was no pushy parent. She would drop me off for auditions when I was in my teens at the Lyric Theatre, then give me my bus fare and say she would see me later at home. She wasn’t hanging around in the wings geeing me on. I had to do it on my own; it was up to me.

110

‘Check Yes Or No’ is a song that I reference in ”90s Country.’ George Strait had a very crafty lyric: it tells a story then comes back around. Never gets old.

111

For me, music always leads. Lyrics are only about how they sing. It is wonderful if they read well, too. In the very best scenario, sometimes a lyric will pop out with a melody, simultaneously. That’s a lovely thing, but you can’t rely on that.

112

It’s very rare – and it does happen on occasion – where I’ll take a piece of lyric and I’ll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

113

I write a lyric, but when I reread it, I think it’s awful and either hide it or crumple it up.

Tiffany Darwish

114

Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.

Terence Trent D’Arby

115

I’m a lyric man – I’m always looking for meaningful songs.

116

I’m conflicted about the lyric tattoo thing. I feel like that’s a lifetime decision, and I always feel like, ‘I hope you don’t regret this a couple years from now when you get tired of that song.’

117

But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.

Caroline Polachek

118

What makes a great song – you don’t put it into words. You feel it. The perfect lyric. The perfect melody. It makes you feel something.

119

It must have been when I was 14 or 15 that I started tentatively writing songs and was able to convey an emotion and a lyric with what I wanted to say.

120

When the student has her voice under complete control, it is safe to take up the lyric repertoire of Mendelssohn, Old English Songs, etc. How simple and charming they are!

Alma Gluck

121

In our hands, even the straightest lyric sounded shady.

122

There can be no proof that Blake‘s lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

John Drinkwater