Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."
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.
I carry two traditional pipes and I sing my songs and pray that us as human beings treat each other with respect. So when it came to trying to portray a connection on screen, that's what you see.
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.
There's just enough drinking and cheating songs around without me adding to them. Unless you've got something better than "Misery and Gin" by Merle Haggard, you're beating a dead horse.
When someone says that I'm angry it's actually a compliment. I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I'd write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman.
I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.
You would never hear any song played twice in the same way. The words were retained, but within a certain frame there was great latitude, and the musician could improvise to his heart's content; and the more the variations and combinations, the greater the musician.
Not any specific one, but I was a huge fan of Frank Jacobs, I guess he wrote the plurality of the song parodies for MAD, Sam Hart, a few others, but that was also where I was first exposed to the art form of song parodies.
Being is so significant that it is irreplaceable. You are just yourself. Do something that comes out of you - not to assert, but to express! Sing your song, dance your dance, rejoice in being whatever nature has chosen you to be.
A message came from my youth of vanished days, saying, 'I wait for you among the quivering of unborn May, where smiles ripen for tears and hours ache with songs unsung.' It says, 'Come to me across the worn-out track of age, through the gates of death. For dreams fade, hopes fail, the fathered fruits of the year decay, but I am the eternal truth, and you shall meet me again and again in your voyage of life from shore to shore.
We've always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we're not a band with big songs.
I do original songs in the style of other artists, where I try to learn all their musical idiosyncrasies and try to do something that sounds like them and yet is a bit more sick and twisted.
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.
The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.