Pete Burns Quotes

I do believe that when I'm writing music, I get addicted to the music of the concept of what the outcome of the song is, or the passion behind the lyrics.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.

I had written 'Cafe de Flore' with 'Stairway to Heaven' in mind.

I got really hooked on this riff in the middle of this song called 'Minor Miracles' by my friend Eric Johnson from Fruit Bats. I got the tracks for that from him, and that turned into 'Here in Spirit.'

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.

It's the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard!

Music is an important part of my writing process.

Usually when I write a song, I'll write the music and then kind of fit some words to it.

The melody will tell me what the song should be about, the tone of the song. That's when the intellect comes in. Because I have a list of possible titles and concepts, and I expand on that.

Beats are really inspiring. They always make me want to write something over them.

'Nova' was one of the tracks that inspired me to create 'Fade,' which later became 'Faded'. It has a beautiful melody, and the way it progresses throughout the whole track is just amazing!

I always enjoyed writing music; things pop into my head every day.

I have grown up listening to Strings and they have always been a source of inspiration to me.

A couple of days working with Joe Jonas, I thought, 'This guy is a slayer of a singer; he's really funny, goofy, and sexy. We need to write that.' And that led to 'Cake By The Ocean.'

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

Songwriting is an art unto itself, not to be confused with performing.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

'Gorilla Man' is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his 'Gorilla' album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There's an old notebook with at least three more verses in it somewhere.