The song ‚Innocent‘ is a song that I wrote about something that really, really emotionally impacted me.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It’s all authentic.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

When I was writing the Destiny’s Child songs, it was a big thing to be that young and taking control. And the label at the time didn’t know that we were going to be that successful, so they gave us all control. And I got used to it.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called ‚Fingers Crossed,‘ which is on SoundCloud.

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

I wrote a song with Ed Sheeran that was kind of spontaneous.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

If danger arises in the present moment, there may be an emotion. There may even be pain. But that’s a challenge, not a problem. For a problem to exist, you need time and repetitive mind activity.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I write music every day.

Songwriters, you have to work – you have to wait for residuals. You have to pray that the song’s going to be a hit. And then a year later, you might get a check.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

When I’m stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

Writing a song is so personal. You have to have trust in someone you’re working with; otherwise, you’re not gonna come out with something that’s really you.

I’m a serious aficionada of country music – Reba McEntire, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry. I’ve even written some songs. They haven’t done anything of mine yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

I still have my first paycheck. It was just, I think, a dollar or two that I got when I started as a songwriter with BMI, and I had some songs there that I had through the company, and in the mail I got this big old check for, like, a dollar and a half or something. Somebody had recorded one of my songs.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

Most of my songs have names of people I’ve met or are dear to me. There are people who have privacy issues and about people knowing about their private life. But for me, I like to include few special names and few details about them to make the song very special to me.

I really learned to sing in church, I think, really with emotion.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I’ll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I’ve written a whole song in an hour.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written… Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn’t have much of a social life going on.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There’s no tricks. It’s honesty with big melodies.

Lyrics are so important, but they’re really underrated.