Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed.
Interpretation
Songwriting serves as a cathartic expression for artists to release their inner struggles and emotions.
In this quote, John Lennon likens the process of songwriting to an exorcism of personal demons. He suggests that creating music is a powerful and almost supernatural experience, allowing him to channel intense emotions, thoughts, and conflicts in a way that is both liberating and transformative.
In practice
During a workshop on songwriting, this quote could be shared to illustrate the emotional depth music can provide.
When I get older losing my hair many years from now. Will you still be sending me a Valentine. Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? If I'd been out till quarter to three would you lock the door? Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?
The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something.
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.
I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.
I never think about themes. I let the music create itself. I like it to be a potpourri of all kinds of sounds, all kinds of colors, something for everybody, from the farmer in Ireland to the lady who scrubs toilets in Harlem.
In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
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