Marvin Hamlisch Quotes

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I like to tinkle at my piano when I'm working out a new song - I just put my fingers down and see what comes out.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.

I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth.

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

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

I started writing songs at age 15.

It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

I do a so-called trip into myself: I sit down at the piano and the melody might start to evolve from my playing or then I might start to sing it.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don't always know how to get there.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.

Even when I was studying piano, I always preferred to play around with my own improvisations rather than do my studies. So I've always been interested in writing music from a very early age.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

To me, a day off is sitting at a piano or with a guitar and writing.

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.