Lukas Foss Quotes

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.

I write my music.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

There's no magic for getting into the groove... just banging away at it. Sometimes the lyrics come first, sometimes the music.

Composing is my life blood.

I love making music. I love being involved in arranging music. It's very natural to know what I want to hear next and come up with ideas that are variations of what might be good.

Composing music is hard work.

I can't say that I'm always writing in my head but I do spend a lot of time in my head writing or coming up with ideas. And what I do usually is write the music and melody and then, you know, maybe the basic idea. But when I feel that I don't have a song or just say, God, please give me another song. And I just am quiet and it happens.

Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.

In a certain sense, every time you sit down to write a song, there's a fear that you've forgotten how to do it.

The model of a composer.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

We would make songs, and the producers said we should play it for my dad. I was kind of scared, I didn't know what to think cuz we were just joking around.

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've been writing music since I was a teenager. I play keyboards. I'm not much of a player, but I can write. That will come along. I'd like to do a musical.

I think that the process of making music is a hard one to describe as well.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

It takes a lot of people hours to make music because they focus so much on one thing. I just do it, and I make something you can just vibe to.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.

I love writing music, but it seems I'm always writing words, so I don't get much time to do it.

I still don't know if I can write songs. I don't think anyone ever knows if they can write songs.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.