Ry Cooder Quotes

Movie music allows me to work with players as creatively as I can.

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

It's fun and super exciting to see how other people work, how other people write music, and how other people put things together. To me, it's an endless learning process, and I love doing it because everybody works so completely differently.

I like to collaborate with other people for studio recordings because I believe collaboration, in any form, makes music better.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.

Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

I consider myself a composer.

I thought it was time to get a group together and the first person I thought of was Wayne Shorter. I called Wayne and in the meantime, Wayne called me to make an album with him, which was Super Nova.

When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

First and foremost, I consider myself a songwriter.

With Pearl Jam, everybody is so good at what they do, it's hard to get up the courage to say, 'Can I sing this part,' or, 'I want to play guitar.'

I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.

When I don't know what the music is going to be for a scene, I imagine some sort of orchestration going on and damned if they don't usually come up with a similar kind of thing.

I'm writing a record of comedy songs. I'm doing all these collaborations with artists. I bring them lyrics and they write the music to it.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

If I'm writing for a particular artist, I definitely think about their past records, pay attention to the type of tempos that they like. If I have the privilege of actually being in the session with the artist, I just like to have a conversation with them.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

I'm having a blast being the music director at the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. It certainly is challenging for me, but I love challenges.

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.