Robert Hunter Quotes

I just hear a beat and start mumbling words. I just hear sounds and rhythms, and it just kind of comes intuitively. Formatting a song, figuring out a flow, how I respond to the beat.

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.

It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

Then a friend of Jim's suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

I'm a fun song maker. I love to make people smile. I also love to see them big, burly dudes crying because their wives' song is 'Die a Happy Man.'

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.

It's never easy to write a song. It's the most difficult thing I do.

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.

When I hear the piano played in a compositional way, like in a songwriter's way in a compositional way, there's a certain arc to that that I love.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

The best songs I write in 20 minutes.