Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
I'm feeling more and more thoughts that aren't songs, just reflections. I'm always been very shy and in some ways a prisoner in one language and I feel that the liberation of creativity has to be in all senses. So I've been deciding to publishing something very simple but very small at the same time, nothing egocentric.
My grand plan is that I can master having a better life by making sure I have a regular flow of songs. Then I can give myself time to tour or celebrate or write a film score.
I'm so sick of my own music that I don't know if I can edit another video, which involves hundreds of hours of listening to your own song again and again and again. It becomes so grating after a while.
I definitely shut down sometimes. I always just go into my own little cocoon and write, and I surround myself with as much music as possible. The last girlfriend I had, when we broke up, I remember being in a room for days on days on days with my music cranked up, playing songs like Kanye's '808's & Heartbreak. ' That playlist just was long!
My writing is really intuitive. As a kid, I went to school in New Jersey and hung out in New York, so the way kids used to talk got into our earlier songs.
Well, at the very beginning of the Amboy Dukes, I was doing background but I never sang my own songs. I would sing them for the guys to show them how I wanted the songs to go, but I always had lead vocalists.
I've never been the big recording star I'd love to be some day. I've had lots of hits off and on through the years but I've never had the success of other artists - one hit after another back-to-back-to-back and big hits, where every song is going to be number one. I'm not greedy or nothing. I just want everything. Is there something wrong with that?
I think music is just a great place to focus your energy and your feelings. If you're young, you can take all that stuff that you feel so intensely about - especially these days, but I'm not going to go there - but to take all those feelings and put them into music was such a big deal for me to be able to play punk rock songs. It was such a release for me. It's a good thing for parents to support that.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
One of the benefits of success with new songs is that some of the other songs will get a chance to see the light of day whereas they wouldn't have before.
I wrote my first song when I was nine, and it was called 'Notice Me'. My Mom still has the piece of paper around somewhere, but I can't even imagine how terrible it is.
Leave out my name from the gift if it be a burden, but keep my song.
I need a little bass and I don't even need that crazy bass to break your face. I just want it to sound good when I have my favorite song.
Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
I am really obsessed with finding melodies that just hypnotize you and sink you into a song.
Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.
As someone who listens almost exclusively to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, I definitely like "No Bullshit" by Chris Brown, and melodically I'm really into what he's doing - that song is kind of singular because it's got this piano intro and outro. But obviously I'm not singing about what he's singing about. What we want out of our songs is not the same thing.
A lot of artists are used to their music being reused online and have come to accept and embrace it. You have a generation who go on YouTube and remake and remix music online all the time. They remake and upload songs and videos, and then other people remake the remakes; it just keeps going.
I did write a letter to the archdiocese who'd banned the song, Only the Good Die Young, asking them to ban my next record.