Quotes About Expression

I think that may be the highest purpose of any work of art, to inspire someone else to save themselves through art. Creating creates creators.

search for "Rich Kelly & Friendship" and "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." Then watch it. In its entirety. But if you're in a hurry, fast-forward to the 1:35 mark, when the bassist breaks into a happy foot solo.

Music isn't a loaf of bread.

Melody is king. Songs are ruled by melody. I believe that melody, more than lyrics, is what does all the heavy lifting emotionally. When I write lyrics, or when I adapt a poem to a song, my goal is to interfere as little as possible with whatever spell is being cast by the melody. At the same time, I hope, at best, that the words enhance the song somehow, add meaning or clarify and underline what the melody is making me feel.

I became a songwriter not when I composed that perfect couplet, or experienced the right amount of pain. It's when I realized that whatever I wrote, even if it meant gutting myself in front of strangers, letting all those raw emotions come flooding out, making a fool of myself with my own words, was exactly what I always wanted to do with my life.

No work of art is ever finished; it can only be abandoned in an interesting place.

That's not the same sound someone else is going to make. We discount that as something we're supposed to measure against other people's imaginations, and that's a squandered gift.

I believe that poetry came into existence because people needed it—if it were easy to write down and record things without poetry, we wouldn't have needed poetry. But for some reason we did.

Don't we want more than anything to make something that reflects who we are and how we feel honestly enough that someone else might feel seen or acknowledged, and less alone?

The creative state is the most important part. None of it means anything if you're not excited by the discovery of what you're making.

if you allow yourself the time and willingness to experiment, you will hear something that you want to keep. Or hear something that reminds you of something else. Songwriters are just people who have claimed those things—who give themselves credit. Who say they invented rock and roll. And you can do it, too. You just invented a song. You just invented music.

showing up with a reliably open heart and a will to share whatever spirit you can muster is what resonates and transcends technical perfection.

Stockpiling Words, Language, and Lyrics—doing exercises like freewriting, writing poems, refining, and revising, all of which I'll talk about in the next section Stockpiling Music, Songs, and Parts of Songs—making demo recordings, practicing, learning other people's songs, and writing parts for songs in progress Pairing Words and Music—writing lyrics to a melody and searching for matches between stockpiled demos and lyric sets, poems, and freewriting

Being willing to sound bad is one of the most important pieces of advice that I can give you. Writing a song will teach you that it's OK to fail. And more than that, that it's actually good to fail, and that you can come to appreciate the gifts of failure.

In the end, learning how to write songs is, in large part, about teaching yourself to fail and being OK with it. But it's also about searching for, finding, and sharing some truth.

What you make of the song or what the world will make of it is of little concern when contrasted with the joy that I've talked about many times now—the joy of disappearing long enough to find something you didn't know you had inside you.

take the final necessary steps—arranging and recording—needed to dress my songs up enough to send them out into the world.

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.

Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don't use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what'll happen.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

And so I wept my story into the ocean and the ocean received it.

Renaissance artist Gregorio Comanini, has counseled the equivalent of "Live an ordinary, regular life so you can be irregular and brilliant in your creativity.