Khalid Quotes

Especially when I finish one of my songs I play it to my friends who are just normal people and not people in the music business.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

Songwriting is a give-and-take process, and it can lead to some good, healthy debates.

Prince used to call me up 3am in the morning and invite me to hear some of his new songs.

Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you've never met, you're pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it's a really weird feeling.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

Chris Jericho is a great guy. He's beyond hysterical. He's good people. They're really good. Chris wanted me to throw down a solo. He sent it to me and I knocked it out.

I became inspired while I was listening to music on the radio. I felt the music in my head sounded better, so I turned off the radio and scribbled it down on a piece of paper. I remember that it was in May. People liked that song. They said it was beautiful. I felt overjoyed.

All I know is, I play the guitar, beat it out, and sing a song that has some damn resonance that we feel as musicians. We send it out and people get it, and that's a good thing.

There's definitely a couple of people I'll play stuff to when it's nearly finished just to see what they think; Mark, our producer, his wife is Australian and just listens to the radio - she's awesome - and, I guess, is quite a casual music listener.

I wasn't letting people in with the music writing process, and for a long time, I thought I was hard to work with.

In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.

Composing is just another exciting thing. It's as exciting as being in a band. It's kind of like joining a new band for three months.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

When I first started, I wrote some songs with Linda Perry. She's so instrumental in a lot of artist's lives, listening to you and then helping you write songs that are you, that bring the most of what you are out, whereas a lot of producers might put their stamp on you. I gained confidence because I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

I don't create the movies I'm in. When it comes to music, it's my clothes, it's my guitar, it's my voice, it's my song.

Usually [the lyrics] go from one word to the next word - there's no finish line. The music was that way, too.

Start with the titles, and then build the music that goes with them.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

It's really very easy for me to be in The Cardinals, because I bring my voice, my guitar, and my songs to them, and then we all play around to find out what works.

Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

I think I always thought of the guitar as the vehicle to be able to make some musical idea up. The only appeal to learning more chords was having more chords to put into songs. I never got too wrapped up in becoming technically good. So writing songs happened pretty simultaneously with learning how to play the guitar.

Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

I have this really beautiful Martin guitar, and it just kind of writes songs for me.

I really do like seeing other people perform my music. It's one of the most rewarding things for me, so it's worth the extra work.