I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

I just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.

We'd been noticing how much more important the internet had become - once information is out there in the world now, anyone can get it. Since that was beginning to happen with the record anyway, we figured, OK, let's just stream it for free ourselves.

We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

I don't believe every download is a lost sale.

Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

Even the most dismal and hopeless-sounding Wilco music, to my ears, has always maintained a level of hope and consolation.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.

I always think I don't have any songs, I don't have anything I'm working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I'm thinking about. It's just kind of second nature.

I didn't want to admit that I was falling into a cliche.

I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.

I don't think you can be good in life without acknowledging the part of you that isn't good.

I guess I don't think there's any reason to feel guilty about having joy in your life, regardless of how bad things are in the world.

I have always thought it was important to maintain some connection for myself to what it takes to make a song work by myself, to put a song across to an audience by myself.

I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.

I think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not.

I was never at my best when I was at my worst. When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren't healthy.

I've been buying instruments and musical gear for a long time.

I've been obsessed with seeing life through music. My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.

Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

You obviously don't really forget how to play the old songs; you just don't have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you've already written and chords you've already played.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?

If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, ya know.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot.

Peace Train is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions of human beings.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Listen kid, take my advice, never hate a song that has sold half a million copies.

There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.

I do not mind having written the song at all. I just wish that I had written it in a different key, as the high d is hard to play. I am glad that I wrote something that brought joy to millions of people.

It's like, it's up to the people to fall in love with the song. The record company can only do so much.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

I guess you could write a good song if your heart hadn't been broken, but I don't know of anyone whose heart hasn't been broken.

A song has to become as much a part of you as a tailored suit.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

In an age of incompetence, I've been able to last in this crazy business. I actually know how to play my ax and write a song. That's my job.

The only thing that's a little tricky about it is sometimes people assume that if it's a new song, it's a reflection of what you're feeling or going through now.