20th century Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Times are such that poetry has been slowly drifting away from our songs and the language of conversation is used a lot more as…

— M. Jayachandran

In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could…

— Ryuichi Sakamoto

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

— David Antin

I sought to reform minstrelsy among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which…

— Stephen Foster

I feel like folk music is almost like an old recipe that is passed on from generation to generation.

— Neha Bhasin

Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money…

— Will Sheff

Big, evocative words get thrown around, and people can sing along to passionately as if the lyrics just materialized out of the ether, largely…

— Dan Bejar

I don't know what folk music means anymore, because the meaning of that just keeps changing.

— Angel Olsen

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of…

— Anonymous

I think that anything is a form of folk music. That's just me being glib, but the thing I like the best about humans,…

— Will Sheff

We're not writing songs to solve a cultural problem. The goal for us is to express what we're going through, and it's great if…

— Ben Hopkins

I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know. I think people miss that.

— Dawn Richard