Maynard James Keenan Quotes

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

I tend to start with a full set of lyrics, and then my producer, Joel Little, and I work on the music collaboratively.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

Videos have to go hand in hand with your music, so that's why, ultimately, they should be created by the artist. And if they're not, it doesn't really add up to me.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

A lot of the music editing job is communication and working out what a director really wants the music to be.

We wanted to take as much time and effort making the video as we did the song.

I love song writing, so I'm always happy to write for other musicians.

Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.

I think songs and visuals are so evocative of each other.

I've always wanted to make a music video with skating and different imagery, something very artistic.

I'm an artist. I produce, I direct, and all of that goes into the music.

I think a truly fantastic video is worth it. We spend so much time on the music, it only makes sense to have a really well-done visual translation of that music.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

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.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.