In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be; Where all the noises, that on peace intrude, Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee, Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
When the songs of your heart start singing, you should listen...for its harmony will bring you happiness and the melody is the voice of your true spirit.
I start with a comprehensive list of all the recent songs that have been big hits - and then I go down that list and see if I can come up with funny ideas for them. I can always come up with ideas, but not necessarily good ones!
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.
That was the first sound in the song of love!
Scarce more than silence is, and yet a sound.
Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings
Of that mysterious instrument, the soul,
And play the prelude of our fate. We hear
The voice prophetic, and are not alone.
If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."
In country and R&B, there's much more of that division between writers and performers, and that's where you see more of those [crossover] songs, but you don't get a lot of that coming out of the more pop and rock side of things.
Recently I danced in a video spoof of the song 'Gangnam Style,' and it was quickly banned across multiple Chinese online video platforms. But the story still traveled all over the world, carried in hundreds of international media reports.
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.
[Scottish songs] are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.
Do you know out of what the German Empire arose? Out of dreams, songs, fantasies and black-red-gold ribbons? Bismarck merely shook the tree that fantasies had planted.