I started writting songs when I was really little because there were things I could say through songs that I couldn't verbalize any other way. Writting was something I had to do.
There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head could carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked old wild sea-songs, minding nobody... Often I have heard the house shaking with Yo-ho-ho and a bottle and rum, all the neighbours joining in for dear life with the fear of death upon them and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. Fiften men on the dead man's chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done for the rest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart….. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house….. But the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house; I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
I've always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody and I am there to provide the lyrics. You want the lyrics to match the melody, because if you are composing a song or recording a song, it's cacophonous if they don't match.
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Anyone who's got a guitar, you like to pick it up. I can play a couple of songs, some '50s rock and roll, a bit of Elvis. That's it, really - I'm not a musician, I'm not a singer.
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love; Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.
We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.