Tycho Quotes

I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.

Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs.

For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the back-story.

The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

A song sometimes ends up with its own internal logic.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

Each song is a small universe to me. Each song has a story of its own. Each has a full life to express in order to be complete, so it often happens that the building to a big crescendo feels right in the recording or writing process.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

All I'm really interested in musically is trying to make concept albums. Serving a larger sum than the parts.

But you know, I really like to present the songs on an album as a story, as something thematic, rather than something you'd put on a random shuffle.

With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.

I suppose when you do it correctly, a good introduction and a good outro makes the song feel like it's coming out of something and then evolving into something.

You never stop trying to make progress as a musician.

I like to have an album arc that comes from an experience rather than a story.

Most records are usually not united by one specific story, but that seems to be something that I like and that I find easy to do.

I find that albums generally tell a story. Because it's music, it doesn't have to be in chronological order.