Sampha Quotes

A lot of my albums that I've done, a lot of the songs have been the first take. It's before you mess with it too much - you can take away all the spontaneity and the emotion of something by trying to make it sound perfect.

Ultimately, if I'm really moved by something, it's going to go on the record and that's that.

I started writing and recording, at a very basic level, just in my own bedroom.

Generally I'll keep 95% of what I sing on that first scratch vocal take. Sometimes that idea will ferment for a long time, and sometimes I"ll be close enough to my studio and have enough time (kind of rare these days) to go and work on the idea. Not every song is super easy though.

We cut songs that touch us because if they don't touch us first, there's no way in the world we're going to be able to sell those songs to somebody else.

I don't know, whenever someone was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to the studio,' I just went with them. And I started recording.

As a producer, as a songwriter, I've spent a lot of time either in my bedroom or in studios, alone.

There's one song that I recorded called 'Saviour' and every single sound from that song was actually recorded in a shipyard on my iPhone.

I'm never not in the studio creating; it's like my second home.

I was constantly in the studio at my home writing ideas that would later become 'Hotel California' or 'Victim of Love.'

I didn't intend to make one solo record, much less two. It's really a matter of seeing how it goes.

There were songs that we cut out after we chose the name, because 'Praise Break' turned out to be an underlying concept that I didn't know was there.

Just about the entirety of the first album, 'Brown Sugar,' I wrote it, the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond. And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track in my bedroom. I think EMI was a little leery of me being in the studio producing it on my own, which is what I was fighting for.

I like to record something pretty much as soon as I have an idea for a song, but I'm on so many buses, I have to record on my mobile.

A lot of the things I was doing on the first couple Washed Out releases was very naive.

I do a few shows every year, but I'm mostly at home, making music. Day and night.

Almost everything I've ever recorded, I recorded myself at the desk, in my house.

There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.

My place in London is very small, so a piano would take up a third of the room. I leave home in the morning when I'm there and go to my studio. I close the door, and it's soundproof. There's no phone or TV or computer, and I can work uninterruptedly. That has been a huge advantage over the years.

I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, 'Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.' It was just magic.

I quietly work with my computer on the tour bus, and then I wait to make my more natural rhythms when I get home.

I kind of think that's the best way to operate; even when I'm in sessions writing with other artists, I'm always pulling from the kind of emotions that are the most raw in my own life and offering them up in the studio.

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

Rick Rubin said, well, I don't know that we will sell records. He said, I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart's content everything you ever wanted to record. I said, that sounds good to me. So I did that. And day after day, three weeks, I sang for him.

We [with Rick Rubin] would focus on the ones that we did like, that felt right and sounded right. And if I didn't like the performance on that song, I would keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one, that it was right for my soul.