Carmen Cusack Quotes

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

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.

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

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.

I've written more songs for this record than I ever have in the past so I'm trying to give it a lot of special attention to be sure my ideas really get translated right.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

What's cool about making music is when you create a record, it comes from somewhere.

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

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.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

I write my music.

Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that.

'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.

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 would start seeing, in just the sense I was saying now, the kind of record it was going to be and what the arrangement demands, and what my vocal part should be in the record. This was all emerging as the song was emerging.

I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook - what I want the track to be about melodically - and then I'll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.

When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.

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.

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

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I'll have the music, and then I'll just turn the microphone on, press Play and Record and sing. And whatever comes out ends up being the melody.

I have come up with very creative ideas that really didn't work with the song I was currently composing.