Jeffrey Brown Quotes

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if I knew exactly what I wanted I'd arrive at something too soon.

I feel like there are things that inspire the music, and then there's the music itself. I don't feel like I always need to force them together.

The way I work, and the material we work with, I think if you analyze too much and have too many specific ideas, it just becomes a little bit too superficial, and then performances might become too self-conscious and project relatively narrow things.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

I'm a traveler and a vagabond and an observer, and the songs come through that. And that's just the way it's going to be.

I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It's really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let's see if I can do it.

Some professional writers write everyday no matter what and perhaps that's the way it should be done, but it's not the way I do it. If I'm not pregnant with words and I'm not in labor with them, I don't even try to bring them forth because they won't be any good anyway. Once I'm ready to deliver, it's like being pregnant. I've got to find a typewriter or a piece of paper. The only words that have ever had any possible value to others seem to have been those words that just had to come out.

When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

I imagine that when I am creating a song or a project or an album or putting some clothing together or cooking a meal, whatever it is, I don't really have a recipe. The fun part is to throw that big piece of clay in the middle of the table as hard as I can, and whatever shape it takes, that's what shape it takes, and then I start to carve away.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Art is a game. Too bad for him who makes a duty of it.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

When you're improvising, you're relying on this connection to creativity.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

Making a painting is like playing the saxophone. You hit the note and it comes out.

Composition is selective improvisation.

My instinct about painting says, 'if you don't think about it, it's right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets.