AJ Michalka Quotes

Songwriting is hard - it's so easy to fall into the same traps. It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

I know too many musicians that have to tour on the same 10 songs, and they burn out. They get back to their house, and they have no reason to write new music. They are music'd out.

I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.

It took a long while for me to even put out a record because there were so many options of how to do a song, and in some respects, I'm never totally happy with the outcome.

For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I've been in the room or watched artists walk in who don't write, and you can't figure out what they really want.

That's always the time to quit - when you have nothing to say as an artist and creative person.

After the first album, I felt like I needed to one up myself - get even bigger features - and I spent six months thinking about that and not making any music.

I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.

I think I see a lot of artists struggling to make their first album perfect, and I've been there.

I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness overwhelms me and I don't know what's the matter. That is, I know but I won't admit it. I'm just tired from writing. As you get older, writing becomes harder. By that I mean you see so many more potentialities. Things like transition used to trouble me. But not any more. When I say it's harder, I'm not talking about facility. You learn all the so-called tricks, but then you don't want to use them.

I remember Prince gave me a cassette of Purple Rain. It was like 20 minutes long and he asked me to write something on it. I tried for a month and then he came to L.A. I went to see him and said, "I can't do it. It's too perfect. It's like 'Stairway to Heaven.'" He said OK and then I go, "I can keep the cassette, right?" He said, "Of course and thank you for trying."

Mustard believes in me so much. It's good to have a mentor that's been through it. Even though he's a producer, he's been a new artist.

Well the first record is something that you just put so much into. And the second record, people always talk about the sophomore jinx and everything, but I was still able to get through it and still focus on what I needed to do and make timeless music.

We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.

Moving from a first to a second album is an incredibly transitional time for any band because you never get to make one in a vacuum like you did with your debut.

I think as a producer, you're always sort of questioning if what you're contributing is something that an artist loves and elevates a song.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

When you start a rock n' roll band, you've gotta fake it till you make it. You begin by doin' what you love- and what you love is usually what some other people have already done. It just depends on how much of a fool you make of yourself along the way to finding your own sound, assuming you find it.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)