Stephen Malkmus Quotes

I like the process of writing songs. It makes me feel good.

Well, it grow together. It's like, first time I try to write a song is the first time I try to play the guitar. And so I can write a song without the guitar. But it really grow together. I really like stay with my guitar. But it just happen, is the inspiration come through man. Because, I personally, it look like, could I write a whole heap a tune, it look like. But I pick special tune to write. Cause a man can think of plenty things. Yuh know wah ah mean.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

I think that anyone really can write songs, it just takes having an idea and a feeling and chasing it, and you can learn more about it. I think that's why I go to so many sessions. It is a craft that you can learn from other people. I find it to be the most fascinating thing. So I write a lot, yeah!

I feel happy about the songs I've written. I'm a great lover of the craft of songwriting, and I sure admire it in other people when I see it - past and present. I feel comfortable with what I have accomplished. I feel happy to be able to work in that environment, and that I have a lot of songs left to be written, somewhere.

It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

Songs are puzzles - you get an intro, or maybe an end, but you gotta fill in the rest. Sometimes they come easy and sometimes they're a pain in the ass.

I think that any songwriter - and I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us - you don't write the songs anyhow.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Whenever I have a bunch of tunes written, I always find a kind of uniform that accompanies the songs.

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

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.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it's got a certain kind of significance.

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.

I find myself improvising a lot. But, sometimes I'll come us with a chorus or just one line and it will sort of hang out for a long time before it get's flushed out into a real living song.