Jon Landau Quotes

I had written lyrics to a song called The Silent Extreme, which Alex later renamed Humans Being.

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.

I've become a workaholic. When the shows slow down and there's no press and I can get my time to myself in the studio with my music, I get into this zone, man. I enter this incredible space where I'm just making music. And I feel like I can work with anybody - with Elton John, with Hanson - and I can make something incredible.

I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey - like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.

From then on in, me and Sonny started makin' records. My first records, Sonny was backin' me up. Sonny wasn't singin' natural at the time; he was singin' falsetto.

I've actually thought very little about solo work up until just very recently. Most of it is because in my band, Incubus, it is very much a collaborative effort. I do what I do in the band, and everyone plays their respective parts, but in the end, we are sort of a democratic process.

With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.

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.

Man, we were so opposite. One guy sang high, the other low. One guy tall, one short. We were like a quartet without the two guys in the middle. If you were putting two guys together to make hit records, you wouldn't have picked Bobby and me.

Toplines usually suck. I'll send a song to a band or artist whose entire body of work I love and I'll ask them to do a vocal for one of my songs and I'll get it back and I'll hate it so much. It might have to do with my possessiveness over my music.

Taylor Goldsmith and I hit it off big time, and so we started writing some songs together.

'Never Forget You' was the first song I co-wrote.

I always wrote everything - I wrote all the lyrics, I wrote all the melodies, everything; it's just somebody else sung it. And to me, the singer is nothing else than a different... like a bass player or a keyboard player - they're not more important than any other musician.

By the time we made "Abbey Road", John and I were openly critical of each other's music, and I felt John wasn't much interested in performing anything he hadn't written himself.

John [Travolta] and I have remained very close friends ever since we did Grease. When I was told that "You're the One That I Want" was named the #1 duet in history and, during a text chat with John letting him know he said "we should record a Christmas song." Of course I said yes.

I had been, like, 'I don't wanna be a singer anymore', so dramatic, but when I was recording with Brian Higgins I was like, oh my god I love this, I love these songs, I love what this is. And then we just kept on working and working until we got more songs.

I love not being in charge of writing all the songs, and being the front person - the whole thing is cool.

A great hang is mandatory. But in all of my years as a traveling musician, on a whole it's been pretty damn magical. There have been a couple duds along the way, but most time, I'm in awe of the guys who want to play on my records.

In public, I like real conservative clothes, something that's not too flashy. But onstage, I like 'em as flashy as you can get 'em.

When you're in a band and write a song on your own, it isn't fully realized until it goes into somebody else's ears.

I'm a songwriter. I've got ideas in the closet that just didn't work out with my band, that I think, "This is a great idea, it's just the wrong guys."

We weren't like mates who decided to form a band. The other three met me because they were interested in being in the band that I was starting.

You just do you like when you're doing any other song. It's nothing different. Some people are like "How's it like working with Kendrick Lamar?" and really, it's like working with anyone else that I work with.