Lyric inspiration : listening in to others’ loves, hates, wishes, feelings | Derek Sivers

Lyric inspiration : listening in to others’ loves, hates, wishes, feelings

April 30th, 2008

Check out twistori.com. Click one of the big words on the left, then sit and watch it for a while.

It’s monitoring the public feed of thoughts people post to their twitter account, searching for occurences of “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I feel”, “I wish”, etc.

Anonymous and candid, and really inspiring for lyric writing!

Read the 19 Comments »

© 2008 Derek Sivers. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

19 Responses to “Lyric inspiration : listening in to others’ loves, hates, wishes, feelings”

Valerie wrote on April 30th, 2008
If you can say

I love – You are very lucky to feel passionate about something

I hate – You probably need to save yourself more. Hate is very self exausting

I think – hopefully a lot of times

I feel – Something that we cannot have control over

I wish – Get over it!? figure out what you should do now?!

I watch people on the way to work. They are listening to music from their mp3 players. Nobody talks to each other. Yet we surf random blogs, upload pictures on flickr and become ‘friends’ on myspace and facebook. Are we becoming more comfortable meeting people in cyber space than meeting people at cafes?
When did you receive a hand written letters with tears and kisses? or should email be embraced more in order for us to save trees?

I was having this urge of hugging everyone at work today. I think we all need hugs Especially in grey old nyc.
april wrote on April 30th, 2008
I’m amazed at the immediate insinuations particular words have. Like how much more negative I Wish sounds in mass than I Love or I Believe.
Peter Blue wrote on April 30th, 2008
And you can even highlight and copy and paste.
Here is a snipped I just managed to catch. Amazing!

“I think I want to either marry or have sex with everyone in this band and I’m not sure which. OMG so talented.”
Peter Blue wrote on April 30th, 2008
Checked the feeds but after some time you see that they are looped. The creators of the site got their information via http://summize.com/
There you can search twitter in realtime. You can type in any word. Fascinating. And never ending.
Daniel Holter wrote on April 30th, 2008
Nice tip… always good to have quickie inspiration bits waiting in the wings.

FYI, I just posted at Twitter yesterday that your blog would make a great addition to Kawasaki’s music.alltop. Any chance you’re jumping on the Twitter bandwagon sometime soon?
Enrique Domas wrote on April 30th, 2008
SORRY, BUT rather BORING STUFF to me.
Amy wrote on April 30th, 2008
Hi there, Amy from Twistori here. Thanks for the link!

Peter, two fun facts for you…

1) you can hit the space bar to pause. Go to town with c&p!

2) We’re not looped exactly. There is a bit of repetition because we were only able to pull 10 tweets per hour per topic from summize before. We’ve been able to work with them to up the data output so you will see far fewer duplicates now. However, if nobody says anything new, you will see repeats. Kinda a side effect of the medium.
Bev Barnett wrote on April 30th, 2008
this is addictive.
Mandi Leachman wrote on May 1st, 2008
i like this idea, it’s really hard to write lyrics being a songwriter I know how tough it can be so thanks very cool!
j willis pratt wrote on May 1st, 2008
i love rocknroll hate being poor were at cdbaby.com & on my space
Mike Hrencecin wrote on May 3rd, 2008
Thank you Derek for the pointer to your .org site and to Twistori … I like it !
Jose' wrote on May 4th, 2008
The world is cluttered with what people have to say. What you have led us to is a breath of fresh air! Thanks D.S. I think it’s awesome and very inspiring from a lyricist point of view. Thumbs up Bro!!!
Joycelyn wrote on May 4th, 2008
I think this is a great idea. As an artist and a songwriter, it is not easy to write lyrics – so thanks Derek for such a great idea.
Tania Rose wrote on May 5th, 2008
THAT WAS BLOODY HILARIOUS!
Too good. you realise there’s now going to a flood of wishing, believing, and feeling songs. Thanks Derek…i think. LOL…
Will Ludford wrote on May 5th, 2008
I love God.
I dont hate anyone
thinking is for people who do nothing
I believe in God.
I feel Gods presence every day.
wishing is not a word, its a cry for help.
Julia wrote on May 11th, 2008
Thankfully then, I never used lyrics, just chants, like babies, they don`t need words either. It`s all about your emotions at the end of the day.
When words no longer have any meaning, thats what I mean.
mark dukes wrote on May 14th, 2008
LOVE IS THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE ,WITHOUT LOVE LIFE GRADUALLY FALLS.
circuitse7en wrote on May 30th, 2008
Just finished a song that i wrote using Twistori… I think it turned out pretty well… thanks for the tip. Here’s the link if anyone wants to check it out: http://www.circuitse7en.com/new-music-airtight/
New Music: Airtight | circuitse7en wrote on July 13th, 2008
[...] song was inspired by an awesome article i read over at Derek Sivers (the founder of CDBaby’s) website. It talked about a site that [...]

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