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Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.

Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.

A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

When there are no lyrics, people can picture what they want. It's a reflection of where they are in their lives. Music becomes a mirror.

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.