Nneka Quotes

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

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.

The first thing that inspires any song is a chord progression. When I have one I really like, I get into the lyrics even more.

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.

The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I did co-write 'Moment of Forever' with Danny Timms. He wrote the melody, and I just did the words.

It doesn't take long to make catchy songs. That's not my problem.

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.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

I enjoy songwriting. It's slow-motion improvising.

I try to find nice chord changes, that's how I love to start, and then I start trying to knock it into a song, knock it into shape.

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.

When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.

When I first started making music, it was learning other people's songs and putting them onto four-track. Like Beatles songs and stuff. When I started writing, I used the singing side of the production as a vehicle for melody and lyrical ideas.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

I wrote 'Despacito' with my guitar, but where you can tweak a lot is in the production.

Everything I did on the 'Paid in Full' album and those first three albums, I wrote everything right in the studio.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

Usually what I do is I write my vocal melody over guitar parts and then I come up with lyrics.

The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.